Expanding Nation Essay

In the 1830s and 40s the westwardwards move handst of population left the valley of the Mississippi behind and penetrated the off the beaten track(predicate) westward all the way to the Pacific. Pi iodineers pursued fertile grunge and scotch opportunity beyond the existing boundaries of the fall in States and thus helped set the represent for the annexations and international crises of the 1840s. nigh went for material gain, others for adventure, and a significant minority desire freedom from religious persecution.But whatever their reasons for migrating, they brought the Statesn attitudes and loyalties into regions that were already engaged or at least claimed by Mexico or owing(p) Britain. Whether they recognise it or not, these pioneers were the vanguard of American expansionism. The domestic controversies aro apply 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 add itional efforts to extend the nations boundaries.Concerns closely slavery and race impeded acquisition of revolutionary territory in Latin America and the Caribbean. Resolution of the Oregon dispute clformer(a) indicated that the United States was not willing to go to war with a powerful obstructionist to obtain large chunks of British North America, and the old ambition of incorporating Canada quick faded. after(prenominal) 1848, American increase usually took the form of populating and developing the coarse territory already acquired. The expansionists of the 1840s saw a clear liaison between acquisition of new territory and other forms of material suppuration and development.In 1844 Samuel F. B. Morse perfected and demonstrated his electric cable, a construction that would make it possible to communicate rapidly over the expanse of a continental nation. Simultaneous, the railroad was becoming increasely important as a means of moving people and goods over the same grea t distances. Improvements in manufacturing and agricultural methods led to an upsurge in the volume and range of intrinsic trade, and the beginnings of mass immigration were providing human resources for the exploitation of new areas and scotch 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 sizable. 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 technical advances and population increased of the 1840s continued during the 50s. The result was an acceleration of economic growth, a substantial increase in indus trialization and urbanization, and the progeny of a new working class (Billington, 1956). The first movement west aimed not for the nearby plains only when for California and Oregon on the continents farthermost shore. It started in the 1849 Gold Rush to California and in the next cardinal decades perhaps as many as half(a) a million individuals made the long journey.Some walked others rode horses alone or in small groups. Ab step to the fore 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 both went with their husbands or faced universe left behind. Four out of louvre men on the overland trail had picked up stakes and move in advance, some of them several times. People move west for many reasons.Some sought adventure others wanted to escape the drab routine of factory or city vivification. Many moved to C alifornia for their health. What ever the special(prenominal) reasons most people moved west to better their lot. On the unit of measurement their timing was good, for as a nations population grew, so did the demand for the descent 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 shit the means to move thither and establish farms. Most people moved West in good times, in period of times 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 stick out three decades of the nineteenth century a flood of settlers ventured into Americas newest and last west (Jones, 1960).The West became a great colonial empire, ha rnessed to easterly capital and tied increasingly to national and international markets. Western economies depended to an eccentric 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 re master(prenominal)ed proud of their hardy, individualistic traditions. Yet they imitated the Easts social, cultural, and political patterns.By the 1890s 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 tint 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, th e eastern part of the region, enjoyed rich soil and good rainfall it included parts of present sidereal 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 farming 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 fabric mills, and commercialized farmers had to rely intemperately on the labor of their family members. In the face of such limited and indistinct labor supplies, producers were greatly tempered to experiment with labor saving machinery.By the 1840s and 50s industrialization had reached a point where it could readily absorb a new inflow 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 civic 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 1840s 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 hit 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 mass ive 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. chip off to America was made possible by the low fares then common on sailing ships bound from England to North America. The million or so Germans who also came in the late 1840s and early 50s 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 Americas self image as a land of opportunity and upward mobility. Wage labor was popularly viewed as a tempo rary condition from which workers were supposed to extricate themselves by hard work and frugality. harmonize to Abraham Lincoln in 1850 of the Norths free labor society, there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer.This perfection still had some validity in rapidly developing regions of the western states, but it was mostly myth when applied to the increasingly foreign natural 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 briefly lead to a catastrophic sectional controversy.From the late 1840s 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 dispu te (Gutman, 1976). Many have searched for the underlying causes of the crisis leading to the disruption of the marrow but have failed to agree on exactly what they were. Some have emphasize 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 1850s 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 Souths 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 all 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 abetter _or_ abettor side stemmed from the fact that these nations depended on the South for three quarter of their cotton supply. In the case of Britain, the uninterrupted production of cotton textile appeared essential to economic prosperity (Stampp, 1950).