3 of 12

Fruits of Manifest Destiny

Continental Expansion

Caused slavery moved to center of national politics
by 1840s:

Nearly all land east of Mississippi was in white hands
Economic crisis pushed settlers west

Manifest Destiny increased in these years

The Mexican Frontier: New Mexico and California

Mexico achieves independence from Spain in 1821
Opens up a new frontier for American settlers

4 of 12

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition

Map 13.1 The Trans-Mississippi West, 1830s – 1840s

Slavery moved to the center of national politics in the 1840s because of territorial expansion. By the 1840s, nearly all land east of the Mississippi was in white hands, and economic crisis pushed many settlers west. Several thousand traveled nearly 2,000 miles to Oregon in the far northwest. During the 1840s, the United States and Great Britain jointly administered Oregon. Nearby Utah was part of Mexico. But national boundaries mattered little to Americans who settled these regions. The idea that Americans had a divine mission to settle the continent, known by the end of the 1840s as “manifest destiny,” intensified in these years.

America’s acquisition of part of Mexico directly raised the issue of slavery. When Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, it was almost as large as the United States in territory and population. But Mexico’s northern provinces of California, New Mexico, and Texas were remote, sparsely populated, and bordered by Indian country. In New Mexico and California, a minority of Mexican landowners and church officials lived among larger Indian populations, sometimes compelling them to work. By the 1840s, California was linked to the United States by American ships that traded in the region.

5 of 12

Fruits of Manifest Destiny

The Texas Revolt

Mexico allowed Americans to settle in hopes of developing area
By 1830, Americans outnumbered Tejanos
Slavery exacerbated tensions

Mexico had abolished slavery, but Texas local authorities allowed American settlers to bring slave with them

Texas revolted from Mexico in 1835, won independence in 1837.

6 of 12

Fruits of Manifest Destiny

The Election of 1844

Henry Clay – Whigs
James K. Polk – Democrats

Polk “first dark horse candidate in American history!”
Days before Polk’s inauguration, Texas was annexed by Congress

President John Tyler revived the annexation of Texas as a means of saving his failed administration and winning southern support for his renomination in 1844. When a letter from John C. Calhoun, then Tyler’s secretary of state, linked annexation to the strengthening of slavery, Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren, prospective presidential candidates for the Whig and Democratic parties, met and agreed to reject annexation, fearing it might spark war with Mexico. They were trying to keep slavery out of national politics. Clay received the Whig nomination, but at the Democratic convention southerners bent on annexation dumped Van Buren for James K. Polk, a former Tennessee governor and ardent annexationist. Polk was a slaveholder. The Democrats’ platform called for the “reannexation” of Texas, which wrongly implied that Texas had been part of the Louisiana Purchase, and the reoccupation of Oregon.

Polk narrowly defeated Clay in the election. If Liberty Party candidate James G. Birney had not received 16,000 votes in New York, Clay would have been elected. In March 1845, right after Polk’s inauguration, Congress annexed Texas.

7 of 12

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition

Map 13.2 The Mexican War, 1846 - 1848

8 of 12

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition

Map 13.3 Gold – Rush California

9 of 12

A Dose of Arsenic

Victory over Mexico raised the fatal political issue that plunged the nation into civil war

Expansion of slavery into the West

The Wilmot Proviso:

1846
Proposed the prohibiting of slavery from all territory acquired from Mexico
Passed the House
Failed the Senate

10 of 12

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition

Map 13.4 Continental Expansion through 1853

11 of 12

A Dose of Arsenic

The Free Soil Appeal

Popular in North

Western Territories = economic advancement
Slavery prevents economic growth for the laborers

Southern rebuttal

Violation of equal rights
Fed gov’t had no right to keep them from brining property into territories

The acquisition of the vast Mexico territory raised a fatal issue that would disrupt America’s political system and drive the nation to Civil War —whether slavery would expand into the West. Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that if the United States took part of Mexico, “it will be as the man who swallows arsenic. . . . Mexico will poison us.” Events proved him right.

Before 1846, the status of slavery throughout the United States had been settled by state law or the Missouri Compromise. But the conquest of Mexico reignited the question of slavery’s expansion. In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot introduced a bill prohibiting slavery from the territory acquired from Mexico. Party lines collapsed. Every northerner, Whig and Democrat, supported the Wilmot Proviso. Almost all southerners opposed it. The measure passed the House, which had a northern majority, but stalled in the Senate, which was evenly split between free and slave states. In 1848, opponents of slave expansion organized the Free Soil Party and nominated Martin Van Buren for president. Democrats that year nominated Lewis Cass, who suggested that settlers in new territories be allowed to vote on the slavery question (an idea later called “popular sovereignty”). Van Buren received 14 percent of the North’s total votes. Whig candidate and Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor won the presidential election. But the Free Soil Party made anti-slavery a political force to be reckoned with.

12 of 12

A Dose of Arsenic

Crisis and Compromise

California asked to be admitted in 1850
Compromise of 1850

CA = Free
Stronger Fugitive Slave Law
Status of slavery in territories acquired from Mexico would be left to a vote by inhabitants
U.S. would pay off Texas debt accumulated while “independent”

In world history, 1848 is remembered as the “springtime of nations,” a moment of democratic uprisings against Europe’s monarchies and demands by ethnic minorities for national independence. American principles of liberty and self-government seemed to triumph in Great Britain, France, Hungary, Italy, and Germany, where people rebelled against monarchy and clamored for national unification and republican rights and constitutions. But, in most places, these uprisings were defeated. Many Americans wondered if their republic would survive.

Party leaders tried to resolve the sectional differences over slavery threatening to tear the nation apart. In 1850, California applied for statehood as a free state. Many southerners opposed it, fearing that its admission would upset the sectional balance in Congress. Henry Clay offered a plan with four provisions that came to be known as the Compromise of 1850: California would enter as a free state; the slave trade, but not slavery, would be abolished in Washington, D.C.; a new law would allow southerners to reclaim fugitive slaves; and slavery’s status in the rest of the territories taken from Mexico would be decided by local white inhabitants.

Clay’s plan prompted one of the greatest debates in Congress’s history. While notable senators from both North and South denounced compromise, Milliard Fillmore, who became president when an ill President Taylor died, helped secure the Compromise of 1850.