immigration, expansion, and sectional conflict, … · immigration, expansion, and sectional...

Immigration, Expansion, and Sectional Conflict, 1840–1848

CHAPTER 13

Between 1845 and 1847 fifteen to twenty thousand Mormons undertookone of the most extraordinary treks in American history. After the murder

of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet (see Chapter 10), Brigham Young ledthe main body of Mormons from Illinois to a new homeland in the Great SaltLake valley. The Mormons labeled this area “Deseret,” the “land of the honeybee.” In part, Young’s aim was to flee persecution by Gentiles (non-Mormons).In 1838 Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri had issued an order thatMormons must be “exterminated” if they would not leave Missouri. Smith’smurder in 1844 capped a long history of persecution of Mormons.

Young wanted Mormons to do more than flee persecution. They also hadto cling together, to retain their distinctive religious beliefs and practices. Onroute to Deseret Young decreed that Mormons establish permanent camps,each with a garrison of well-armed Mormon militia, wood, blacksmithingtools, and Mormon priests to enforce church discipline and to hold each successive caravan of Mormons to the faith. These camps reinforced theMormons’ tendency to cooperate, to depend on each other for survival, andthese attitudes would serve the Mormons again when they finally reachedthe arid region of Deseret.

Why did the Mormons head for Deseret when so many more fertileregions lay in the West? First, because Deseret lay outside the United States;

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Newcomers and Natives

The West and Beyond

The Politics of Expansion, 1840–1846

The Mexican-American War and itsAftermath, 1846–1848

�

377

in 1847 it was part of Mexico. Smith’s murder had ledYoung and most other Mormons to conclude that theycould no longer live among the Gentiles. Second, theGentiles were also on the move west. Before emigrating,Mormons considered and rejected various alternatives:Texas, northern California, and Oregon. The trouble wasthat the hated Gentiles seemed to be everywhere, tiny,restless dots responding to the spirit that a journalistlabeled their “Manifest Destiny” to spread over thewhole continent. Texas was in the process of beingannexed by the United States. California, still part ofMexico, was starting to fill up with Americans, includingthe by now former governor of Missouri, Lilburn Boggs.Oregon was even less attractive, for by 1846 it containedten times more Americans than did Texas. The veryremoteness and aridity of Deseret made it unlikely thatany permanent settlements of Gentiles would take rootthere.

This Mormon projection turned out to be accurate.After irrigating the Great Salt Lake valley and buildingSalt Lake City in present-day Utah, the Mormons wereable to earn money trading with Gentile wayfarers, mostof whom were heading somewhere else. “Americansregard this continent as their birthright,” thundered SamHouston, the first president of the Republic of Texas, in1847. Indians and Mexicans had to make way for “ourmighty march.” This was not idle talk. In less than athousand fevered days during President James K. Polk’sadministration (1845–1849), the United States increasedits land area by 50 percent. It annexed Texas, negotiatedBritain out of half of the vast Oregon territory, andfought a war with Mexico that led to the annexation ofCalifornia and New Mexico. Meanwhile, immigrantspoured into the United States, mainly from Europe. Thenumber of immigrants during the 1840s and 1850sexceeded the nation’s entire population in 1790.

Immigration and territorial expansion were linked.Most immigrants gravitated to the expansionist Demo-cratic party, and the immigrant vote helped tip the elec-tion of 1844 to Polk, an ardent expansionist. Further,waves of immigrants caused tensions between them andthe native-born, which were reflected in ugly outburstsof anti-immigrant feeling. Influential Democrats con-cluded that the best solution to intensifying class andethnic conflicts lay in expanding the national bound-aries, bringing more land under cultivation, and recap-turing the ideal of America as a nation of self-sufficientfarmers.

Democrats also saw expansion as a way to reducestrife between the sections. Oregon would gratify theNorth; Texas, the South; and California, everyone. In

reality, expansion brought sectional antagonisms to theboiling point, split the Democratic party in the late1840s, and set the nation on the path to Civil War.

This chapter focuses on four major issues:

■ How did the massive immigration of the 1840s influ-ence the balance of power between the Whig andDemocratic parties?

■ What economic and political forces fed westwardexpansion during the 1840s?

■ What tactics used by President James K. Polk tounite the Democratic party behind a program ofwestward expansion threatened war with bothBritain and Mexico? How did the Democrats “sell”Texas annexation to the North in the election of1844?

■ How did the outcome of the Mexican-American Warintensify intersectional conflict? Why, specifically,did it split the Democratic party?

NEWCOMERS AND NATIVESBetween 1815 and 1860, 5 million European immigrantslanded in the United States (see Figure 13.1). Of these,4.2 million arrived between 1840 and 1860; 3 million ofthem came in the single decade from 1845 to 1854. Thisten-year period witnessed the largest immigration pro-portionate to the total population (then around 20 mil-lion) in American history. The Irish led the way as themost numerous immigrants between 1840 and 1860,with the Germans running a close second. Smaller con-tingents continued to immigrate to the United Statesfrom England, Scotland, and Wales, and a growing num-ber came from Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, andHolland. But by 1860 three-fourths of the 4.1 million foreign-born Americans were either Irish or German.

Expectations and Realities

A desire for religious freedom drew some immigrants tothe United States. For example, when Mormon mission-aries actively recruited converts in the slums of Englishfactory towns, a number of English migrated to America.Many emigrants from Norway were Quakers fleeing per-secution by the official Lutheran clergy. But a far largernumber of Europeans sailed for America to better theireconomic condition. Their hope was fed by a continu-ous stream of travelers’ accounts and letters from rela-tives describing America as a utopia for poor people.

378 CHAPTER 13 Immigration, Expansion, and Sectional Conflict, 1840–1848

German peasants learned that they could purchase alarge farm in America for the price of renting a small onein Germany. English men and women were told thatenough good peaches and apples were left rotting in theorchards of Ohio to sink the British fleet.

Hoping for the best, emigrants often encounteredthe worst. Their problems began at ports of embarka-tion, where hucksters frequently sold them worthlesstickets and where ships scheduled to leave in June mightnot sail until August. Countless emigrants spent pre-cious savings in waterfront slums while awaiting depar-ture. The ocean voyage itself proved terrifying; manyemigrants had never set foot on a ship. Most sailed oncargo ships as steerage passengers, where, for six weeksor more, they endured quarters almost as crowded as onslave ships.

For many emigrants, the greatest shock came whenthey landed. “The folks aboard ship formed great plansfor their future, all of which vanished quickly after land-ing,” wrote a young German from Frankfurt in 1840.Immigrants quickly discovered that farming in Americawas a perilous prospect at best. Not only did immigrantslack the capital to start farms, but farming in the UnitedStates also bore little resemblance to farming in Europe.European farmers valued the associations of their com-munities. Their social and cultural lives revolved aroundvillages that were fringed by the fields that they worked.

In contrast, as many immigrants quickly learned, Ameri-can farmers lived in relative isolation. They might belongto rural neighborhoods in which farmers on widely scattered plots of land met occasionally at revivals ormilitia musters. But they lacked the compact village lifeof European farmers, and they possessed an individual-istic psychology that led them to speculate in land andto move frequently.

Despite the shocks and dislocations caused bymigration, certain patterns emerged in the distributionof immigrants within the United States. Initially shapedby trade routes, these patterns were then perpetuated bycustom. Most of the Irish settlers before 1840 departedfrom Liverpool on sailing ships that carried Englishmanufactures to eastern Canada and New England inreturn for timber. On arrival in America, few of theseIrish had the capital to become farmers, so they crowd-ed into the urban areas of New England, New York,Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, where they could moreeasily find jobs. In contrast, German emigrants usuallyleft from continental ports on ships engaged in the cot-ton trade with New Orleans. Deterred from settling inthe South by the presence of slavery, the oppressive cli-mate, and the lack of economic opportunity, theGermans congregated in the upper Mississippi and Ohiovalleys, especially in Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, andMissouri. Geographical concentration also character-

Newcomers and Natives 379

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

1830 1840 1850 1860

Total23,322

Total84,066

Total369,980

Total153,640

2,7211,976

39,430

29,704

78,896

164,004

54,491

48,637

Tho

usan

ds o

f im

mig

rant

s

FIGURE 13.1German, Irish, and TotalImmigration, 1830–1860Irish and German immigrants led the morethan tenfold growth of immigration between1830 and 1860.(Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics ofthe United States, Colonial Times to 1970, BicentennialEdition (Washington, D.C., 1975).)

Other immigrants

Irish immigrants

German immigrants

ized most of the smaller groups of immigrants. Morethan half of the Norwegian immigrants, for example, set-tled in Wisconsin, where they typically became farmers.

Immigrants were usually less likely to pursue agri-culture in the New World than in Europe. Both theGermans and, to an even greater degree, the Irish tendedto concentrate in cities. By 1860 these two groupsformed more than 60 percent of the population of St.Louis; nearly half the population of New York City,Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Detroit, and SanFrancisco; and well over a third that of New Orleans,Baltimore, and Boston. These fast-growing cities createdan intense demand for the labor of people with strongbacks and a willingness to work for low wages. Irish con-struction gangs built the houses, new streets, and aque-ducts that were changing the face of urban America and dug the canals and railroads that threaded togetherthe rapidly developing cities. A popular song recount-ed the fate of the thousands of Irishmen who died ofcholera contracted during the building of a canal in NewOrleans:

Ten thousand Micks, they swung their picks,To build the New CanalBut the choleray was stronger ‘n they.An’ twice it killed them awl.

The cities provided the sort of community life thatseemed lacking in farming settlements. Immigrant soci-

eties like the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick took root incities and combined with associations like the HibernianSociety for the Relief of Emigrants from Ireland to wel-come the newcomers.

The Germans

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Germans were anextremely diverse group. In 1860 Germany was not anation-state like France or Britain, but a collection ofprincipalities and small kingdoms. German immigrantsthought of themselves as Bavarians, Westphalians, orSaxons rather than as Germans. Moreover, the Germanimmigrants included Catholics, Protestants (usuallyLutherans), and Jews as well as a sprinkling of free-thinkers who denounced the ritual, clergy, and doctrinesof all religions. Although few in number, these criticswere vehement in their attacks on the establishedchurches. A pious Milwaukee Lutheran complained in1860 that he could not drink a glass of beer in a saloon“without being angered by anti-Christian remarks orraillery against preachers.”

German immigrants came from a wide range ofsocial classes and occupations. The majority hadengaged in farming, but a sizable minority were profes-sionals, artisans, and tradespeople. Heinrich Steinweg,an obscure piano maker from Lower Saxony, arrived inNew York City in 1851, anglicized his name to Henry


Steinway, and in 1853 opened the firm of Steinway andSons, which quickly achieved international acclaim forthe quality of its pianos. Levi Strauss, a Jewish tailor fromBavaria, migrated to the United States in 1847. On hear-ing of the discovery of gold in California in 1848, Straussgathered rolls of cloth and sailed for San Francisco.When a miner told him of the need for durable worktrousers, Strauss fashioned a pair of overalls from can-vas. To meet a quickly skyrocketing demand, he openeda factory in San Francisco; his cheap overalls, laterknown as blue jeans or Levi’s, made him rich andfamous.

For all their differences, the Germans were boundtogether by their common language, which stronglyinduced recent immigrants to the United States to con-gregate in German neighborhoods. Even prosperousGermans bent on climbing the social ladder usually didso within their ethnic communities. Germans formedtheir own militia and fire companies, sponsored parochialschools in which German was the language of instruc-tion, started German-language newspapers, and organ-ized their own balls and singing groups. The range ofvoluntary associations among Germans was almost asbroad as among native-born Americans.

Other factors beyond their common languagebrought unity to the German immigrants. Ironically, theGermans’ diversity also promoted their solidarity. Forexample, because they were able to supply their owndoctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists, merchants, arti-sans, and clergy, the Germans had little need to go out-side their own neighborhoods. Moreover, economic self-sufficiency conspired with the strong bonds of theirlanguage to encourage a clannish psychology among the German immigrants. Although they admired theGermans’ industriousness, native-born Americans resent-ed their economic success and disdained their clannish-ness. German refugee Moritz Busch complained that“the great mass of Anglo-Americans” held the Germansin contempt. The Germans responded by becomingeven more clannish. Their psychological separatenessmade it difficult for the Germans to be as politicallyinfluential as the Irish immigrants.

The Irish

Between 1815 and 1860 Irish immigration to the UnitedStates passed through several stages. Irish soldiers whofought against the United States in the War of 1812 hadreturned to their homeland with reports that Americawas a paradise filled with fertile land and abundantgame, a place where “all a man wanted was a gun andsufficient ammunition to be able to live like a prince.”

Among the Irish who subsequently emigrated between1815 and the mid-1820s, Protestant small landownersand tradespeople in search of better economic opportu-nity predominated.

From the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s, the characterof Irish immigration to the United States graduallychanged. Increasingly, the immigrants were Catholicsdrawn from the poorer classes, many of them tenantfarmers whom Protestant landowners had evicted as“superfluous.” Protestant or Catholic, rich or poor, eighthundred thousand to a million Irish immigrants enteredthe United States between 1815 and 1844. Then, between1845 and the early 1850s, a blight destroyed every har-vest of Ireland’s potatoes, virtually the only food of thepeasantry, and spawned one of the most gruesomefamines in history. The Great Famine inflicted indescrib-able suffering on the Irish peasantry and killed perhapsa million people. One landlord characterized the surviv-ing tenants on his estate as no more than “famished andghastly skeletons.” To escape the ravages of famine, 1.8million Irish migrated to the United States in the decadeafter 1845.

Overwhelmingly poor and Catholic, the Irish usuallyentered the work force at or near the bottom. The popu-lar image of Paddy with his pickax and Bridget the maidcontained a good deal of truth. Irish men in the citiesdug cellars and often lived in them; outside the cities,they dug canals and railroad beds. Irish women oftenbecame domestic servants. Compared to other immi-grant women, a high proportion of Irish women enteredthe work force, if not as maids then often as textile work-ers. By the 1840s Irish women were displacing native-born women in the textile mills of Lowell and Waltham.Poverty drove Irish women to work at early ages, and theoutdoor, all-season work performed by their husbandsturned many of them into working widows. WinifredRooney became a nursemaid at the age of seven and anerrand girl at eleven. She then learned needlework, askill that helped her support her family after her hus-band’s early death. The high proportion of employedIrish women reflected more than their poverty. Com-pared to the predominantly male German immigrants,more than half of the Irish immigrants were women,most of whom were single adults. In both Ireland andAmerica, the Irish usually married late, and many nevermarried. For Irish women to become self-supportingwas only natural.

The lot of most Irish people was harsh. One immi-grant described the life of the average Irish laborer inAmerica as “despicable, humiliating, [and] slavish”;there was “no love for him—no protection of life—[he]can be shot down, run through, kicked, cuffed, spat


upon—and no redress, but a response of ‘served thedamn son of an Irish b____ right, damn him.’ ” Yet someIrish struggled up the social ladder. In Philadelphia,which had a more varied industrial base than Boston,Irish men made their way into iron foundries, wheresome became foremen and supervisors. Other Irish roseinto the middle class by opening grocery and liquorstores.

The varied occupations pursued by Irish immi-grants brought them into conflict with two quite differ-ent groups. The poorer Irish who dug canals and cellars,hauled cargo on the docks, washed laundry for others,and served white families competed directly with equal-ly poor free blacks. This competition stirred up Irish ani-mosity toward blacks and a hatred of abolitionists. At thesame time, enough Irish men eventually secured skilledor semiskilled jobs that clashes with native-born whiteworkers became unavoidable.

Anti-Catholicism, Nativism, and Labor Protest

The hostility of native-born whites toward the Irish oftentook the form of anti-Catholicism. Anti-Catholicism hadbeen a strong, if latent, impulse among AmericanProtestants since the early Puritan days. The surge ofIrish immigration during the second quarter of the nine-teenth century revived anti-Catholic fever. For example,in 1834 rumors circulated among Boston Protestantsthat a Catholic convent in nearby Charlestown con-tained dungeons and torture chambers. The mothersuperior turned away a delegation of officials demand-ing to inspect the convent. Soon the building lay inashes, the victim of a Protestant mob. In 1835 Samuel F.B. Morse, the future inventor of the telegraph, warnedthat the despotic governments of Europe were systemat-ically flooding the United States with Catholic immi-grants as part of a conspiracy to destroy republican insti-tutions. “We must first stop this leak in the ship,” hewrote, “through which the muddy waters from withoutthreaten to sink us.” That same year, the combativeevangelical Protestant Lyman Beecher issued A Plea forthe West, a tract in which he warned faithful Protestantsof an alleged Catholic conspiracy to send immigrants tothe West in sufficient numbers to dominate the region. Ayear later, the publication of Maria Monk’s best-sellingAwful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montrealrekindled anti-Catholic hysteria. Although Maria Monkwas actually a prostitute who had never lived in a con-vent, she professed to be a former nun. In her book, shedescribed how the mother superior forced nuns to sub-

mit to the lustful advances of priests who entered theconvent by a subterranean passage.

As Catholic immigration swelled in the 1840s,Protestants mounted a political counterattack. It tookthe form of nativist (anti-immigrant) societies withnames like the American Republicans and the UnitedOrder of Americans. Although usually started as secretor semisecret fraternal orders, most of these societiesdeveloped political offshoots. One, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, would evolve by 1854 into the “Know-Nothing,” or American, party and would become amajor political force in the 1850s.

During the 1840s, however, nativist parties enjoyedonly brief moments in the sun. These occurred mainlyduring flare-ups over local issues, such as whether stu-dents in predominantly Catholic neighborhoods shouldbe allowed to use the Catholic Douay rather thanProtestant King James version of the Bible for the scrip-tural readings that began each school day. In 1844, forexample, after the American Republican party (whichopposed any concessions to Catholics) won some officesin Philadelphia elections, fiery Protestant orators mount-ed soapboxes to denounce “popery,” and Protestantmobs descended on Catholic neighborhoods. Before themilitia quelled these “Bible Riots,” thirty buildings lay incharred ruins and at least sixteen people had beenkilled.

Nativism fed on an explosive mixture of fears anddiscontents. Protestants thought that their doctrine thateach individual could interpret the Bible was more dem-ocratic than Catholicism, which made doctrine theprovince of the pope and bishops. In addition, at a timewhen the wages of native-born artisans and journeymenwere depressed by the subdivision of tasks and by theaftermath of the Panic of 1837 (see Chapter 10), manyProtestant workers concluded that Catholic immigrants,often desperately poor and willing to work for anything,were threats to their jobs. In reaction, Protestant artisansjoined nativist societies.

Nativist outbursts were not labor’s only response tothe wage cuts that accompanied the depression. Someagitators began to advocate land reform as a solution toworkers’ economic woes. Americans had long cherishedthe notion that a nation so blessed by abundant land asthe United States would never give rise to a permanentclass of factory “wage slaves.” In 1844 the English-bornradical George Henry Evans organized the NationalReform Association and rallied supporters with the slogan “Vote Yourself a Farm.” Evans advanced neo-Jeffersonian plans for the establishment of “rural repub-lican townships” composed of 160-acre plots for work-


ers. He quickly gained the backing of artisans who pre-ferred such “agrarian” notions to a further advance of the industrial order that was undermining their position.

Land reformers argued that workers’ true interestscould never be reconciled with an industrial order in which factory operatives sold their labor for wages. By engaging in wage labor, they said, workers aban-doned any hope of achieving economic independence.These reformers most appealed to articulate and self-consciously radical workers, particularly artisans andsmall masters whose independence was being threat-ened by factories and who feared that American laborwas “fast verging on the servile dependence” common inEurope. But land reform offered little to factory opera-tives and wage-earning journeymen who completelylacked economic independence. In an age when a horsecost the average worker three months’ pay and most fac-tory workers dreaded “the horrors of wilderness life,” theidea of solving industrial problems by resettling workerson farms seemed a pipe dream.

Labor unions appealed to workers left cold by thepromises of land reformers. For example, desperatelypoor Irish immigrants, refugees from an agriculturalsociety, believed that they could gain more by unionsand strikes than by plowing and planting. Even womenworkers organized unions in these years. The leader of aseamstresses’ union proclaimed, “Too long have webeen bound down by tyrant employers.”

Probably the most important development forworkers in the 1840s was a state court decision. InCommonwealth v. Hunt (1842), the MassachusettsSupreme Court ruled that labor unions were not illegalmonopolies that restrained trade. But because less than1 percent of the work force belong to labor unions in the 1840s, this decision initially had little impact.Massachusetts employers brushed aside the Common-wealth decision, firing union agitators and replacingthem with cheap immigrant labor. “Hundreds of honestlaborers,” a labor paper reported in 1848, “have beendismissed from employment in the manufactories ofNew England because they have been suspected ofknowing their rights and daring to assert them.” Thisrepression effectively blunted demands for a ten-hourworkday in an era when the twelve- or fourteen-hourday was typical.

Ethnic and religious tensions also split the antebel-lum working class during the 1830s and 1840s. Frictionbetween native-born and immigrant workers inevitablybecame intertwined with the political divisions of thesecond party system.

Labor Protest and Immigrant Politics

Very few immigrants had ever cast a vote in an electionprior to their arrival in America, and only a small frac-tion were refugees from political persecution. Politicalupheavals had erupted in Austria and several of theGerman states in the turbulent year of 1848 (the so-called Revolutions of 1848), but among the millionGerman immigrants to the United States, only about tenthousand were political refugees, or “Forty-Eighters.”

Once they had settled in the United States, however,many immigrants became politically active. They quick-ly found that urban political organizations, some ofthem dominated by earlier immigrants, would helpthem find lodging and employment, in return for votes.Both the Irish and the Germans identified overwhelm-ingly with the Democratic party. An obituary of 1837 thatdescribed a New Yorker as a “warm-hearted Irishmanand an unflinching Democrat” could have been writtenof millions of other Irish. Similarly, the Germans becamestalwart supporters of the Democrats in cities likeMilwaukee and St. Louis.

Immigrants’ fears about jobs partly explain theirwidespread support of the Democrats. Former presidentAndrew Jackson had given the Democratic party an anti-aristocratic coloration, making the Democrats seemmore sympathetic than the Whigs to the common peo-ple. In addition, antislavery was linked to the Whig party,and the Irish loathed abolitionism because they fearedthat freed slaves would become economic competi-tors. Moreover, the Whigs’ moral and religious valuesseemed to threaten those of the Irish and Germans.Hearty-drinking Irish and German immigrants shunnedtemperance-crusading Whigs, many of whom were alsorabid anti-Catholics. Even public-school reform, cham-pioned by the Whigs, was seen as a menace to theCatholicism of Irish children and as a threat to Germanlanguage and culture.

Although liquor regulations and school laws werecity or state concerns rather than federal responsibili-ties, the Democratic party schooled immigrants inbroad, national principles. It taught them to venerateGeorge Washington, to revere Thomas Jefferson andAndrew Jackson, and to view “monied capitalists” asparasites who would tremble when the people spoke. Itintroduced immigrants to Democratic newspapers,Democratic picnics, and Democratic parades. TheDemocrats, by identifying their party with all that theythought best about the United States, helped give immi-grants a sense of themselves as Americans. By the sametoken, the Democratic party introduced immigrants to


national issues. It redirected political loyalties that oftenhad been forged on local issues into the arena of nation-al politics. During the 1830s the party had persuadedimmigrants that national measures like the Bank of theUnited States and the tariff, seemingly remote from theirdaily lives, were vital to them. Now, in the 1840s, theDemocrats would try to convince immigrants thatnational expansion likewise advanced their interests.

THE WEST AND BEYONDAs late as 1840, Americans who referred to the West stillmeant the area between the Appalachian Mountainsand the Mississippi River or just beyond, a region thatincluded much of the present-day Midwest. Beyond thestates bordering the Mississippi lay an inhospitable

region unlike any that the earlier settlers had known.Those who ventured west of Missouri encountered theGreat Plains, a semiarid plateau with few trees. Windssucked the moisture from the soil. Bands of nomadicIndians—including the Pawnees, Kiowas, and Sioux—roamed this territory and gained sustenance mainlyfrom the buffalo. They ate its meat, wore its fur, and cov-ered their dwellings with its hide. Aside from some well-watered sections of northern Missouri and easternKansas and Nebraska, the Great Plains presented would-be farmers with massive obstacles.

The formidable barrier of the Great Plains did notstop settlement of the West in the long run. Temporar-ily, however, it shifted public interest toward the ver-dant region lying beyond the Rockies, the Far West (seeMap 13.1).


Oregon Trail

California Trail

Santa Fe Trail

Mormon Trail

California Gold Rush

San Francisco

Sacramento(Sutter's Fort)

Astoria

OregonCity

Santa Fe

Nauvoo

Independence

Salt Lake City

San Diego

OREGON COUNTRY

IOWATERRITORY WISCONSIN

TERR.

ILLINOIS

MISSOURI

ARKANSAS

LOUISIANA

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

ME

XI C

AN

PO

SS

ES

SI O

NS

Region

SIE

RR

AN

EV

AD

A

RO

CK

YM

OU

NT

AI N

S

GR

EA

TP

LA

I NS

L. Super io r

L.M

i ch

ga

n

Rio

Grande

Col

ora

doR

.

Columbia R.

Willamette R.

PACIFICOCEAN

i

0 100 200 300

0 100 200 300

Miles

Kilometers

TEXAS

CALIFORNIA

Missou

riR

.

Mis

siss

i ppi

R

.

REPUBLIC OF

MAP 13.1Trails to the West, 1840By 1840 several trails carried pioneers from Missouri and Illinois to the West.

The Far West

With the Transcontinental (or Adams-Onís) Treaty of1819, the United States had given up its claims to Texaswest of the Sabine River. This had left Spain in undisput-ed possession not only of Texas but also of Californiaand the vast territory of New Mexico. Combined,California and New Mexico included all of present-dayCalifornia and New Mexico as well as modern Nevada,Utah, and Arizona, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado.Two years later, a series of revolts against Spanish rulehad culminated in the independence of Mexico and inMexico’s takeover of all North American territory previ-ously claimed by Spain.

The Transcontinental Treaty also had provided forSpain’s ceding to the United States its claims to thecountry of Oregon north of the forty-second parallel (thenorthern boundary of California). Then in 1824 and1825, Russia abandoned its claims to Oregon south of

54°40’ (the southern boundary of Alaska). In 1827 theUnited States and Britain, each of which had claims toOregon based on discovery and exploration, revived anagreement (originally signed in 1818) for joint occupa-tion of the territory between 42° and 54°40’, a colossalarea that contemporaries could describe no more pre-cisely than the “North West Coast of America, Westwardof the Stony [Rocky] Mountains” and that included all ofmodern Oregon, Washington, and Idaho as well as partsof present-day Wyoming, Montana, and Canada.

Collectively, Texas, New Mexico, California, andOregon comprised an area larger than Britain, France,and Germany combined. Such a vast region should have tempted any nation, but during the 1820s Mexico,Britain, and the United States viewed the Far West as aremote and shadowy frontier. By 1820 the American lineof settlement had reached only to Missouri, well overtwo thousand miles (counting detours for mountains)from the West Coast. El Paso on the Rio Grande and Taos

The West and Beyond 385

in New Mexico lay, respectively, twelve hundred and fif-teen hundred miles north of Mexico City. Britain, ofcourse, was many thousands of miles from Oregon.

Far Western Trade

The earliest American and British outposts on the WestCoast were trading centers established by merchantswho had reached California and Oregon by sailingaround South America and up the Pacific. Between thelate 1790s and the 1820s, for example, Boston merchantshad built a thriving exchange of coffee, tea, spices, cut-lery, clothes, and hardware—indeed, anything thatcould be bought or manufactured in the eastern UnitedStates—for furs (especially those of sea otters), cattle,hides, and tallow (rendered from cattle fat and used formaking soap and candles). Between 1826 and 1828alone, Boston traders took more than 6 million cattlehides out of California; in the otherwise undevelopedCalifornia economy, these hides, called “California bank-notes,” served as the main medium of exchange. Dur-ing the 1820s the British Hudson’s Bay Company developed a similar trade in Oregon and northernCalifornia.

The California trade occasioned little friction withMexico. Producing virtually no manufactured goods,Hispanic people born in California (called Californios)were as eager to buy as the traders were to sell—so eagerthat they sometimes rowed out to the vessels laden withgoods, thus sparing the traders the trip ashore. Manytraders who did settle in California quickly learned tospeak Spanish and became assimilated into Mexicanculture.

Farther south, trading links developed during the1820s between St. Louis and Santa Fe along the famedSanta Fe Trail. The Panic of 1819 left the AmericanMidwest short of cash and its merchants burdened byunsold goods. Pulling themselves up from adversity,however, plucky midwesterners loaded wagon trainswith tools, utensils, clothing, windowpanes, and house-hold sundries each spring and rumbled westward toSanta Fe, where they traded their merchandise formules and New Mexican silver. To a far greater extentthan had Spain, Mexico welcomed this trade. Indeed, bythe 1830s more than half the goods entering NewMexico by the Santa Fe Trail trickled into the mineral-rich interior provinces of Mexico such as Chihuahuaand Sonora, with the result that the Mexican silver peso,which midwestern traders brought back with them,quickly became the principal medium of exchange inMissouri.

The profitability of the beaver trade also promptedAmericans to venture west from St. Louis to trap beaverin what is today western Colorado and eastern Utah.There they competed with agents of the Hudson’s BayCompany. In 1825, on the Green River in Mexican terri-tory, the St. Louis-based trader William Ashley inaugu-rated an annual rendezvous or encampment wheretraders exchanged beaver pelts for supplies, thereby sav-ing themselves the trip to St. Louis. Although silk hatshad become more fashionable than beaver hats by 1854,over a half-million beaver pelts were auctioned off inLondon alone that year.

For the most part, American traders and trappersoperating on the northern Mexican frontier in the 1820sand 1830s posed more of a threat to the beaver than toMexico’s provinces. Not only did the Mexican people ofCalifornia and New Mexico depend on the Americantrade for manufactured goods, but Mexican officials inboth provinces also relied on customs duties to supporttheir governments. In New Mexico the government oftenhad to await the arrival of the annual caravan of tradersfrom St. Louis before it could pay its officials and soldiers.

Although the relations between Mexicans andAmericans were mutually beneficial during the 1820s,the potential for conflict was never absent. Spanish-speaking, Roman Catholic, and accustomed to a morehierarchical society, the Mexicans formed a striking con-trast to the largely Protestant, individualistic Americans.And although few American traders themselves becamepermanent residents of Mexico, many returned withglowing reports of the climate and fertility of Mexico’snorthern provinces. By the 1820s American settlers werealready moving into eastern Texas. At the same time, theties that bound the central government of Mexico to itsnorthern frontier provinces were starting to fray.

The American Settlement of Texas to 1835

During the 1820s Americans began to settle the easternpart of the Mexican state known as Coahuila-Texas,which lacked the deserts and mountains that formed anatural barrier along the boundaries of New Mexico andCalifornia. Initially, Mexico encouraged this migration,partly to gain protection against Indian attacks that hadintensified with the erosion of the Spanish-Mexican sys-tem of missions.

Spain, and later Mexico, recognized that the key tocontrolling the frontier provinces lay in promoting theirsettlement by civilized Hispanic people—that is, bySpaniards and Mexicans, and by Indians who had


embraced Catholicism and agriculture. The key instru-ment of Spanish expansion on the frontier had longbeen the mission. Staffed by Franciscan priests, the mis-sions endeavored to convert Native Americans and set-tle them as farmers on mission lands. To protect the mis-sions, the Spanish often had constructed forts, orpresidios, near them. San Francisco was the site of a mis-sion and a presidio founded in 1776, and did not developas a town until the 1830s.

Dealt a blow by the successful struggle for Mexicanindependence, Spain’s system of missions declined inthe late 1820s and 1830s. The Mexican government grad-ually “secularized” the missions by distributing theirlands to ambitious government officials and privateranchers who turned the mission Indians into forcedlaborers. As many Native Americans fled the missions,returned to their nomadic ways, and joined with Indianswho had always resisted the missions, lawlessnesssurged on the Mexican frontier and few Mexicans ven-tured into the undeveloped territory.

In 1824 the Mexican government began to encour-age American colonization of Texas by bestowing gener-ous land grants on agents known as empresarios torecruit peaceful American settlers for Texas. Initially,most Americans, like the empresario Stephen F. Austin,were content to live in Texas as naturalized Mexican citi-zens. But trouble brewed quickly. Most of the Americansettlers were southern farmers, often slaveholders.Having emancipated its own slaves in 1829, Mexico

closed Texas to further American immigration in 1830and forbade the introduction of more slaves. But theAmericans, white and black, kept coming, and in 1834Austin secured repeal of the 1830 prohibition onAmerican immigration. Two years later, Mexican generalManual Mier y Téran ran a sword through his heart indespair over Mexico’s inability to stem and control theAmerican advance. By 1836 Texas contained some thirtythousand white Americans, five thousand black slaves,and four thousand Mexicans.

As American immigration swelled, Mexican politics(which Austin compared to the country’s volcanic geolo-gy) grew increasingly unstable. In 1834 Mexican presi-dent Antonio López de Santa Anna instituted a policy ofrestricting the powers of the regimes in Coahuila-Texasand other Mexican states. His actions ignited a series ofrebellions in those regions, the most important of whichbecame known as the Texas Revolution.

The Texas Revolution, 1836

Santa Anna’s brutality in crushing most of the rebellionsalarmed Austin, who initially had hoped to securegreater autonomy for Texas within Mexico, not inde-pendence. In this, he had the support of the leadingTejanos (Mexicans living in Texas). When Santa Annainvaded Texas in the fall of 1835, however, Austin cast hislot with the more radical Americans who wanted inde-pendence.

The West and Beyond 387

At first, Santa Anna’s army met with success. In lateFebruary 1836, his force of 4,000 men laid siege to SanAntonio, whose 200 Texan defenders retreated into anabandoned mission, the Alamo. After repelling repeatedattacks, the remaining 187 Texans, were overwhelmedon March 6. Most were killed in the final assault. A few,including the famed frontiersman Davy Crockett, sur-rendered. Crockett then was executed on Santa Anna’sorders. A few weeks later, Mexican troops massacredsome 350 prisoners taken from an American settlementat Goliad.

Even before these events, Texas delegates had met ina windswept shed in the village of Washington, Texas,and declared Texas independent of Mexico. The rebelsby then had settled on a military leader, Sam Houston,for their president. A giant man who wore leopard-skinvests, Houston retreated east to pick up recruits (mostlyAmericans who crossed the border to fight Santa Anna).Once reinforced, Houston turned and surprised SantaAnna on a prairie near the San Jacinto River in April.Shouting “Remember the Alamo,” Houston’s army ofeight hundred tore through the Mexican lines, killingnearly half of Santa Anna’s men in fifteen minutes andtaking Santa Anna himself prisoner. Houston then

forced Santa Anna to sign a treaty (which the Mexicangovernment never ratified) recognizing the independ-ence of Texas (see Map 13.2).

American Settlements in California,New Mexico, and Oregon

California and New Mexico, both less accessible thanTexas, exerted no more than a mild attraction forAmerican settlers during the 1820s and 1830s. Only a fewhundred Americans resided in New Mexico in 1840. Thatsame year, California contained perhaps four hun-dred Americans. A contemporary observed that theAmericans living in California and New Mexico “are scat-tered throughout the whole Mexican population, andmost of them have Spanish wives. . . . They live in everyrespect like the Spanish.”

Yet the beginnings of change were already evident.California’s Hispanic population generally welcomedAmerican immigration as a way to encourage economicdevelopment. In addition, some Americans who settledin California before 1840 sent back highly favorablereports of the region to induce immigration. Onetongue-in-cheek story told of a 250-year-old man whohad to leave the idyllic region in order to die. Suchreports produced their intended effect. During the 1840san ever-widening stream of Americans migrated to theinterior Sacramento valley, where they lived geographi-cally and culturally apart from the Mexicans. For theseland-hungry settlers, no sacrifice seemed too great if itled to California.

Oregon, with its abundant farmland, beckoned set-tlers from the Mississippi valley. During the 1830s mis-sionaries like the Methodist Jason Lee moved intoOregon’s Willamette valley, and by 1840 the area con-tained some five hundred Americans. Enthusiasticreports sent back by Lee piqued interest in Oregon. Anorator in Missouri described Oregon as a “pioneer’s par-adise” where “the pigs are running around under thegreat acorn trees, round and fat and already cooked,with knives and forks sticking in them so that you can cut off a slice whenever you are hungry.” Indeed, to some, Oregon seemed even more attractive thanCalifornia. Oregon was already jointly occupied byBritain and the United States, and its prospects for even-tual U.S. annexation appeared better than California’s.

The Overland Trails

Whether bound for California or Oregon, the pioneersfaced a four-month journey across terrain that was allthe more terrifying because little was known about it.


0 200 Miles

0 200 Kilometers

Mexican victory

Texan victory

Disputed area

AlamoMarch 6, 1836

GoliadMassacreMarch 20, 1836

San JacintoApril 21, 1836

REPUBLIC OF TEXAS

MEXICO

Adams – Onís Treaty of 1819ARKANSAS

LOUISIANA

Rio Grande

Nueces R.

BrazosR

.

GULF OF MEXICO

MAP 13.2Major Battles in the Texas Revolution,1835–1836Sam Houston’s victory at San Jacinto was the decisive action ofthe war and avenged the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad.

The eastern press teemed with horror stories, most-ly fictitious, of Indian massacres. Assuming that theywould have to fight their way across the Plains, settlers prepared for the trip by buying enough guns for an army from merchants in the rival jump-off towns ofIndependence and St. Joseph, Missouri. In reality, thepioneers were more likely to shoot themselves or eachother by accident than to be shot by the usually cooper-ative Indians, and much more likely to be scalped by theinflated prices charged by merchants in Independenceor “St. Joe” than by Native Americans.

Once embarked, the emigrants faced new hardshipsand hazards: kicks from mules, oxen that collapsed fromthirst, overloaded wagons that broke down. Trails weredifficult to follow—at least until they became littered by the debris of broken wagons and by the bleachedbones of oxen. Guidebooks to help emigrants chart theircourse were more like guessbooks. The Donner party,which set out from Illinois in 1846, lost so much time fol-lowing the advice of one such book that its membersbecame snowbound in the High Sierra and reachedCalifornia only after its survivors had turned to canni-balism.

Emigrants responded to the challenges of the over-land trails by cooperating closely with one another. Mostset out in huge wagon trains rather than as individuals.Reflecting firmly entrenched traditions, husbandsdepended on their wives to pack and unpack the wagoneach day, to milk the cows brought along to stock thenew farms in the West, and to cook. Women, too, assist-ed with the childbirths that occurred on the trail at

about the same frequency as in the nation as a whole.Men yoked and unyoked the oxen, drove the wagons andstock, and formed hunting parties.

Between 1840 and 1848, an estimated 11,500 emi-grants followed an overland trail to Oregon, and some2,700 reached California. These numbers were modestand concentrated in the years from 1844 to 1848. Yeteven small numbers could make a huge difference in theFar West, for the British could not effectively settleOregon at all, and the Mexican population in Californiawas small and scattered. By 1845 California clung toMexico by the thinnest of threads. The territory’sHispanic population, the Californios, felt little allegianceto Mexico, which they contemptuously referred to as the“other shore.” Nor did they feel any allegiance to theUnited States. Some Californios wanted independencefrom Mexico; others looked to the day when Californiamight become a protectorate of Britain or perhaps evenFrance. But these Californios, with their shaky alle-giances, now faced a growing number of American set-tlers whose political sympathies were not at all divided.

THE POLITICS OFEXPANSION, 1840–1846

The major issue that arose as a by-product of westwardexpansion was whether the United States should annexthe independent Texas republic. In the mid-1840s theTexas-annexation issue generated the kind of politicalpassions that banking questions had ignited in the

The Politics of Expansion, 1840–1846 389

1830s, and became entangled with equally unsettlingissues relating to California, New Mexico, and Oregon.Between 1846 and 1848, a war with Mexico and a dra-matic confrontation with Britain settled all these ques-tions on terms favorable to the United States.

Yet at the start of the 1840s, western issues occupiedno more than a tenuous position on the national politi-cal agenda. From 1840 to 1842 questions relating to eco-nomic recovery—notably, banking, the tariff, and inter-nal improvements—dominated the attention of politicalleaders. Only after politicians failed to address the eco-nomic issues coherently did opportunistic leaders thrustissues relating to expansion to the top of the politicalagenda.

The Whig Ascendancy

The election of 1840 brought Whig candidate WilliamHenry Harrison to the presidency and installed Whigmajorities in both houses of Congress. The Whigs hadraced to power with a program, based on Henry Clay’sAmerican System, to stimulate economic recovery, andthey had excellent prospects of success. They quicklyrepealed Van Buren’s darling, the Independent Treasury.They then planned to substitute some kind of national“fiscal agent,” which, like the defunct Bank of the UnitedStates, would be a private corporation chartered byCongress and charged with regulating the currency. TheWhigs also favored a tariff, but with a twist. In the past,Whigs had supported a “protective” tariff set high to dis-courage the importation of goods that would competewith the products of American industries. Now theWhigs proposed a modification in the form of a “revenue”tariff high enough to provide “incidental” protection forAmerican industries but low enough to allow most for-eign products to enter the United States. The duties col-lected on these imports would accrue to the federal gov-ernment as revenue. The Whigs then planned todistribute this revenue to the states for internal improve-ments, a measure as popular among southern and west-ern Whigs as the tariff was among northeastern Whigs.

The Whig agenda might have breezed into law had itnot been for the untimely death of Harrison after onlyone month in office. With Harrison’s demise, VicePresident John Tyler, an upper-crust Virginian who hadbeen put on the ticket in 1840 to strengthen the Whigs’appeal in the South, assumed the presidency. From vir-tually every angle, the new president proved a disasterfor the Whigs.

A former Democrat, Tyler had broken with Jacksonover nullification, but he continued to favor the

Democratic philosophy of states’ rights. As president, herepeatedly used the veto to shred his new party’s pro-gram. In August 1841 a Whig bill to create a new nationalbank became the first casualty of Tyler’s veto. Stunned,the Whig majority in Congress quickly passed a modifiedbanking bill, only to see Tyler veto it as well.

Congressional Whigs fared little better on the tariffand the distribution of tariff revenues to the states. TheCompromise Tariff of 1833 had provided for a gradualscaling down of tariff duties, until none was to exceed 20percent by 1842. Amid the depression of the early 1840s,however, the provision for a 20 percent maximum tariffappeared too low to generate revenue. Without revenue,the Whigs would have no money to distribute among thestates for internal improvements and no program withnational appeal. In response, the Whig congressionalmajority passed two bills in the summer of 1842 thatsimultaneously postponed the final reduction of tariffsto 20 percent and ordered distribution to the states toproceed. Tyler promptly vetoed both bills. Tyler’s mount-ing vetoes infuriated Whig leadership. “Again has theimbecile, into whose hands accident has placed thepower, vetoed a bill passed by a majority of those legallyauthorized to pass it,” screamed the Daily RichmondWhig. Some Whigs talked of impeaching Tyler. Finally, inAugust, needing revenue to run the government, Tylersigned a new bill that maintained some tariffs above 20 percent but abandoned distribution to the states.

Tyler’s erratic course confounded and disrupted hisparty. By maintaining some tariffs above 20 percent, thetariff of 1842 satisfied northern manufacturers, but byabandoning distribution, it infuriated many southernersand westerners. Northern Whigs succeeded in passingthe bill with the aid of many northern Democrats, par-ticularly pro-tariff Pennsylvanians, whereas large num-bers of Whigs in the Upper South and West opposed thetariff of 1842.

In the congressional elections of 1842, the Whigspaid a heavy price for failing to enact their program.Although retaining a slim majority in the Senate, theylost control of the House to the Democrats. Now thenation had one party in control of the Senate, its rival incontrol of the House, and a president who appeared tobelong to neither party.

Tyler and the Annexation of Texas

Although a political maverick disowned by his party,Tyler ardently desired a second term as president.Domestic issues offered him little hope of building apopular following, but foreign policy was another mat-


ter. In 1842 Tyler’s secretary of state, Daniel Webster,concluded a treaty with Great Britain, represented byLord Ashburton, that settled a long-festering disputeover the boundary between Maine and the Canadianprovince of New Brunswick. Awarding more than half ofthe disputed territory to the United States, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty was popular in the North. Tyler rea-soned that if he could now arrange for the annexation ofTexas, he would build a national following.

The issue of slavery, however, had long cloudedevery discussion of Texas. By the late 1830s antislaverynortherners viewed proposals to annex Texas as part ofan elaborate southern conspiracy to extend Americanterritory south into Mexico, Cuba, and Central America,thus allowing for an unlimited number of new slavestates, while the British presence in Canada would limitthe number of free states. In fact, some southernerstalked openly of creating as many as four or five slavestates out of the vast territory encompassed by Texas.

Nevertheless, in the summer of 1843, Tyler launcheda propaganda campaign for Texas annexation. He justi-fied his crusade by reporting that he had learned of cer-tain British designs on Texas, which Americans, heargued, would be prudent to forestall. Tyler’s campaignwas fed by reports from his unofficial agent in London,Duff Green, a protégé of John C. Calhoun and a manwhom John Quincy Adams contemptuously dismissedas an “ambassador of slavery.” Green assured Tyler that,as a prelude to undermining slavery in the United States,the British would pressure Mexico to recognize the inde-pendence of Texas in return for the abolition of slaverythere. Calhoun, who became Tyler’s secretary of stateearly in 1844, embroidered these reports with fancifultheories about British plans to use abolition as a way todestroy rice, sugar, and cotton production in the UnitedStates and gain for itself a monopoly on all three staples.

In spring 1844 Calhoun and Tyler submitted to theSenate for ratification a treaty, secretly drawn up, annex-ing Texas to the United States. Among the supportingdocuments accompanying the treaty was a letter fromCalhoun to Richard Pakenham, the British foreign min-ister in Washington, that defended slavery as beneficialto blacks, the only way to protect them from “vice andpauperism.” Antislavery northerners no longer had tolook under the carpet for evidence that the impulsebehind annexation lay in a desire to protect and extendslavery; now they needed only to read Calhoun’s words.Both Martin Van Buren, the leading northern Democrat,and Henry Clay, the most powerful Whig, came outagainst immediate annexation on the grounds thatannexation would provoke the kind of sectional conflict

that each had sought to bury. By a vote of 35 to 16, thetreaty went down to crushing defeat in the Senate.Decisive as it appeared, however, this vote only post-poned the final decision on annexation to the upcomingelection of 1844.

The Election of 1844

Tyler’s ineptitude turned the presidential campaign intoa free-for-all. The president hoped to succeed himself inthe White House, but he lacked a base in either party.Testing the waters as an independent, he could not gar-ner adequate support and was forced to drop out of therace.

Henry Clay had a secure grip on the Whig nomina-tion. Martin Van Buren appeared to have an equally firmgrasp on the Democratic nomination, but the issue ofTexas annexation split his party. Trying to appease allshades of opinion within his party, Van Buren stated thathe would abide by whatever Congress might decide on


the annexation issue. Van Buren’s attempt to evade theissue succeeded only in alienating the modest numberof northern annexationists, led by Michigan’s formergovernor Lewis Cass, and the much larger group ofsouthern annexationists. At the Democratic convention,Van Buren and Cass effectively blocked each other’snomination. The resulting deadlock was broken by thenomination of James K. Polk of Tennessee, the first“dark-horse” presidential nominee in American historyand a supporter of immediate annexation.

Jeering “Who is James K. Polk?” the Whigs deridedthe nomination. Polk was little known outside the South,and he had lost successive elections for the governor-ship of Tennessee. Yet Polk was a wily campaigner, andhe persuaded many northerners that annexation ofTexas would benefit them. Conjuring an imaginativescenario, Polk and his supporters argued that if Britainsucceeded in abolishing slavery in Texas, slavery wouldnot be able to move westward; racial tensions in existingslave states would intensify; and the chances of a racewar, which might spill over into the North, wouldincrease. However far-fetched, this argument playedeffectively on northern racial fears and helped Polkdetach annexation from Calhoun’s narrow, prosoutherndefense of it.

In contrast to the Democrats who established a cleardirection in their arguments, Clay kept muddying thewaters. First he told his followers that he had nothingagainst annexation as long as it would not disrupt sec-

tional harmony. In September 1844 he again came outagainst annexation. Clay’s shifts on annexation alienat-ed his southern supporters and prompted a small butinfluential body of northern antislavery Whigs to desertto the Liberty party, which had been organized in 1840.Devoted to the abolition of slavery by political action,the Liberty party nominated Ohio’s James G. Birney forthe presidency.

Annexation was not the sole issue of the campaign.The Whigs infuriated Catholic immigrant voters by nom-inating Theodore Frelinghuysen as Clay’s running mate.A leading Presbyterian layman, Frelinghuysen gave “hishead, his hand, and his heart” to temperance and anassortment of other Protestant causes. His presence on their ticket fixed the image of the Whigs as the ortho-dox Protestant party and roused the largely Catholic foreign-born voters to turn out in large numbers for theDemocrats.

On the eve of the election in New York City, so manyIrish marched to the courthouse to be qualified for vot-ing that the windows had to be left open for people to getin and out. “Ireland has reconquered the country whichEngland lost,” an embittered Whig moaned. Polk wonthe electoral vote 170 to 105, but his margin in the popu-lar vote was only 38,000 out of 2.6 million votes cast, andhe lost his own state of Tennessee by 113 votes (see Map 13.3). In most states the two main parties contend-ed with each other on close terms, a sign of the maturityof the second party system. A shift of 6,000 votes in NewYork, where the immigrant vote and Whig defections tothe Liberty party hurt Clay, would have given Clay boththe state and the presidency.

Manifest Destiny, 1845

The election of 1844 demonstrated one incontestablefact: the annexation of Texas had more national supportthan Clay had realized. The surging popular sentimentfor expansion that made the underdog Polk rather thanClay the man of the hour reflected a growing convictionamong the people that America’s natural destiny was toexpand into Texas and all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

Expansionists emphasized extending the “area offreedom” and talked of “repelling the contaminatingproximity of monarchies upon the soil that we have con-secrated to the rights of man.” For contemporary youngAmericans like Walt Whitman, such restless expansion-ism knew few limits. “The more we reflect upon annexa-tion as involving a part of Mexico, the more do doubtsand obstacles resolve themselves away,” Whitman wrote.“Then there is California, on the way to which lovely tract


DemocraticJames K. Polk

Henry ClayWhig

170

105

1,338,464

1,300,097

49.6

48.1

OREGONCOUNTRY

INDIANTERRITORY

MEXICANPOSSESSIONS

WIS. TERR.

FLA. TERR.

ElectoralVote

PopularVote

Percentage ofPopular Vote

12

46

738

9

66

36

2623

129

1217

11

9

10

13

96

7

6

IOWATERR.

REPUBLIC OFTEXAS

5

3

James G. BirneyLiberty

– 62,300 2.3

MAP 13.3The Election of 1844

lies Santa Fe; how long a time will elapse before theyshine as two new stars in our mighty firmament?”

Americans awaited only a phrase to capture thisebullient spirit of continentalism. In 1845 John L.O’Sullivan, a New York Democratic journalist, wrote of“our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess thewhole of the continent which Providence has given usfor the development of the great experiment of libertyand federated self-government entrusted to us.”

Advocates of Manifest Destiny used lofty languageand routinely invoked God and Nature to sanctionexpansion. Inasmuch as most proponents of ManifestDestiny were Democrats, many of whom supported theannexation of Texas, northern Whigs frequently dis-missed Manifest Destiny as a smoke screen aimed atconcealing the evil intent of expanding slavery. In reality,many advocates of Manifest Destiny were neither sup-porters of slavery nor zealous annexationists. Oregonand California loomed more prominently in their mindsthan Texas. For despite their flowery phrases, theseexpansionists rested their case on hard material calcula-tions. Most blamed the post-1837 depression on the fail-ure of the United States to acquire markets for its agri-cultural surplus and saw the acquisition of Oregon andCalifornia as solutions. A Missouri Democrat observedthat “the ports of Asia are as convenient to Oregon as theports of Europe are to the eastern slope of our confeder-acy, with an infinitely better ocean for navigation.” AnAlabama Democrat praised California’s “safe and capa-cious harbors,” which, he assured, “invite to their bos-oms the rich commerce of the East.”

Expansionists desired more than profitable traderoutes, however. At the heart of their thinking lay animpulse to preserve the predominantly agriculturalcharacter of the American people and thereby to safe-guard democracy. Most expansionists associated theindustrialization that was transforming America withsocial stratification and class strife, and many saw theconcentration of impoverished Irish immigrants in citiesand factory towns as evidence of shrinking opportuni-ties for the economic advancement of the common peo-ple. After a tour of New England mill towns in 1842, JohnL. O’Sullivan warned Americans that should they fail toencourage alternatives to factories, the United Stateswould sink to the level of Britain, a nation that theardent Democratic expansionist James Gordon Bennettdescribed as a land of “bloated wealth” and “terriblemisery.”

Most Democratic expansionists came to see theacquisition of new territory as a logical complement totheir party’s policies of low tariffs and decentralized

banking. Where tariffs and banks tended to “favor andfoster the factory system,” expansion would providefarmers with land and with access to foreign markets for their produce. As a consequence, Americans wouldcontinue to become farmers, and the foundations of the Republic would remain secure. The acquisition ofCalifornia and Oregon would provide enough land andharbors to sustain not only the 20 million Americans of1845 but the 100 million that some expansionists pro-jected for 1900 and the 250 million that O’Sullivan pre-dicted for 1945.

The expansionists’ message, especially as deliveredby the penny press in such newspapers as Bennett’s NewYork Herald, made sense to the laboring poor ofAmerica’s antebellum cities. The Herald, the nation’slargest-selling newspaper in the 1840s, played on theanxieties of its working-class readers by arguing relent-lessly for the expulsion of the British from Oregon andfor thwarting alleged British plans to abolish slavery inthe United States. These readers, many of them fiercelyantiblack, anti-British Irish immigrants, welcomed anyefforts to open up economic opportunities for the com-mon people. Most also favored the perpetuation of slav-ery, for the freeing of slaves would throw masses ofblacks into the already intense competition for jobs.

The expansionists with whom these laboring-classreaders sided drew ideas from Thomas Jefferson, JohnQuincy Adams, and other leaders of the early Republicwho had proclaimed the American people’s right to dis-place both “uncivilized” and European people from thepath of their westward movement. Early expansionists,however, had feared that overexpansion might create anungovernable empire. Jefferson, for example, had pro-posed an indefinite restriction on the settlement ofLouisiana. In contrast, the expansionists of the 1840s,citing the virtues of the telegraph and the railroad,believed that the problem of distance had been “literallyannihilated.” James Gordon Bennett claimed that thetelegraph would render the whole nation as compactand homogeneous as New York City. Ironically, althoughmany expansionists pointed with alarm to the negativeeffects of industrialization on society, their confidencein technology convinced them that the nation couldexpand with minimal risk to the people.

Polk and Oregon

The most immediate effect of the growing spirit ofManifest Destiny was to escalate the issue of Oregon. Tosoften northern criticism of the still-pending annexationof Texas, the Democrats had included in their platform


for the election of 1844 the assertion that American title“to the whole of the Territory of Oregon is clear andunquestionable.” Taken literally, the platform commit-ted the party to acquire the entire area betweenCalifornia and 54°40’, the southern boundary of Alaska.Since Polk had not yet been elected, the British couldsafely ignore this extraordinary claim for the moment,and in fact the Oregon issue had aroused far less interestduring the campaign than had the annexation of Texas.But in his inaugural address, Polk reasserted the “clearand unquestionable” claim to the “country of Oregon.” Ifby this Polk meant all of Oregon, then the United States,which had never before claimed any part of Oregonnorth of the forty-ninth parallel, had executed anastounding and belligerent reversal of policy.

Polk’s objectives in Oregon were more subtle thanhis language. He knew that the United States couldnever obtain all of Oregon without a war with Britain,and he wanted to avoid that. He proposed to use thethreat of hostilities to persuade the British to acceptwhat they had repeatedly rejected in the past—a divi-sion of Oregon at the forty-ninth parallel. Such a divi-sion, extending the existing boundary between theUnited States and Canada from the Rockies to thePacific, would give the United States both the excellentdeep-water harbors of Puget Sound and the southern tip

of British-controlled Vancouver Island. For their part,the British had long held out for a division along theColumbia River, which entered the Pacific Ocean farsouth of the forty-ninth parallel (see Map 13.4).

Polk’s comments in his inaugural speech rousedamong westerners a furious interest in acquiring thewhole territory. Mass meetings adopted such resolu-tions as “We are all for Oregon, and all Oregon in the West” and “The Whole or None!” Furthermore, each passing year brought new American settlers intoOregon. Even John Quincy Adams, who advocated nei-ther the annexation of Texas nor the 54°40’ boundary forOregon, believed that the American settlements inOregon gave the United States a far more reasonableclaim to the territory than mere exploration and discov-ery gave the British. The United States, not Britain,Adams preached, was the nation bound “to make thewilderness blossom as the rose, to establish laws, toincrease, multiply, and subdue the earth,” all “at the firstbehest of God Almighty.”

In April 1846 Polk secured from Congress the ter-mination of joint British-American occupation ofOregon and promptly gave Britain the required one-year’s notice. With joint occupation abrogated, theBritish could either go to war over American claims to54°40’ or negotiate. They chose to negotiate. Althoughthe British raged against “that ill-regulated, overbearing,and aggressive spirit of American democracy,” they hadtoo many domestic and foreign problems to welcome awar over what Lord Aberdeen, the British foreign secre-tary, dismissed as “a few miles of pine swamp.” Theensuing treaty provided for a division at the forty-ninthparallel, with some modifications. Britain retained all ofVancouver Island as well as navigation rights on theColumbia River. The Senate ratified the treaty (with theproviso that Britain’s navigation rights on the Columbiawere merely temporary) on June 15, 1846.

THE MEXICAN-AMERICANWAR AND ITS AFTERMATH,

1846–1848Between 1846 and 1848 the United States successfullyfought a war with Mexico that led Mexico to renounceall claims to Texas and to cede its provinces of NewMexico and California to the United States. ManyAmericans rejoiced in the stunning victory. But somerecognized that deep divisions over the status of slaveryin New Mexico and California boded ill for their nation’sfuture.


Spanish treaty line, 1819

Treaty of 1825ALASKA(RUSSIA)

5440'

49

42

MEXICO

UNITED STATES

BRITISHNORTH AMERICA

(CANADA)

OREGON

COUNTRY Missouri R.Columbia R.

Snake R.

Willamette R.

PACIFICOCEAN

Puget Sound

Oregon Trail

Vancouver

British treaty line, 1818

Focus of dispute, 1846

Compromise line, 1846

MAP 13.4Oregon Boundary DisputeAlthough demanding that Britain cede the entire Oregon Territorysouth of 54°40′, the United States settled for a compromise atthe forty-ninth parallel.

The Origins of the Mexican-American War

Even as Polk was challenging Britain over Oregon, theUnited States and Mexico moved steadily toward war.The impending conflict had both remote and immediatecauses. One long-standing grievance lay in the failure ofthe Mexican government to pay some $2 million in debtsowed to American citizens. In addition, bitter memoriesof the Alamo and of the Goliad massacre continued toarouse in Americans a loathing of Mexicans. Above all,the issue of Texas embroiled relations between the twonations. Mexico still hoped to regain Texas or at least tokeep it independent of the United States.

Behind Mexican anxieties about Texas lay a deeperfear. Mexicans viewed the United States with a mixtureof awe and aversion. Americans struck them as markedby industriousness and political stability, qualitiesMexicans found lacking in themselves (the Mexicanpresidency changed hands twenty times between 1829and 1844). But Mexicans also saw this “Colossus of theNorth” as extremely aggressive, prone to trample onanyone in its path and to disguise its intentions withhigh-sounding phrases like Manifest Destiny. Once incontrol of Texas, the Mexicans feared, the United Statesmight seize other provinces, perhaps even Mexico itself,and treat the citizens of Mexico much as it treated itsslaves.

Unfortunately for Mexico, Polk’s election increasedthe strength of the pro-annexationists, for his campaignhad persuaded many northerners that enfolding Texaswould bring national benefits. In February 1845 bothhouses of Congress responded to popular sentiment bypassing a resolution annexing Texas. However, Texansbalked, in part because some feared that union with theUnited States would provoke a Mexican invasion andwar on Texas soil.

Confronted by Texan timidity and Mexican belliger-ence, Polk moved on two fronts. To sweeten the pot forthe Texans, he supported their claim to the Rio Grandeas the southern boundary of Texas. This claim ran count-er to Mexico’s view that the Nueces River, a hundredmiles northeast of the Rio Grande, bounded Texas. Thearea between the Nueces and the Rio Grande was largelyuninhabited, but the stakes were high. Although only ahundred miles southwest of the Nueces at its mouth onthe Gulf of Mexico, the Rio Grande meandered west andthen north for nearly two thousand miles and encircleda huge slice of territory, including part of New Mexico.The Texas that Polk proposed to annex thus encom-passed far more land than the Texas that had gained

independence from Mexico in 1836. On July 4, 1845,reassured by Polk’s largesse, a Texas convention over-whelmingly voted to accept annexation. In response toMexican war preparations, Polk then made a secondmove, ordering American troops under General ZacharyTaylor to the edge of the disputed territory. Taylor tookup a position at Corpus Christi, a tiny Texas outpost situ-ated just south of the Nueces and hence in territory stillclaimed by Mexico.

Never far from Polk’s thoughts in his insistence onthe Rio Grande boundary lay his desire for Californiaand for its fine harbors of San Diego and San Francisco.In fact, Polk had entered the White House with the firmintention of extending American control over California.By the summer of 1845, his followers were openly pro-claiming that, if Mexico went to war with the UnitedStates over Texas, “the road to California will be open tous.” Then in October 1845, Polk received a dispatch fromThomas O. Larkin, the American consul at Monterey,California, that warned darkly of British designs onCalifornia but ended with the optimistic assurance thatthe Mexicans in California would prefer American toBritish rule. Larkin’s message gave Polk the idea thatCalifornia might be acquired by the same methods asTexas: revolution followed by annexation.

With Texans’ acceptance of annexation and Taylor’stroops at Corpus Christi, the next move belonged toMexico. In early 1845 a new Mexican government agreedto negotiate with the United States, and Polk, locked intoa war of words with Britain over Oregon, decided to givenegotiations a chance. In November 1845 he dispatchedJohn Slidell to Mexico City with instructions to gainMexican recognition of the annexation of Texas with theRio Grande border. In exchange, the United States gov-ernment would assume the debt owed by Mexico toAmerican citizens. Polk also authorized Slidell to offerup to $25 million for California and New Mexico. But bythe time Slidell reached Mexico City, the governmentthere had become too weak to make concessions to theUnited States, and its head, General José Herrera,refused to receive Slidell. Polk then ordered Taylor tomove southward to the Rio Grande, hoping to provoke aMexican attack and unite the American people behindwar.

The Mexican government dawdled. Polk was aboutto send a war message to Congress when word finallyarrived that Mexican forces had crossed the Rio Grandeand ambushed two companies of Taylor’s troops. Nowthe prowar press had its martyrs. “American blood hasbeen shed on American soil!” one of Polk’s followers pro-claimed. On May 11 Polk informed Congress that war

The Mexican-American War and Its Aftermath, 1846–1848 395

“exists by the act of Mexico herself” and called for a $10 million appropriation to fight the war.

Polk’s disarming assertion that the United Stateswas already at war provoked furious opposition inCongress, where John C. Calhoun briefly united withantislavery Whigs to protest the president’s high-hand-edness. Polk’s opponents pointed out that the Mexicanattack on Taylor’s troops had occurred in territory thatno previous administration had claimed as part of theUnited States. By announcing that war already existed,moreover, Polk seemed to be undercutting Congress’spower to declare war and using a mere border incidentas a pretext for plunging the nation into a general war toacquire more slave territory. The pro-Whig New YorkTribune warned its readers that Polk was “precipitatingyou into a fathomless abyss of crime and calamity.”Antislavery poet James Russell Lowell of Massachusettswrote of the Polk Democrats,

They just want this CalifornySo’s to lug new slave-states inTo abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye,An’ to plunder ye like sin.

But Polk had maneuvered the Whigs into a corner.Few Whigs could forget that the Federalists’ oppositionto the War of 1812 had wrecked the Federalist party, andfew wanted to appear unpatriotic by refusing to supportTaylor’s beleaguered troops. Swallowing their outrage,most Whigs backed appropriations for war againstMexico.

Throughout the negotiations with Britain overOregon and with Mexico over Texas, Polk had demon-strated his ability to pursue his goals unflinchingly. Ahumorless, austere man who banned dancing and liquorat White House receptions, Polk inspired little personalwarmth, even among his supporters. But he possessedclear objectives and a single-mindedness in their pursuit.At every point, he had encountered opposition on thehome front: from Whigs who saw him as a reckless adven-turer; from northerners of both parties opposed to anyexpansion of slavery; and from John C. Calhoun, whodespised Polk for his high-handedness and fretted that awar with Britain would strip the South of its market forcotton. Yet Polk triumphed over all opposition, in partbecause of his opponents’ fragmentation, in part becauseof expansion’s popular appeal, and in part because of theweakness of his foreign antagonists. Reluctant to fightover Oregon, Britain chose to negotiate. Too weak tonegotiate, Mexico chose to fight over territory that it hadalready lost (Texas) and for territories over which its holdwas feeble (California and New Mexico).

The Mexican-American War

Most European observers expected Mexico to win thewar. With a regular army four times the size of theAmerican forces, Mexico had the added advantage offighting on home ground. The United States, which hadbotched its one previous attempt to invade a foreignnation, Canada in 1812, now had to sustain offensiveoperations in an area remote from American settle-ments.

In contrast to the Europeans, expansionists in theUnited States hardly expected the Mexicans to fight atall. A leading Democrat confidently predicted thatMexico would offer only “a slight resistance to the NorthAmerican race” because its mixed Spanish and Indianpopulation had been degraded by “amalgamation.”Newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett pro-claimed that the “imbecile” Mexicans were “as sure tomelt away at the approach of [American] energy andenterprise as snow before a southern sun.”

In fact, the Mexicans fought bravely and stubbornly,although unsuccessfully. In May 1846 Taylor, “Old Roughand Ready,” routed the Mexican army in Texas and pur-sued it across the Rio Grande, eventually capturing themajor city of Monterrey in September. War enthusiasmsurged in the United States. Recruiting posters blared,“Here’s to old Zach! Glorious Times! Roast Beef, IceCream, and Three Months’ Advance.” Taylor’s conspicu-ously ordinary manner—he went into battle wearing astraw hat and a plain brown coat—endeared him to thepublic, which kicked up its heels in celebration to the“Rough and Ready Polka” and the “General Taylor QuickStep.”

After taking Monterrey, Taylor, starved for supplies,halted and granted Mexico an eight-week armistice.Eager to undercut Taylor’s popularity—the Whigs werealready touting him as a presidential candidate—Polkstripped him of half his forces and reassigned them toGeneral Winfield Scott. Scott was to mount an amphibi-ous attack on Vera Cruz, far to the south, and proceed toMexico City, following the path of Cortés and his con-quistadores. Events outstripped Polk’s scheme, however,when Taylor defeated a far larger Mexican army at theBattle of Buena Vista, on February 22–23, 1847.

While Taylor was winning fame in northern Mexico,and before Scott had launched his attack on Vera Cruz,American forces farther north were dealing decisiveblows to the remnants of Mexican rule in New Mexicoand California. In spring 1846 Colonel Stephen Kearnymarched an army from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,toward Santa Fe. Like the pioneers on the Oregon Trail,


Kearny’s men faced immense natural obstacles as theymarched over barren ground. Finally reaching NewMexico, Kearny took the territory by a combination ofbluff, bluster, and perhaps bribery, without firing a shot.The Mexican governor, following his own advice that “itis better to be thought brave than to be so,” fled atKearny’s approach. After suppressing a brief rebellion byMexicans and Indians, Kearny sent a detachment of hisarmy south into Mexico. There, having marched fifteenhundred miles from Fort Leavenworth, these troopsjoined Taylor in time for the Battle of Buena Vista.

Like New Mexico, California fell easily intoAmerican hands. In 1845 Polk had ordered CommodoreJohn D. Sloat and his Pacific Squadron to occupyCalifornia’s ports in the event of war with Mexico. Toensure victory, Polk also dispatched a courier overlandwith secret orders for one of the most colorful andimportant actors in the conquest of California, John C.Frémont. A Georgia-born adventurer, Frémont had mar-ried Jessie Benton, the daughter of powerful SenatorThomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Benton used his influ-ence to have accounts of Frémont’s explorations in theNorthwest (mainly written by Jessie Benton Frémont)published as government documents. All of this earnedglory for Frémont as “the Great Pathfinder.” Finally over-

The Mexican-American War and Its Aftermath, 1846–1848 397

taken by Polk’s courier in Oregon, Frémont was dis-patched to California to “watch over the interests of theUnited States.” In June 1846 a small force of Americansettlers loyal to Fremont seized the village of Sonomaand proclaimed the independent “Bear Flag Republic.”The combined efforts of Frémont, Sloat, his successorDavid Stockton, and Stephen Kearny (who arrived inCalifornia after capturing New Mexico) quickly estab-lished American control over California.

The final and most important campaign of the warsaw the conquest of Mexico City itself. In March 1847Winfield Scott landed near Vera Cruz at the head oftwelve thousand men and quickly pounded the city intosubmission. Moving inland, Scott encountered SantaAnna at the seemingly impregnable pass of Cerro Gordo,but a young captain in Scott’s command, Robert E. Lee,helped find a trail that led around the Mexican flank to asmall peak overlooking the pass. There Scott plantedhowitzers and, on April 18, stormed the pass and routedthe Mexicans. Scott now moved directly on Mexico City. Taking the key fortresses of Churubusco andChapultepec (where another young captain, Ulysses S.

Grant, was cited for bravery), Scott took the city onSeptember 13, 1847 (see Map 13.5).

In virtually all these encounters on Mexican soil, theMexicans were numerically superior. In the final assaulton Mexico City, Scott commanded eleven thousandtroops against Santa Anna’s twenty-five thousand. Butdoom stalked the Mexican army. Hampered by SantaAnna’s nearly unbroken string of military miscalcula-tions, the Mexicans fell victim to the vastly superiorAmerican artillery and to the ability of the Americans toorganize massive military movements. The “barbariansof the North” (as Mexicans called the American soldiers)

died like flies from yellow fever, and they carried intobattle the agonies of venereal disease, which they pickedup (and left) in many of the Mexican towns they took.But the Americans benefited from the unprecedentedquality of their weapons, supplies, and organization.

By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 2,1848), Mexico ceded Texas with the Rio Grande bound-ary, New Mexico, and California to the United States. In return, the United States assumed the claims ofAmerican citizens against the Mexican government andpaid Mexico $15 million. Although the United Statesgained the present states of California, Nevada, New


San Diego

Dec. 6, 1846San Pasqual

San GabrielLosAngeles

San Francisco

Sonoma(Bear Flag Revolt)

June 14, 1846

Monterey

U.S

. Navy

Frém

ont

Kearny

Santa Fe

Colorado R.

Kearny

Buena Vista

MonterreySept. 21-24,

1846

Taylor

San

taA

na

S co t tMexico CitySept. 13-14, 1847

Vera Cruz

Scott

New Orleans

LOUISIANA

ARKANSAS

MISSOURI

Fort Leavenworth

IOWAUNORGANIZED

TERRITORY

U N I T E D S T A T E S

OREGON COUNTRY

T E X A S

DISPUTED AREA

M E X I C O

GULF OF MEXICO

Rio Grande

Nu e

cesR.

Red R .

Missouri R.

Mis

siss

ippi

R.

n

Mexican forces

Mexican victory

Boundary of territory ceded by Mexico, 1848

PACIFIC

OCEAN

0 500 Miles

0 500 Kilometers

Cerro GordoApril 18, 1847

Feb. 22-23, 1847

Matamoros

Palo AltoMay 8, 1846American

forces

American victory

occupiedJuly 10,1846

occupied July 7, 1846

Jan. 8, 1847

occupied Aug. 18, 1846

Tampicooccupied

Nov. 14, 1846

occupied March 29, 1847

MAP 13.5Major Battles of the Mexican-American WarThe Mexican War’s decisive campaign began with General Winfield Scott’s capture of Vera Cruz and endedwith his conquest of Mexico City.

Mexico, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of Coloradoand Wyoming, some rabid expansionists in the Senatedenounced the treaty because it failed to include all ofMexico. But the acquisition of California, with its excel-lent Pacific ports of San Diego and San Francisco, satis-fied Polk. Few senators, moreover, wanted to annex themixed Spanish and Indian population of Mexico. Awriter in the Democratic Review expressed the prevailingview that “the annexation of the country [Mexico] to theUnited States would be a calamity,” for it would incorpo-rate into the United States “ignorant and indolent half-civilized Indians,” not to mention “free negroes andmulattoes” left over from the British slave trade. The vir-ulent racism of American leaders allowed the Mexicansto retain part of their nation. On March 10, 1848, theSenate ratified the treaty by a vote of 38 to 10.

The War’s Effects on Sectional Conflict

Wartime patriotic enthusiasm did not stop sectionalconflict from sharpening between 1846 and 1848.Questions relating to territorial expansion intensifiedthis conflict, but so too did President Polk’s uncompro-mising and literal Jacksonianism.

Polk had restored the Independent Treasury, to theWhigs’ dismay, and had eroded Democratic unity bypursuing Jacksonian policies on tariffs and internalimprovements. Despite his campaign promise, applaud-ed by many northern Democrats, to combine a revenuetariff with a measure of protection, his administration’sTariff of 1846 had slashed duties to the minimum nec-essary for revenue. Polk then disappointed westernDemocrats, thirsting for federal aid for internal improve-ments, by vetoing the Rivers and Harbors Bill of 1846.

Important as these issues were, territorial expansionsparked the Polk administration’s major battles. To Polk,it mattered little whether new territories were slave orfree. Expansion would serve the nation’s interests by dis-persing population and retaining its agricultural anddemocratic character. Focusing attention on slavery in the territories struck him as “not only unwise butwicked.” The Missouri Compromise, prohibiting slaverynorth of 36°30’, impressed him as a simple and perma-nent solution to the problem of territorial slavery.

But many northerners were coming to see slavery inthe territories as a profoundly disruptive issue that nei-ther could nor should be solved simply by extending the36°30’ line westward. Antislavery Whigs who opposedany extension of slavery on moral grounds were still aminority within their party. They posed a lesser threat to

Polk than did northern Democrats who feared thatexpansion of slavery into California and New Mexico(parts of each lay south of 36°30’) would deter free labor-ers from settling those territories. These Democratsargued that competition with slaves degraded free labor,that the westward extension of slavery would check thewestward migration of free labor, and that such a barrierwould aggravate the social problems already beginningto plague the East: class strife, social stratification, andlabor protest.

The Wilmot Proviso

A young Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania,David Wilmot, became the spokesman for these dis-affected northern Democrats. On a sizzling night inAugust 1846, he introduced an amendment to an appro-priations bill for the upcoming negotiations with Mexicoover Texas, New Mexico, and California. This amend-ment, known as the Wilmot Proviso, stipulated that slav-ery be prohibited in any territory acquired by the negoti-ations. Neither an abolitionist nor a critic of Polk ontariff policy, Wilmot spoke for those loyal Democratswho had supported the annexation of Texas on theassumption that Texas would be the last slave state.Wilmot’s intention was not to split his party along sec-tional lines but instead to hold Polk to what Wilmot andother northern Democrats took as an implicit under-standing: Texas for the slaveholders, California and NewMexico for free labor.

With strong northern support, the proviso passed inthe House but stalled in the Senate. Polk refused toendorse it, and most southern Democrats opposed anybarrier to the expansion of slavery south of the MissouriCompromise line. Accepting the view that the westwardextension of slavery would reduce the concentration ofslaves in the older regions of the South and thus lessenthe chances of a slave revolt, southern Democrats triedto put as much distance as possible between themselvesand Wilmot.

The proviso raised unsettling constitutional issues.Calhoun and fellow southerners contended that sinceslaves were property, slaveholders enjoyed the Con-stitution’s protection of property and could carry theirslaves wherever they chose. This position led to the conclusion (drawn explicitly by Calhoun) that the Mis-souri Compromise of 1820, prohibiting slavery in theterritories north of 36°30’, was unconstitutional. On the other side were many northerners who cited the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compro-mise, and the Constitution itself, which gave Congress

The Mexican-American War and its Aftermath, 1846–1848 399

the power to “make all needful rules and regulationsrespecting the territory or other property belonging tothe United States,” as justification for congressional leg-islation on slavery in the territories. With the election of1848 approaching, politicians of both sides, eager tohold their parties together and avert civil war, franticallysearched for a middle ground.

The Election of 1848

Having asserted that their policies of national bankingand high tariffs alone could pull the nation out of thedepression, the Whigs had watched in dismay as pros-perity returned under Polk’s program of an independ-ent treasury and low tariffs. Never before had Clay’sAmerican System seemed so irrelevant. But the WilmotProviso gave the Whigs a political windfall; originating in

the Democratic party, it enabled the Whigs to portraythemselves as the South’s only dependable friends.

These considerations inclined the majority of Whigstoward Zachary Taylor. As a Louisiana slaveholder, hehad obvious appeal to the South. As a political new-comer, he had no loyalty to the discredited AmericanSystem. As a war hero, he had broad national appeal.Nominating Taylor as their presidential candidate in1848, the Whigs presented him as an ideal man “withoutregard to creeds or principles” and ran him without anyplatform.

The Democrats faced a greater challenge becauseDavid Wilmot was one of their own. They could notignore the issue of slavery in the territories, but if theyembraced the position of either Wilmot or Calhoun, theparty would split along sectional lines. When Polkdeclined to run for reelection, the Democrats nominat-ed Lewis Cass of Michigan, who solved their dilemma byannouncing the doctrine of “squatter sovereignty,” orpopular sovereignty as it was later called. Cass arguedthat Congress should let the question of slavery in theterritories be decided by the people who settled there.Squatter sovereignty appealed to many because of itsarresting simplicity and vagueness. It neatly dodged thedivisive issue of whether Congress had the power to pro-hibit territorial slavery. In fact, few Democrats wanted adefinitive answer to this question. As long as the doc-trine remained ambiguous, northern and southernDemocrats alike could interpret it to their respectivebenefit.

In the campaign, both parties tried to ignore theissue of territorial slavery, but neither succeeded. A fac-tion of the Democratic party in New York that favoredthe Wilmot Proviso, called the Barnburners, broke awayfrom the party, linked up with former Liberty party abo-litionists, and courted antislavery “Conscience” Whigs tocreate the Free-Soil party. Declaring their dedication to“Free Trade, Free Labor, Free Speech, and Free Men,” theFree-Soilers nominated Martin Van Buren on a platformopposing any extension of slavery.

Zachary Taylor benefited from the Democrats’ alien-ation of key northern states over the tariff issue, fromDemocratic disunity over the Wilmot Proviso, and fromhis war-hero stature. He captured a majority of electoralvotes in both North and South. Although failing to carryany state, the Free-Soil party ran well enough in theNorth to demonstrate the grass-roots popularity ofopposition to slavery extension. Defections to the Free-Soilers, for example, probably cost the Whigs Ohio. Byshowing that opposition to the spread of slavery had fargreater appeal than the staunch abolitionism of the old


Liberty party, the Free-Soilers sent the Whigs and Dem-ocrats a message that they would be unable to ignore infuture elections.

The California Gold Rush

When Wilmot announced his proviso, the issue of slav-ery in the Far West was more abstract than practicalbecause Mexico had yet to cede any territory and rela-tively few Americans resided in either California or NewMexico. Nine days before the signing of the Treaty ofGuadalupe Hidalgo, however, an American carpenterdiscovered gold in the foothills of California’s SierraNevada range. A frantic gold rush began within a fewmonths. A San Francisco newspaper complained that“the whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles,and from the shore to the base of the Sierra Nevada,resounds with the sordid cry to gold, GOLD, GOLD!while the field is left half-planted, the house half-built,and everything neglected but the manufacture of shov-els and pickaxes.”

Shovels and pickaxes to dig gold from crevices inand around streams were enough for most of the earlygold prospectors. But as the most accessible deposits ofgold were depleted, individual miners increasinglyformed combinations to undertake such costly projectsas diverting the course of streams and rivers to uncovergold-laden beds or excavating shafts in the earth.“Hydraulic mining,” a development of the mid-1850s,involved channeling water from streams through nar-row hoses to blast thousands of cubic yards of earthfrom hillsides and then sifting the earth through sluicesto capture the precious particles of gold.

By December 1848 pamphlets with titles like TheEmigrant’s Guide to the Gold Mines had hit the streets ofNew York City. Arriving by sea (see Technology andCulture: The Age of the Clipper Ships) and by land, gold-rushers drove up the population of California fromaround 15,000 in the summer of 1848 to nearly 250,000by 1852. Miners came from every corner of the world. Afemale journalist reported walking through a miningcamp in the Sierras and hearing English, Italian, French,Spanish, German, and Hawaiian. Conflicts over claimsquickly led to violent clashes between Americans andHispanics (mostly Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians).Americans especially resented the Chinese who floodedinto California in the 1850s, most as contract laborersfor wealthy Chinese merchants, and who struckAmericans as slave laborers. Yet rampant prejudiceagainst the Chinese did not stop some American busi-nessmen from hiring them as contract workers for the

American mining combinations that were forming inthe 1850s.

Within a decade the gold rush turned the sleepyHispanic town of Yerba Buena, the population of whichwas 150 in 1846, into “a pandemonium of a city” of50,000 known as San Francisco. No other U.S. city con-tained people from more parts of the world. Many of theimmigrants were Irish convicts who arrived by way ofAustralia, to which they had been exiled for their crimes.All the ethnic and racial tensions of the gold fields wereevident in the city. A young clergyman confessed that hecarried a harmless-looking cane, which “will be found tocontain a sword two-and-a-half feet long.” In 1851 SanFrancisco’s merchants organized the first of severalCommittees of Vigilance, which patrolled the streets,deported undesirables, and tried and hanged allegedthieves and murderers.

With the gold rush, the issue of slavery in the FarWest became practical as well as abstract, and immedi-ate rather than remote. The newcomers attracted to

The Mexican-American War and its Aftermath, 1846–1848 401

The Age of the Clipper Ship

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

There was no “first” clipper ship. These legendary“Greyhounds of the Sea,” which reached the height

of their fame between 1845 and 1859, evolved from theAmerican interest in finding ways to make ships—in facteverything—go faster. Lacking the protection of a greatnavy, American shipbuilders and sea captains knew thatsailing at a fast “clip” was the best way to elude theenemy warships that had threatened American com-merce between 1807 and 1815, the era of the Embargoand the War of 1812. The opening of new commercialports in China in the 1830s and 1840s intensified thequest for speed to overcome both great distances andthe tendency of tea leaves to spoil if left in the hold fortoo long. By the mid-1840s Americans were starting toboast of their “extreme clippers.”

Compared to traditional sailing vessels, these extremeclippers—so many were built that before long it becamepointless to add “extreme”—carried a lot of sail in rela-tion to their tonnage. In mariners’ language, they were

heavily “sparred.” Spars were wooden masts, yardarms,or booms that supported the rigging and enabled clip-pers to spread as much canvas as possible in order to take maximum advantage of the wind, their onlysource of propulsion. The bows of clippers were unusu-ally “sharp,” with little buoyancy. While the barrel-chestedbows and wide hulls of traditional vessels pushed thewater out of the way, the sharp bows and narrow hulls of clippers knifed through it. The clippers’ sleeknesstranslated into an average speed of twelve knots an hour (a knot is a nautical mile, about a mile and one-eighth), compared to six to eight knots for traditional vessels.

Had clippers been designed only to carry cargo, theirnarrow beams would have been a drawback. But in thelate 1840s demand for faster passenger ships mounted.British emigrants were heading for Australia, and Britishshipowners commissioned the building of clippers inAmerican yards. Then the California gold rush sparked

402

demand for voyages from eastern ports toSan Francisco. Not all of these passengerswere headed for the gold fields. InCalifornia’s dizzy gold-rush economy, cartdrivers, carpenters, masons, and cookscould command four to five times the dailywages of workers in the rest of the nation.Paying two hundred dollars, three hundreddollars, or more for sea passage—close toa year’s wages—struck many of them as agood investment.

Before the end of February 1849,eleven thousand passengers had left onships from eastern ports to go to SanFrancisco and the gold fields, most on slowvessels that averaged 157 days for the six-teen thousand-mile trip from New York toSan Francisco around Cape Horn, thesouthernmost tip of South America. In theo-ry, it was faster to sail from New York to theisthmus of Panama, the narrowest point ofNorth America; cross the sixty-mile isth-mus by foot, mule, and boat; and take asteamship north to San Francisco. Butdense jungle, snakes, scorpions, armies of mosquitoes,and weeks or months waiting for a steamship limited theappeal of the isthmus route.

By the early 1850s the shipyards of Boston and NewYork were turning out clippers for the Cape Horn route atastonishing rates. Boston’s shipbuilder Donald McKayoversaw the construction of thirty-one clippers between1850 and 1858. The most famous of these was the FlyingCloud, which McKay sold for $60,000 to a Boston shipowner, who almost immediately sold it to a New Yorkowner for $90,000. Guided by its captain, Josiah P.Cressy, and its navigator, Cressy’s wife Ellen (a masterfulmistress of the sextant and other instruments for locatinga ship’s position at sea), the Flying Cloud made the runfrom New York to San Francisco around the Horn ineighty-nine days in 1851, a record not broken by any sail-ing vessel until 1989. At one point on this voyage, theFlying Cloud attained the unheard of speed of eighteenknots an hour.

The speed of the Flying Cloud and other clippersgripped the public’s imagination. A betting industrysprang up around the clippers, with wagers on howmany days and hours it would take a ship to reach theequator or to drop anchor at San Francisco. In the early1850s many shipbuilders were concluding that the newlyinvented steamship, slow and with boilers prone toexplode, had reached its limits and that the future, atleast for ocean voyages, belonged to the clipper.

They were wrong. Like the gold rush itself, the reignof the clipper was brief. The invention in 1836 of thesteam-powered screw propeller, which churned off asteamer’s stern and eliminated the drag-producing side-wheels of the early steamers, made it possible forsteamships to average thirteen knots by the mid-1850s.

However magnificent, clippers were expensive. Man-aging their immense spreads of sail required relativelylarge crews of at least sixty, and, running nearly flush tothe sea, clippers took a horrific pounding in bad weather.Insurance rates soared by the mid-1850s, less becauseclippers were sinking than because they needed somuch repair after each voyage. As interest in the goldfields waned, most of the clippers were shorn of theirmasts and miles of rigging and converted to barges. TheFlying Cloud itself, its masts shortened to make it easierto handle with a smaller crew, met a pitiful end in 1874when, damaged by a storm while in port, it was deemednot worth repairing. Under orders from the insuranceunderwriters, a team of workers towed it to sea, dousedit with kerosene, set it ablaze, and watched it burn to thewater.

Focus Questions

• What were the relative advantages and disadvan-tages of the Horn and isthmus routes to California?How did each compare with overland travel?

• Why was the reign of the clipper ship so short?

403

California in 1849 included free blacks and slaves broughtby planters from the South. White prospectors loathedthe thought of competing with either of these groupsand wanted to drive all blacks, along with California’sIndians, out of the gold fields. Tensions also inten-sified between the gold-rushers and the Californios,whose extensive (if often vaguely worded) land holdingswere protected by the terms of the Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo. Spawned by disputed claims and prejudice,violence mounted, and demands grew for a strong civilian government to replace the ineffective militarygovernment in place in California since the war. Polkbegan to fear that without a satisfactory congressionalsolution to the slavery issue, Californians might organ-ize a government independent of the United States. The gold rush thus guaranteed that the question of slavery in the Mexican cession would be the first item onthe agenda for Polk’s successor and, indeed, for thenation.

CONCLUSIONThe massive immigration of the 1840s changed the face of American politics. Angered by Whig nativism and anti-Catholicism, the new German and Irish immi-grants swelled the ranks of the Democratic party.Meanwhile, the Whigs were unraveling. The untimelydeath of President Harrison brought John Tyler, aDemocrat in Whig’s clothing, to the White House. Tyler’svetoes of key Whig measures left the Whig party in disar-ray. In combination, these developments led to the sur-prise election of James K. Polk, a Democrat and ardentexpansionist, in 1844.

Wrapped in the language of Manifest Destiny, west-ward expansion appealed to Americans for many rea-sons. It fit their belief that settlers had more right to theAmerican continent than did the Europeans who basedtheir claims on centuries-old explorations, the lethargicand Catholic Mexicans, and the nomadic Indians.Expansion promised trade routes to the Pacific, moreland for farming, and, in the case of Texas, more slavestates. Polk simultaneously rode the wave of nationalsentiment for Manifest Destiny and gave it direction byannexing Texas, provoking a crisis with Britain overOregon, and leading the United States into a war withMexico. Initially, Polk succeeded in uniting broad swathsof public opinion behind expansion. Polk and his follow-ers ingeniously argued that national expansion was inthe interests of northern working-class voters, many of

them immigrants. By encouraging the spread of slaveryto the Southwest, the argument went, the annexation ofTexas would reduce the chances of a race war in theSoutheast that might spill over into the North.

Yet even as war with Mexico was commencing,cracks in Polk’s coalition were starting to show. TheWilmot Proviso exposed deep sectional divisions thathad only been papered over by the ideal of ManifestDestiny and that would explode in the secession of Free-Soil Democrats in 1848. Victorious over Mexico and enriched by the discovery of gold in California,Americans counted the blessings of expansion butbegan to fear its costs.


CHRONOLOGY, 1840–1848

1822 Stephen F. Austin founds the first American communityin Texas.

1830 Mexico closes Texas to further American immigration.1835 Santa Anna invades Texas.1836 Texas declares its independence from Mexico.

Fall of the Alamo.Goliad massacre.Battle of San Jacinto.

1840 William Henry Harrison elected president.1841 Harrison dies; John Tyler becomes president.1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty.1844 James K. Polk elected president.1845 Congress votes joint resolution to annex Texas.

Mexico rejects Slidell mission.1846 The United States declares war on Mexico.

John C. Frémont proclaims the Bear Flag Republic inCalifornia.Congress votes to accept a settlement of the Oregonboundary issue with Britain.Tariff of 1846.Colonel Stephen Kearny occupies Santa Fe.Wilmot Proviso introduced.Taylor takes Monterrey.

1847 Taylor defeats Santa Anna at the Battle of Buena Vista.Vera Cruz falls to Winfield Scott.Mexico City falls to Scott.Lewis Cass’s principle of “squatter sovereignty.”

1848 Gold discovered in California.Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed.Taylor elected president.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE

READINGS

Peter J. Blodgett, Land of Golden Dreams (1999). A vividaccount of California in the gold rush.

William R. Brock, Parties and Political Conscience:American Dilemmas, 1840–1850 (1979). An excellentinterpretive study of the politics of the 1840s.

William H. Goetzmann, When the Eagle Screamed: TheRomantic Horizon in American Diplomacy, 1800–1860(1966). A lively overview of antebellum expansionism.

Maldwyn A. Jones, American Immigration (1960). An excel-lent brief introduction to immigration.

Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: TheEclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the CivilWar (1997). An important recent study.

Malcolm J. Rorabaugh, Days of Gold: The California GoldRush and the American Nation (1997). Emphasizes howthe discovery of gold in California reaffirmed theAmerican belief that, regardless of family name or edu-cation, anyone who worked hard in America could growrich.

Charles G. Sellers, James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843–1846(1966). An outstanding political biography.

Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West asSymbol and Myth (1950). A classic study of westwardexpansion in the American mind.

WEBSITES

End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Centerhttp://endoftheoregontrail.org/index.htmlA valuable site for interpreting the Oregon Trail. In addi-tion to information on wagon travel and communicationbetween whites and Indians, the site includes diaries,narratives, and biographies of pioneer families on theOregon Trail.

Gold Rushhttp://www.museumca.org/goldrush/This site contains paintings of the gold rush, informationon mining, and accounts of the experiences of gold-rushers from many nations and cultures.

The U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/mainframe.htmlThis site offers valuable chronologies of the war andinterpretations of it in English and Spanish from boththe American and Mexican perspectives.

For additional works please consult the bibliography atthe end of the book.

For Further Reference 405

silviam

Text Box

Next Chapter

silviam

Text Box

Previous Chapter

immigration, expansion, and sectional conflict, … · immigration, expansion, and sectional...

Documents