Gregory Bodenhamer Mechanicsburg Pa Walt Whitman. In 1855, Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which he continued to revise, rearrange, and enlarge until his death in 1892. A revolutionary work that greatly influenced American poetry, it expressed Whitman's love for his country in lusty and controversial free verse that included homoerotic images. While many critics at the time found Leaves crude and vulgar, Emerson found Whitman's poetry to be decidedly American, democratic and plain. Whitman shared Thoreau's abolitionist sentiments, but the two parted company on politics; Whitman had an unbridled faith in democratic government, despite its imperfections.

Walt Whitman. In 1855, Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which he continued to revise, rearrange, and enlarge until his death in 1892. A revolutionary work that greatly influenced American poetry, it expressed Whitman's love for his country in lusty and controversial free verse that included homoerotic images. While many critics at the time found Leaves crude and vulgar, Emerson found Whitman's poetry to be decidedly American, democratic and plain. Whitman shared Thoreau's abolitionist sentiments, but the two parted company on politics; Whitman had an unbridled faith in democratic government, despite its imperfections.

Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Nathaniel Hawthorne was fascinated by the dark side of the Puritan mind. His novels, especially the Scarlet Letter (1850) and the House of Seven Gables (1851), dealt with revenge, guilt, and pride. Although he had been involved with Brook Farm and wrote the Blithedale Romance (1852) based on his experiences there, Hawthorne did not share the transcendentalists' faith in the perfectibility of man.

Herman Melville, unlike many of the writers before the Civil War, did not receive recognition for his work while he was alive. His first novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were set in the South Pacific, where he had visited as a sailor. Moby-Dick (1851), based on Melville's experiences on a whaling ship, was not appreciated as one of the great works of American fiction until the 1920s.

Edgar Allan Poe focused on literary genres different from those of his contemporaries: the short story and short poem. His work reflected his own pessimistic outlook on life and focused chiefly on the mental state of the characters. He is credited with pioneering detective fiction in such stories as the “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1843) and gothic horror in the “Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and the “Tell-Tale Heart” (1843).

American art. In the decades before the Civil War, a distinctive style of American landscape painting attracted considerable attention. The Hudson River school, comprising such artists as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Asher Durand, captured on canvas the massive trees, sparkling water, and lush American environment, conveying a sense of the majesty and mystery of the wilderness that was quickly disappearing. Just as Emerson had claimed that Americans should write about themselves in their own place, Cole noted in an essay published in 1836 that it was not necessary for artists to go to Europe to find subjects for their paintings: “American scenery… has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe. The most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.”

Antebellum America: Recreation, Leisure

During the antebellum period, popular pastimes included a variety of participant and spectator sports. The New York Clipper, a magazine first published in 1853, employed a network of reporters spread across the country who used the new electric telegraph to cover every kind of sport, including foot races, pedestrian (walking) events, horse races, dog fights, cock fights, rat catching, boxing matches, rowing regattas, and, of course, baseball games.

Although the myth persists that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, the game actually evolved from the English sport called “rounders” and was played in the colonies during the eighteenth century. Credit for key changes to what was variously called “town ball,” “four-old cat,” and “base ball” belongs to Alexander Cartwright. In 1845, he suggested that runners be tagged with the ball rather than hit with it and that each team be limited to three outs. These rules led to modem baseball, which was on its way to becoming a national pastime by the Civil War.

Popular reading. Improvements made to printing presses had a dramatic impact on Americans' reading. As technology reduced production costs, allowing publishers to sell newspapers for a penny an issue, readership increased. The number of newspapers in the country grew from fewer than 100 in 1790 to more than 3,700 by 1860. Large metropolitan papers, such as the New York Sun and the New York Herald, featured sensational stories about crime, sex, and scandal. The number of magazines also began to grow in the second half of the nineteenth century. “Highbrow” periodicals, such as the North American Review and Harper's, which is still in print today, carried articles by some of the most noted authors of the day, while other magazines catered to the tastes and interests of specific audiences—women, farmers, and businessmen, for example.

The expansion of public education, the opening of lending libraries, and the popularity of the lyceum created a mass audience for books. Although the works of Cooper and Hawthorne sold well, even more popular were sentimental novels by and for women, books that provided advice or practical instruction (early “how-to” books), and literature with a moral message. Often, books were serialized in newspapers or magazines before they were published as full novels. Such was the case with Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which was written in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and did much to strengthen antislavery sentiment in the North.

Theater and P. T. Barnum. The theater was as popular in antebellum America as movies are today. Best-selling novels were adapted for the stage; Uncle Tom's Cabin was produced in New York in 1853, for example (interestingly, African Americans had to enter the theater through a special entrance and were segregated from the rest of the audience). Shakespeare's plays were a perennial favorite, as were melodramas and comedies. Shows that touched on the social issues of the day were important. Temperance plays, which showed how alcohol could destroy a family, were a popular genre, and about fifty plays about Native Americans were staged between 1825 and 1860.

Early in his career as a showman, Phineas T. Barnum realized that people would pay to see exotic and sensational exhibits purported to have an educational value. In 1835, he introduced the public to an aged black woman, Joice Heth, who he claimed had been George Washington's nurse. Barnum followed this hoax with the “Feejee mermaid,” created by sewing together a fish and the upper body of a monkey. The “mermaid” and other odd displays, along with appearances by the famous twenty-five-inch-tall dwarf, General Tom Thumb, were featured attractions at Barnum's American Museum in New York City (1842). Barnum was also a legitimate theatrical promoter; he brought the noted Swedish singer Jenny Lind to the United States for a concert tour in 1850.

The impact of the minstrel shows. One of the most popular forms of entertainment beginning in the 1840s was the minstrel show, which featured white performers acting out skits, singing, dancing, and telling jokes in blackface makeup. African Americans were consistently portrayed either as clumsy, lazy, stupid, docile, and childlike or as arrogant and dandified, looking ridiculous as they tried to adopt white ways. The extreme stereotypes that the shows and their advertising conveyed reflected the strong racial prejudice in the United States. Minstrel shows confirmed whites' sense of superiority while providing a racial justification for slavery. Curiously, the shows were popular at a time when feelings against slavery in the North had been increasing.

Long after the heyday of minstrel shows passed, American audiences could still see vaudeville entertainers such as Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson in blackface, and the tradition continued into the era of sound motion pictures. Even African-American stage actors often had to undergo the indignity of putting on the distinctive makeup because theatrical convention required it.

Slavery, the Economy, and Society

At the time of the American revolution, slavery was a national institution; although the number of slaves was small, they lived and worked in every colony. Even before the Constitution was ratified, however, states in the North were either abolishing slavery outright or passing laws providing for gradual emancipation. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 barred slavery from the new territories of that period, so rather quickly, slavery effectively existed only in the South and became that region's “peculiar institution.”

Between the first federal census in 1790 and the eve of the Civil War, the slave population in the United States increased from approximately seven hundred thousand to almost four million. The formal end to the foreign slave trade in 1808 had no impact—the smuggling of slaves was common—and in any event, natural increase accounted for practically all of the slave-population growth in the United States. The nationwide distribution of slaves also changed during this time span. Around 1820, slavery was concentrated in the tobacco-growing areas of Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky and along the coasts of South Carolina and northern Georgia. By 1860, it had significantly expanded into the Deep South, particularly Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, following the spread of cotton production. Had slavery somehow ceased during that expansion, it would have been impossible for the South to meet the worldwide demand for its products.

The Cotton Kingdom. Cotton production was originally limited because separating the seeds from the fiber of the particular plant variety that grew well across most of the South was a time-consuming process. The introduction of the cotton gin resolved this problem and made the use of large numbers of field hands to work the crop economical. The invention came along just as the soil in the older tobacco-growing regions of the South was nearly depleted but about the time the removal of Native Americans from the very lands where cotton grew best had begun.

The principal source of slaves for the Cotton Kingdom was the Upper South, which included the states traditionally considered to be border states—Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky—as well as Missouri, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Agriculture in this part of the South was diversifying, and although tobacco and rice remained staple cash crops, more and more acreage was being devoted to wheat, corn, rye, and oats for local consumption. Half of the country's corn was grown in the South. These cereal grains were not as labor intensive as cotton or tobacco, and planters in the region were finding themselves with more slaves than they needed. Alexandria, Virginia, became a major center of the internal slave trade, and according to one estimate, three hundred thousand slaves were sold from there into the Deep South in the two decades before the Civil War.

Slavery as an economic institution. A small percentage of slaves were domestic servants, working in a planter's main house as cooks, nursemaids, seamstresses, and coachmen. An even smaller percentage worked as laborers or craftsmen—carpenters, masons, and blacksmiths. It was not unheard of for “spare” slaves to become mill or factory workers, and skilled artisans might be hired out to other plantations by their masters. But the overwhelming majority of slaves were field hands, picking cotton and planting and harvesting rice, tobacco, and sugar cane. The occupational distribution of slaves reflected the nature of the economy and society of the South, a region that was agricultural and rural with very little industrialization and urbanization compared to the North.

Irrespective of the jobs that slaves did, slavery on the whole was profitable. The expense to planters for housing, clothing, and feeding slaves was considerably less than the value they produced. Estimates vary, but expenses associated with the maintenance of one field hand were probably half the value of the revenue the master received from the slave's labor. Profitability increased steadily in the first half of the nineteenth century, as prices for cash crops rose and the cost of keeping slaves remained level. The slaves themselves became a good investment. As cotton production expanded and the demand for slaves increased, their prices rose accordingly. The highest prices were paid for “prime field hands,” usually healthy young men in their late teens and twenties, but women with like agricultural skills were often sold for the same amounts. The enterprising slave owner bought and sold slaves for an additional source of income.

Planters. The image of the South as a place where plantation adjoined plantation and the entire white population owned slaves is a myth. Three quarters of the southern whites owned no slaves at all, and among those that did, most owned fewer than ten. Although the planter class, those individuals who owned twenty or more slaves to work plantations of about a thousand acres, was extremely small, it comprised the southern elite. (A very few plantations were several thousand acres in size and used hundreds of slaves.) With the day-to-day routine of the plantation in the hands of an overseer, a planter had little contact with his slaves except for those working in his house. The planter was an agrarian businessman, deciding how much land to put into cash crops versus foodstuffs, debating whether to buy more slaves or invest in machinery, and always keeping an eye on the market prices of his crops. Wealth, social position, and lifestyle separated the planter from the farmer who owned just a few slaves and usually labored alongside them in the fields. However, the goal of many small slaveholding farmers was to obtain more slaves and land so they could become planters themselves.

The “cult of domesticity” took root in the South as well as the North but with regional differences. A southern planter's wife had many more people to look after in her household than her immediate family. She supervised the work of the domestic slaves, looked after the upkeep of the slave quarters, served as nurse and seamstress (ready-made clothes were less available in the South than in the North), and maintained the household accounts. While southern women were expected to be models of virtue, the men were bound by no such standards. Southern women endured the disappointment and humiliation of seeing mulatto children on the plantation who had been fathered by their husbands and sons. No laws protected slaves from rape by their owners, nor did the white men face any social consequences for their actions.

Yeoman farmers. The largest single group of southern whites were family farmers, the “ yeoman” praised by Thomas Jefferson as the backbone of a free society. On farms of about one hundred acres or less, they raised livestock and grew corn and sweet potatoes for their own consumption, and perhaps tended a little cotton or tobacco to supply much-needed hard currency. The yeoman families lived much more isolated lives than their counterparts in the North and, because of their chronic shortage of cash, lacked many of the amenities that northerners enjoyed. Some southern yeomen, particularly younger men, rented land or hired themselves out as agricultural workers. Small farmers did not own slaves, and their prospect for acquiring enough land or money to do so was nil, but they still supported slavery out of strongly held views of racial superiority and because a large free black population would compete with them for a decent living.

Poor whites. The lowest rung on the white social ladder was occupied by people who lived on the most marginal lands in the South—the pine barrens, swamps, and sandy hill country. Poor whites, variously called “hillbillies,” “white trash,” “crackers,” or “clay eaters,” just barely survived as subsistence farmers, usually as squatters. Their reputed laziness was primarily due to an extremely inadequate diet; malnutrition left them susceptible to malaria, hookworm, and other diseases that produced lethargy. Slaves sometimes had better physical living conditions than poor whites.

Free blacks in the South. Not all African Americans in the South before the Civil War were slaves. More than a quarter million “free persons of color” were concentrated in the states of Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia as well as the cities of Charleston and New Orleans. Blacks who managed to buy their freedom or were freed by their masters, a practice outlawed throughout the South during the 1830s, occupied a strange place in society. While a handful found financial success, even becoming landowners with slaves of their own, the majority were laborers, farm hands, domestics, factory workers, and craftsmen who never escaped poverty. Religion played an important role in the lives of free blacks, as it did for slaves, and black evangelical churches, particularly Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal (AME), flourished. Perhaps because planters felt sentimental toward children they had sired with slaves, mulattos accounted for a significant percentage of the free persons of color. As a group, mulattos tended to look down on those with darker skin, whether free or slave.

Slave Society and Culture

The conditions slaves faced depended on the size of the plantation or farm where they worked, the work they had to do, and, of course, the whim of their master. Those who worked the fields with their owner and his family tended to receive better treatment than plantation slaves under an overseer, who was interested only in maximizing the harvest and had no direct investment in their well-being. Household slaves, blacksmiths, carpenters, and drivers (slaves responsible for a gang of workers) were better off than field hands. Ultimately, any slave's fate was determined by his or her owner; the use of corporal punishment and the granting of privileges, such as allowing a visit to a nearby plantation, were his decisions alone.

Labor and subsistence. Field hands—men, women, and children—might work as long as sixteen hours a day during the harvest and ten or more hours a day in winter; the work week was typically six days long, with Saturday usually a half day. Slaves were organized into gangs of about twenty-five under a driver and overseer ( the gang system), or individuals were given a specific job to do each day ( the task system). Punishment was inflicted by the overseer or driver if the assigned job was not completed or done poorly or if equipment was lost or damaged. Usually, punishment meant a whipping, but extra work and a reduction in food rations were other forms of discipline. Consistently good work was rewarded by extra food, a pass to visit friends or family on another plantation, or the privilege of having a vegetable garden.

Ready-made clothes were generally given to men twice a year, and everyone received new shoes about once a year; women were provided with cloth to make dresses for themselves and clothes for their children. Some plantations ran a kitchen for the slaves, but it was more common for food to be distributed weekly to individuals and families. Typically, rations consisted of cornmeal, salt pork or bacon, and molasses. The number of calories was adequate, but the diet had little variety and was heavy on starch and fats. It could be supplemented with fish, small game, chickens, and vegetables from a garden, if the master approved. On large plantations, slave quarters were located near the fields and main house. They were one- or two-room dirt-floored cabins that were hot in summer and extremely cold in winter. More than one family usually lived in a cabin.

The overall slave population was not generally healthy. The combination of hard physical labor, corporal punishment, a diet often lacking nutritional value, and poor living conditions contributed to a very high infant mortality rate—at least 20 percent of the slave children died before the age of five—and a much lower life expectancy than southern whites. While it was in the economic interest of planters to keep their slaves healthy, most did not provide satisfactory medical care. A few large plantations had infirmaries, but conditions in them were often worse than in the slave quarters.

The slave family. While without legal standing, slave marriages were accepted by most planters because they believed marriage made slaves easier to control and less likely to run away. The marriage ceremony itself might have consisted of a man and woman “ jumping the broom,” a custom that affirmed their commitment to each other before the slave community; a formal wedding in the main house with the planter and his family; or just a simple agreement from the owner. A planter or farmer's acceptance of marriage did not mean, however, that he respected the institution. Selling wives away from husbands or children from parents was common, as was the sexual abuse of slave women. Slave children who were sent to another plantation would be taken in by a family belonging to their new owner.

Despite the ever-present threat of having their family torn apart, slaves did their best to maintain stability. The division of responsibility between husband and wife was much the same as in white society: the husband acted as the head of the household and was a provider—fishing and hunting for extra food, collecting firewood, and fixing up the cabin; the wife cared for their children when they were very young and did the cooking, sewing, and any other domestic chores. Many slave narratives, accounts of slavery told by the slaves themselves, note how much work women did after they had spent a long day in the field tending cotton. A pregnant woman would work in the fields as long as the overseer believed she could do her job. Mothers would be given time off to nurse a young child who was sick. Beyond mother, father, and children was an extended family of uncles, aunts, and grandparents as well as individuals who had no direct familial ties, all providing a strong support network in the slave community.

Slave religion and culture. In much the same way they viewed slave marriage, planters also saw religion as a means of controlling their slaves, and they encouraged it. Slaves, in a prayer house built on the plantation or at services in their master's nearby church, heard time and again a simple sermon—obey your master and do not steal or lie. But the slaves also developed their own religion, often an amalgam of evangelical Christianity and West-African beliefs and practices, and it was the source of a very different message. At services held secretly during the evening in the slave quarters or nearby woods, prayers, songs, and sermons focused on ultimate deliverance from bondage. Not at all surprising was the emphasis on Moses, the “promised land,” and the Israelites' release from Egypt in both slave religion and song.

Music, particularly what became known as the “Negro spiritual,” was an important part of slave culture. It seemed to southern whites that slaves sang all the time, and apologists for slavery argued that this showed slaves were happy and content with their lot. They evidently ignored the songs' lyrics about the burden of backbreaking labor; sorrow over the breakup of families; and hope for the end to slavery, either in the hereafter or sooner, if escape to the North could be arranged.

Resistance to and the Defense of Slavery

Resistance to slavery took several forms. Slaves would pretend to be ill, refuse to work, do their jobs poorly, destroy farm equipment, set fire to buildings, and steal food. These were all individual acts rather than part of an organized plan for revolt, but the objective was to upset the routine of the plantation in any way possible. On some plantations, slaves could bring grievances about harsh treatment from an overseer to their master and hope that he would intercede on their behalf. Although many slaves tried to run away, few succeeded for more than a few days, and they often returned on their own. Such escapes were more a protest—a demonstration that it could be done—than a dash for freedom. As advertisements in southern newspapers seeking the return of runaway slaves made clear, the goal of most runaways was to find their wives or children who had been sold to another planter. The fabled underground railroad, a series of safe houses for runaways organized by abolitionists and run by former slaves like Harriet Tubman, actually helped only about a thousand slaves reach the North.

Slave revolts. The United States had fewer violent slave revolts than the Caribbean colonies and Brazil, and the reasons were largely demographic. In other parts of the Western Hemisphere, the African slave trade had continued, and the largely male slave populations came to significantly outnumber the white masters. In the United States, with the exception of Mississippi and South Carolina, slaves were not in the majority, and whites remained very much in control. Perhaps most important, marriage and family ties, which formed the foundation of the U.S. slave community, worked against a violent response to slavery.

Nevertheless, in the early nineteenth century, there were several major plots for revolt. Gabriel Prosser recruited perhaps as many as a thousand slaves in 1800 with a plan to set fire to Richmond, the capital of Virginia, and take the governor prisoner. The plot failed when other slaves informed the authorities about Prosser. In 1822, Denmark Vesey's scheme to seize Charleston was also betrayed by slaves who were involved in the conspiracy. Despite these failures, some African Americans, most notably David Walker (in his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World), still saw armed rebellion as the only appropriate response to slavery.

Motivated by religious visions of racial violence, Nat Turner organized a revolt in Virginia in August 1831. He and a close-knit group of slaves went from farm to farm killing any whites they found; in the end, fifty-five of them were found dead, mostly women and children. Turner intentionally did not try to gain support from slaves on nearby plantations before the short-lived revolt began. He had hoped that the brutality of the murders (the victims were hacked to death or decapitated) would both terrorize slaveowners and gain him recruits. Once he had a larger force, he planned to change tactics: women, children, and any men who did not resist would be spared. But only a few slaves joined Turner, and the militia put down the rebellion after a few days. Turner, who managed to elude capture for several months, was eventually tried and hanged along with nineteen other rebels. Other trials of alleged conspirators in the revolt resulted in the execution of many innocent slaves by enraged whites.

The debate over slavery in Virginia. Turner's revolt convinced many Virginians—particularly farmers in the western part of the state who owned few slaves—that it was time to end slavery. Early in 1832, the state legislature considered a proposal for gradual emancipation, with owners compensated for their loss. Although the measure prompted an open debate on the merits of slavery, it failed in both houses, but by only comparatively small margins. Ironically, after coming to the brink of abolishing slavery, Virginia, and then other southern states, moved in the opposite direction and opted for greater control over the black population. New slave codes passed in each state increased patrols to locate runaway slaves and guard against new outbreaks of violence, prohibited African Americans from holding meetings, denied free blacks the right to own any kind of weapon, made it illegal to educate a slave (Turner knew how to read and write), and outlawed the manumission (freeing) of slaves by their owners.

In defense of slavery. The debate in the Virginia legislature coincided with the publication of William Lloyd Garrison's first issue of the Liberator. The moral attack that the abolitionists mounted against slavery called for a new defense from the South. Rather than emphasize that slavery was a profitable labor system essential to the health of the southern economy, apologists turned to the Bible and history. They found ample support for slavery in both the Old and New Testaments and pointed out that the great civilizations of the ancient world—Egypt, Greece, and Rome—were slave societies.

The most ludicrous defense of slavery was that enslavement was actually good for African Americans: slaves were happy and content under the paternal care of their master and his family, toward whom they felt a special affection, and talk of liberty and freedom was irrelevant because slaves could not even understand those concepts. The proponents of slavery also maintained that slaves on plantations in the South were better off than the “wage slaves” in northern factories, where business owners had no real investment in their workers. In contrast, planters had every incentive to make sure their slaves were well fed, clothed, and housed. Harsh masters, more often than not, were northerners who had moved to the South, rather than those born and bred in the region, the proponents claimed. Underlying all the arguments was a fundamental belief in the superiority of whites.

Public discussion of slavery and its abolishment effectively ended in the South after 1832; all segments of white society supported slavery, whether they owned slaves or not. The growing isolation of the region was reflected by splits in several Protestant denominations over the slavery question. In 1844, the Methodist Episcopal Church South was established as a separate organization, and a year later, southern Baptists formed their own group, the Southern Baptist Convention. Not only did southerners try to counter the abolitionists in print, they wanted help in suppressing the antislavery movement altogether. In 1835, the South Carolina legislature called on the northern states to make it a crime to publish or distribute anything that might incite a slave revolt. The resolutions made it very clear that South Carolina considered slavery an internal issue and that any attempt to interfere with it would be unlawful and resisted.

North versus South. The existence of slavery was just the most visible difference between the North and South. The two regions' economies had been complementary, but by most measures—the number of railroads, canals, factories, and urban centers and the balance between agriculture and industry—they were moving in opposite directions. The reform movements that arose in the decades before the Civil War made few inroads in the South because any calls for social change were associated with abolitionism. Although wealthy planters hired tutors for their children, and many of their sons went on to college, even public education was considered not particularly important in the South.

In the North, the rejection of slavery as an institution did not mean there was widespread support for extending full political rights, let alone social equality, to African Americans. Residents of both the North and South believed in democracy, but at the time, the goal that would attain full democracy for the nation was the expansion of the franchise to all white males. Both northerners and southerners took part in the westward movement of the country, looking for better land and greater opportunities, but they could not escape the divisive issue of slavery. It was over the status of slavery in the new territories of the west that the sectional lines dividing the nation became rigid.

Expansion of America

In the spring of 1803, the western boundary of the United States had reached the Mississippi River, and the original thirteen states had expanded to seventeen with the admission of Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792), Tennessee (1796), and Ohio (1803). By the end of the year, the size of the country had doubled with the Louisiana Purchase, bringing under American control land stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to British Canada and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains.

Then, in less than a half century, the map of the United States again changed dramatically through a combination of diplomacy and war. Florida was acquired from Spain in 1819. Nagging questions over the border with Canada were worked out through the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842), and the long-standing dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon Country was resolved by establishing the forty-ninth parallel as the boundary (1846). Texas, which won its independence from Mexico in 1836, was admitted to the Union in 1845. As a result of war with Mexico (1846–48), almost all of the Southwest, including the remainder of Texas, New Mexico, and California, was ceded to the United States.

Mexican Borderlands and Oregon

Mexico faced serious problems after it became independent from Spain in 1821. After a brief flirtation with monarchy, it became a republic, and a succession of presidents wrangled over whether the new nation should be centralist, with a strong government in Mexico City, or federalist, with considerable autonomy given to the provinces. Mexico's northern provinces, from Texas to California, were underpopulated and difficult to defend, so Mexico initially encouraged American settlement and trade. Americans were also attracted to potentially rich farmland in the Oregon Country in the early 1840s. While settlers moved into the Republic of Texas, the opening of the Oregon Trail marked the beginning of significant migration to the Pacific Northwest as well.

The settlement of Texas. In the last days of colonial rule in Mexico, Spain had accepted a proposal from several American entrepreneurs to bring American settlers into Texas; Mexico renewed the agreement in 1825 with the provisions that all newcomers become Mexican citizens and accept Catholicism. Promoters of American settlement (known as empresarios by the Mexicans), such as Stephen F. Austin, did their jobs well. As many as twenty thousand Americans, along with a thousand slaves, were living in Texas by 1830, mostly southern fanners who found the land cheap and ideal for growing cotton. The growth of the American population, which quickly overwhelmed the group of roughly five thousand Spanish-speaking Mexicans in Texas ( Tejanos), led Mexico to reverse its “open-door” policy. The Mexican Congress banned slavery in Texas and prohibited further immigration by American citizens, but settlers, both white and slave, continued to cross the border from the United States. Tensions rose as Americans demanded a greater say in their own affairs.

Texas's independence. In 1834, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna seized power in Mexico, determined to exercise greater control over Texas. His attempts to enforce his centralist policies there failed, and in 1835, he led his troops north. The American Texans and Tejanos responded with a declaration of independence (March 2, 1836), but the first confrontation of the Texas Revolution was a disaster for them. Santa Anna's forces completely wiped out the defenders of the Alamo, a mission on the outskirts of San Antonio. Famed frontiersmen Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie died in the fighting. A few weeks later, Santa Anna ordered the execution of all Texas prisoners captured in the Battle of Goliad. The tide decisively turned when Sam Houston, a former governor of Tennessee who had fought with Andrew Jackson, took command of the Texas army. At the Battle of San Jacinto (April 21, 1836), he surprised the Mexican troops, captured Santa Anna, and forced the general to sign a treaty that recognized Texas's independence in return for his freedom. Although Santa Anna repudiated the treaty after he was released, as did the Mexican government, Texas had become a sovereign nation.

While refusing to acknowledge Texas's independence, Mexico still simmered over the location of the border. The Mexican government had long maintained that Texas was part of the province of Coahuila, whose northern boundary was the Nueces River. Independent Texans, on the other hand, claimed the two-thousand-mile-long Rio Grande as their southern and western border. The enormous territory north and east of the Rio Grande remained in dispute until 1846.

The Republic of Texas chose Sam Houston as its first president, created a legislature and court system, and received diplomatic recognition from the United States, Great Britain, and France. Most Texans, however, expected and wanted their independence to be short-lived. But the Republic's petition for annexation to the United States was refused in 1837, and Texas did not become a state until 1845.

New Mexico and California. In 1821, Mexico opened Santa Fe, one of the oldest European settlements in North America, to U.S. trade. In just a short time, wagon trains carrying American goods were making the long trek from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe, along what became known as the Santa Fe Trail. While fewer settlers went to New Mexico than to Texas, the commercial ties were profitable, and more important, the establishment of the trail demonstrated that the Great Plains was not a barrier to westward expansion.

Mexico also began to encourage U.S. trade with California, whose ports had been effectively off limits to foreign shipping during the period of Spanish rule (1769–1821). Agents of New England merchants established offices for the purpose of exchanging a wide variety of American-made products for California cattle hides and tallow. Many of the agents married Spanish-speaking Californians, or Californios, and converted to Catholicism. The first Americans to reach California overland were fur trappers and traders, such as Jedediah Smith (1826) and James Pattie (1828), who reached the Mexican province by way of Santa Fe. By the 1840s, two main routes were open to settlers—the Old Spanish Trail from Santa Fe into southern California and the California Trail, an Oregon Trail offshoot that crossed the Sierra Nevada and descended into the Sacramento River Valley. Wealthy Californios and a small number of early American settlers acquired vast estates known as ranchos after Mexico secularized the lands of the Catholic missions in 1834.

Dissatisfaction with the remote Mexican government grew in California throughout the 1830s. A rapid turnover of provincial governors, most of whom knew little about California, exacerbated the negative feelings. By 1845, a native governor, Pio Pico, who was based in Los Angeles, and the Mexican military commandant in Monterey were battling over power. Under these frustrating conditions, many people in California, including the seven hundred or so Americans there, concluded that it was time for a complete break with Mexico, either through independence or by annexation to the United States.

The Oregon Country. American claims to the Oregon Country dated back to Captain Robert Gray's discovery of the Columbia River in 1792 and were reinforced by the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the Pacific (1804–06). The official joint occupation of the territory by the United States and Great Britain worked well until the 1840s, when “Oregon fever” gripped many Americans. Wagon trains, organized in the spring in Independence or St. Joseph, Missouri, transported chiefly young families from the Midwest, who traveled northwest for six months over the Oregon Trail, parts of which had long been in use by trappers and early explorers. These pioneer families traveled along the Platte River, crossed through the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, and then turned north to follow the Snake and Columbia Rivers to the Willamette Valley. Between 1841 and 1845, an estimated five thousand Americans settled in the Oregon Country, by far the largest number of people to have traveled to the Far West.

Politics of Expansion

American politics in the 1820s and 1830s had been dominated by domestic issues: the banks, tariffs, and internal improvements. In the 1840s, foreign policy— “American expansion,” more accurately—took center stage. The shift was due in part to the political opportunism of John Tyler, William Henry Harrison's vice president. A former Democrat who had broken with Jackson over nullification, Tyler became president when Harrison died after just a month in office. Tyler really did not support the Whig program; his vetoing of bills that would have reestablished the Bank of the United States and raised tariffs led to the wholesale resignation of his cabinet (except Secretary of State Daniel Webster) and lost him what little support the Whig party had earlier given him.

Tyler's foreign policy. Having created so many political enemies with his domestic policy, Tyler turned to foreign affairs. The successful negotiation of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty convinced him to call for the annexation of Texas. Secret negotiations with the Republic of Texas began in 1843, and a treaty to formalize annexation was sent to the Senate in April 1844. Tyler claimed that if the United States did not take Texas, Great Britain would. Despite his arguments, opposition to the treaty was strong from both Whigs and Democrats; many saw the annexation as a plot to scrap the Missouri Compromise and extend slavery, while others feared war with Mexico. The treaty was rejected handily.

Defeat was not the end of the matter, however. The election of Democrat James Polk in November 1844 on an expansionist platform suggested that the public mood had changed. Rather than quickly reintroduce the treaty, which had to be ratified by two thirds of the Senate, Tyler was able to accomplish annexation through a joint resolution of Congress, which required only simple majorities in both houses to pass. The joint resolution was approved and signed by Tyler as one of his last acts in office (March 1, 1845).

The election of 1844. The front runners for the presidency in 1844 were Henry Clay for the Whigs and Martin Van Buren for the Democrats. Before the parties' nominating conventions, the two men met and agreed to keep the issues of expansion and slavery out of the campaign. Both men published lengthy letters in the national press opposing the immediate annexation of Texas. Clay easily won the Whig nomination, but the Democrats deadlocked because Van Buren's stand on Texas cost him votes. In the end, he could not hurdle the party's rule that required a candidate to win two thirds of the vote of the convention for nomination. James Polk of Tennessee, a former Speaker of the House, was chosen on the ninth ballot. The Democratic platform called for the “reannexation” of Texas and the “reoccupation” of Oregon; in fact, one of the party's most effective slogans was “Fifty-four Forty or Fight !,” a reference to the northernmost boundary of the Oregon Country.

Clay was on the defensive from the beginning, but he eventually came out with a qualified endorsement for the annexation of Texas. His strategy backfired. Whigs in New York had switched to the anti-slavery Liberty party in enough numbers to cost Clay the state. Had Clay taken New York, he would have won the presidency by seven electoral votes. Only thirty-eight thousand popular votes separated the candidates, but the margin for Polk in the Electoral College was 170 to Clay's 105.

Settling the Oregon question. Despite the rhetoric of the presidential campaign, Polk was not ready to go to war with Great Britain over Oregon. Joint occupation, however, was becoming meaningless as more and more American settlers moved into the territory. The practical reality was that Americans far outnumbered the British fur trappers, and the fur trade was in decline in any event. While the British initially rebuffed an American offer to negotiate, both countries ultimately agreed to settle their differences peacefully in 1846. The solution was to extend the Webster-Ashburton Treaty line (the forty-ninth parallel) to the Pacific, making some twists and turns in Puget Sound so that all of Vancouver Island went to Great Britain. That accomplished, Polk remained dissatisfied with his obtaining American control over most of the disputed part of Oregon and his bringing Texas into the Union (December 1845); he wanted New Mexico and California as well and this time was prepared to go to war, if necessary.

The rise of manifest destiny. Polk's vision of a country that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific was not a new idea, but soon after his election, Americans received a well-phrased rationale to justify expansion. In 1845, John L. O'Sullivan, publisher of the Democratic Review, wrote that it was the nation's “manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” The two words “manifest destiny” quickly caught on, soon coming to mean that those who favored expansion had God on their side and were engaged in the noble task of spreading democracy. Despite the fact that the expansionist doctrine was based partly on the notion of racial superiority—O'Sullivan referred to the “superior vigor of the Anglo-Saxon race”—it appealed both to supporters of slavery, who wanted Texas annexed, and to antislavery advocates, who favored adding California and Oregon to the Union.

Proponents of manifest destiny claimed that a continental United States would benefit from trade with Asia, from the commercial advantages of San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound, and from lower tariffs. Sea-to-sea expansion would also safeguard democracy, give the nation room to grow, and preserve the essential character of the country as an agricultural nation in the Jeffersonian tradition.

War with Mexico

When Congress approved the annexation of the Republic of Texas, Mexico broke off diplomatic relations with the United States. Polk responded by ordering U.S. troops under the command of General Zachary Taylor into the new American state. He also sent his personal emissary, John Slidell, to Mexico City with a proposal to purchase New Mexico and California and fix the boundary of Texas at the Rio Grande. By March 1846, however, the Mexican government had been overthrown, the new Mexican president had reaffirmed Mexico's claims to all of Texas, Slidell's mission had failed, and Taylor's forces had advanced to the Rio Grande. Fighting began around Matamoros in April. When the news reached Washington a month later, Polk did not hesitate to send a war message to Congress, stating “Mexico has … shed American blood on American soil.” The fact that hostilities had broken out in still-disputed territory was not considered particularly relevant. President Polk signed the declaration of war against Mexico on May 13, 1846.

The war in California and New Mexico. If Texas provided the spark for war, California provided the motive. The United States had long been interested in California, primarily because San Francisco had the finest natural harbor on the Pacific coast. In 1842, American naval forces, mistakenly believing that war had broken out between the United States and Mexico, landed at Monterey. Polk had confidential agents in place by 1844 to encourage American settlers in California to push for either annexation or independence under U.S. protection. On June 14, 1846, a small group of Americans in the Sacramento Valley ran a homemade flag up a pole and declared California an independent nation. The so-called Bear Flag Revolt, which was supported by Captain John C. Frémont, was short-lived. When the Mexican War actually did begin, Polk lost little time in sending the Pacific fleet under Commodore John Sloat to California, with orders to claim the province as occupied territory. Sloat landed at Monterey in early July and declared California part of the United States. Mexican resistance to the American takeover was over by January 1847. Virtually no fighting took place in New Mexico. Colonel Stephen Kearny arrived in Santa Fe in August 1846 with the “Army of the West,” a force of about seventeen hundred men, and simply proclaimed that New Mexico was new American territory. He established a temporary territorial government before moving on to California.