Antebellum Western Migration and Indian Removal

• After the War of 1812, Americans settled the Great Lakes region rapidly thanks in part to aggressive land sales by the federal government

  • The harassment and dispossession of Native Americans—whether driven by official U.S. government policy or the actions of individual Americans and their communities—depended on the belief in manifest destiny

    • Manifest destiny was grounded in the belief that a democratic, agrarian republic would save the world

      • The quasi-religious call to spread democracy coupled with the reality of thousands of settlers pressing westward

      • The Young America movement, strongest among members of the Democratic Party but spanning the political spectrum, downplayed divisions over slavery and ethnicity by embracing national unity and emphasizing American exceptionalism, territorial expansion, democratic participation, and economic interdependence

• American action in Florida seized Indigenous people’s eastern lands, reduced lands available for freedom-seeking enslaved people, and killed entirely or removed Native American peoples farther west

  • Desire to remove Native Americans from valuable farmland motivated state and federal governments to cease trying to assimilate Native Americans and instead plan for forced removal

  • Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, thereby granting the president authority to begin treaty negotiations that would give Native Americans land in the West in exchange for their lands east of the Mississippi

    • Many advocates of removal, including President Jackson, paternalistically claimed that it would protect Native American communities from outside influences that jeopardized their chances of becoming “civilized” farmers

• President Martin van Buren, in 1838, decided to press the issue beyond negotiation and court rulings and used the New Echota Treaty provisions to order the army to forcibly remove those Cherokee not obeying the treaty’s cession of territory

  • Harsh weather, poor planning, and difficult travel compounded the tragedy of what became known as the Trail of Tears (a series of forced displacements that resulted in thousands of deaths)

• The allure of manifest destiny encouraged expansion regardless of terrain or locale, and Indian removal also took place, to a lesser degree, in northern lands

Life and Culture in the West

• The dream of creating a democratic utopia in the West ultimately rested on those who picked up their possessions and their families and moved west

• Americans debated the role of government in the westward expansion

  • This debate centered on the proper role of the U.S. government in paying for the internal improvements that soon became necessary to encourage and support economic development

• More than anything else, new roads and canals provided conduits for migration and settlement

  • The use of steamboats grew quickly throughout the 1810s and into the 1820s

• Economic chains of interdependence stretched over hundreds of miles of land and through thousands of contracts and remittances

  • America’s manifest destiny became wedded not only to territorial expansion but also to economic development

Texas, Mexico, and the United States

• The debate over slavery became one of the prime forces behind the Texas Revolution and the resulting republic’s annexation by the United States

  • New immigrants, mostly from the southern United States, poured into Mexican Texas, resulting in concerns over the growing American influence over the area

• In 1834, an internal conflict between federalists and centralists in the Mexican government led to the political ascendency of General Antonio López de Santa Anna

  • Santa Anna, governing as a dictator, repudiated the federalist Constitution of 1824, pursued a policy of authoritarian central control, and crushed several revolts throughout Mexico

• Texas annexation had remained a political landmine since the Republic declared independence from Mexico in 1836

  • American politicians feared that adding Texas to the Union would provoke a war with Mexico and reignite sectional tensions by throwing off the balance between free and slave states

• The U.S.-Mexican War had an enormous impact on both countries

  • The American victory helped set the United States on the path to becoming a world power and served as a training ground for the Civil War

Manifest Destiny and the Gold Rush

• If the great draw of the West served as manifest destiny’s kindling, then the discovery of gold in California was the spark that set the fire ablaze

  • Most western settlers sought land ownership, but the lure of getting rich quick drew younger single men (with some women) to gold towns throughout the West

• Lawlessness, predictable failure of most fortune seekers, racial conflicts, and the slavery question all threatened manifest destiny’s promises

  • Linguistic, cultural, economic, and racial conflict roiled both urban and rural areas

    • The ethnic patchwork of these frontier towns belied a clearly defined socioeconomic arrangement that saw whites on top as landowners and managers, with poor whites and ethnic minorities working the mines and assorted jobs

The Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny

• The expansion of influence and territory of the continent became an important corollary to westward expansion

  • The U.S. government sought to keep European countries out of the Western Hemisphere and applied the principles of manifest destiny to the rest of the hemisphere

• Bitter disagreements over the expansion of slavery into the new lands won from Mexico began even before the war ended

  • Many northern businessmen and southern enslavers supported the idea of expanding slavery into the Caribbean as a useful alternative to continental expansion since slavery already existed in these areas

  • Some were critical of these attempts, seeing them as evidence of a growing slave-power conspiracy

  • Many others supported attempts at expansion, like those previously seen in eastern Florida, even if these attempts were not exactly legal

• Fears of racialized revolution in Cuba (as in Haiti and Florida before it), as well as the presence of an aggressive British abolitionist influence in the Caribbean, energized the movement to annex Cuba and encouraged filibustering as expedient alternatives to lethargic official negotiations.