Expanding Nation Essay

In the 1830’s and 40’s the westward movement of population left the valley of the Mississippi behind and penetrated the Far West all the way to the Pacific. Pioneers pursued fertile land and economic opportunity beyond the existing boundaries of the United States and thus helped set the stage for the annexations and international crises of the 1840’s. Some went for material gain, others for adventure, and a significant minority sought freedom from religious persecution. But whatever their reasons for migrating, they brought American attitudes and loyalties into regions that were already occupied or at least claimed by Mexico or Great Britain. Whether they realized it or not, these pioneers were the vanguard of American expansionism. The domestic controversies aroused by the Mexican War and the propaganda of Manifest Destiny revealed the limits of the mid-nineteenth century American expansionism and put a damper on additional efforts to extend the nation’s boundaries. Concerns about slavery and race impeded acquisition of new territory in Latin America and the Caribbean. Resolution of the Oregon dispute clearly indicated that the United States was not willing to go to war with a powerful adversary to obtain large chunks of British North America, and the old ambition of incorporating Canada rapidly faded. After 1848, American growth usually took the form of populating and developing the vast territory already acquired. The expansionists of the 1840’s saw a clear link between acquisition of new territory and other forms of material growth and development. In 1844 Samuel F. B. Morse perfected and demonstrated his electric telegraph, a device that would make it possible to communicate rapidly over the expanse of a continental nation. Simultaneous, the railroad was becoming increasingly important as a means of moving people and goods over the same great distances. Improvements in manufacturing and agricultural methods led to an upsurge in the volume and range of internal trade, and the beginnings of mass immigration were providing human resources for the exploitation of new areas and economic opportunities. After gold was discovered in newly acquired California in 1848, a flood of emigrants from the East and several foreign nations arrived by ship or wagon train, their appetites whetted by the thoughts of striking it rich. The gold they unearthed spurred the national economy, and the rapid growth of population centers on the Pacific Coast inspired projects for transcontinental telegraph lines and railroad tracks. When the spirit of Manifest Destiny and the thirst for acquiring new territory waned after the Mexican War, the expansionist impulse turned inward. The technological advances and population increased of the 1840’s continued during the 50’s. The result was an acceleration of economic growth, a substantial increase in industrialization and urbanization, and the emergence of a new working class (Billington, 1956). The first movement west aimed not for the nearby plains but for California and Oregon on the continent’s far shore. It started in the 1849 Gold Rush to California and in the next three decades perhaps as many as half a million individuals made the long journey. Some walked; others rode horses alone or in small groups. About half jointed great caravans, numbering 150 wagons or more, that inched across the 2000 miles between the Missouri River and the Pacific Coast. More often than not men made the decision to make the crossing. Wives either went with their husbands or faced being left behind. Four out of five men on the overland trail had picked up stakes and moved before, some of them several times. People moved west for many reasons. Some sought adventure; others wanted to escape the drab routine of factory or city life. Many moved to California for their health. What ever the specific reasons most people moved west to better their lot. On the whole their timing was good, for as a nations population grew, so did the demand for the livestock and the agricultural mineral and lumber products of the expanding West. Opposite to older historical views the West did not act as a major safety valve or an outlet for social and economic tensions. The poor and unemployed did not have the means to move there and establish farms. Most people moved West in good times, in periods of rising prices, of expanding demand, when the prospects for making money from this new land looked brightest; and this aspect characterized the whole pattern of settlement and greatly improved the whole of the economic growth for the U. S. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century a flood of settlers ventured into America’s newest and last west (Jones, 1960). The West became a great colonial empire, harnessed to eastern capital and tied increasingly to national and international markets. Western economies depended to an unusual degree on the federal government, which subsidized their railroads, distributed their land, and spent millions of dollars for the upkeep of soldiers and Indians. Regional variations persisted and Westerners remained proud of their hardy, individualistic traditions. Yet they imitated the East’s social, cultural, and political patterns. By the 1890’s the West of the buffalo and Indian was gone, and instead there were cities and towns, health resorts, Paris fashion and the latest magazines. The frontier line had reached the edge of the timber country of Missouri by 1840. Beyond lay an enormous land of rolling prairies, parched deserts, and rugged, majestic mountains. Emerging from the timber country, travelers first encountered the Great Plains. These lands were treeless, nearly flat, and an endless sea of grassy hillocks. The Prairie Plains, the eastern part of the region, enjoyed rich soil and good rainfall; it included parts of present day Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. To the west covering Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona were called the High Plains. They were rough, semiarid, rising gently to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains (Faragher, 1979). The original incentive to mechanize northern industry and agriculture came in part from a shortage of cheap labor. Compared with the industrializing nations of Europe, the United States of the early nineteenth century was a labor-scarce economy. Since it was difficult to attract able-bodied men to work for low wages in factories or on farms, women and children were used extensively in the early textile mills, and commercial farmers had to rely heavily on the labor of their family members. In the face of such limited and uncertain labor supplies, producers were greatly tempered to experiment with labor saving machinery. By the 1840’s and 50’s industrialization had reached a point where it could readily absorb a new influx of unskilled workers. Factories required increasing numbers of unskilled operatives, and railroad builders needed construction gangs. The growth of industrial work opportunities helped attract a multitude of European immigrants during the two decades before the Civil War (Fishlow, 1965). Between 1820 and 1840 an estimated 700,000 immigrants arrived in the United States, mainly from the British Isles and German-speaking areas of continental Europe. During the 1840’s this substantial flow suddenly became a flood. No less than 4,200,000 crossed the Atlantic between 1840 and 1860, and about 3 million of these arrived in the single decade between 1845 and 1855. This was the greatest influx in proportion to total population that the nation has ever experienced. The largest single source of the new mass immigration was Ireland, but Germany was not far behind. This massive transatlantic movement had many causes; some people were pushed out of their homes, while others were pulled toward America. The great push factor that caused a million and a half Irish to forsake the Emerald Isle was the great potato famine. Escape to America was made possible by the low fares then prevailing on sailing ships bound from England to North America. The million or so Germans who also came in the late 1840’s and early 50’s were somewhat more fortunate. Most of them were also peasants, but they fled hard times rather than outright catastrophe. What attracted or pulled most of the Irish, German and other European immigrants to America, was the promise of economic opportunity (Jones, 1992). By 1860 industrial expansion and immigration had created a working class of men and women who seemed destined for a life of low paid wage labor. This reality stood in contrast to America’s self image as a land of opportunity and upward mobility. Wage labor was popularly viewed as a temporary condition from which workers were supposed to extricate themselves by hard work and frugality. According to Abraham Lincoln in 1850 of the North’s free labor society, â€Å"there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer. This ideal still had some validity in rapidly developing regions of the western states, but it was mostly myth when applied to the increasingly foreign born industrial workers of the Northeast. Both internal and external expansion had come at a heavy cost. Tensions associated with class and ethnic rivalries were only one part of the price of rapid economic development. The acquisitions of new territories became politically divisive and would soon lead to a catastrophic sectional controversy. From the late 1840’s to the Civil War, the United States was a divided society in more than one sense, and the need to control or resolve these conflicts presented politicians and statesmen with a monumental challenge (Gutman, 1976). Many have searched for the underlying causes of the crisis leading to the disruption of the Union but have failed to agree on exactly what they were. Some have stressed the clash of economic interests between agrarian and industrializing regions. But this interpretation does not reflect the way people at the time expressed their concerns. The main issues in the sectional debates of the 1850’s were whether slavery was right or wrong and whether it should be extended or contained. Disagreements over protective tariffs and other economic measures allegedly benefiting one section or the other were clearly secondary. It has never been clear why the interests of northern industry and those of the South’s commercial agriculture were irreconcilable. From a purely economic point of view, there was no necessity for producers of raw materials to go to war with those who marketed or produced them. The critical period of Civil War diplomacy was in 1861 to 1862 when the South was making every effort to induce foreign powers to recognize its independence and break the Union blockade. The hope that England and France could be persuaded to involve themselves in the war on the Confederate side stemmed from the fact that these nations depended on the South for three quarters of their cotton supply. In the case of Britain, the uninterrupted production of cotton textile appeared essential to economic prosperity (Stampp, 1950).