Joseph Cenci
Brandon Tong
Joseph Treimanis
Stella Wang
Geographic Reasons for Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny
President Thomas Jefferson - "It is the case of a guardian, investing the money of his ward in purchasing an
important adjacent territory; and saying to him when of age, I did this for your own good."
President James K. Polk - “Texas, as ceded to the United States by France in 1803, has been always claimed as
extending west to the Rio Grande or Rio Bravo.”
President William McKinley - “The annexation of Hawaii and the changed relations of the United States to Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and the Philippines resulting from the war, compel the prompt adoption of a maritime policy by the
United States. There should be established regular and frequent steamship communication, encouraged by the
United States, under the American flag, with the newly acquired islands.”
Alaska: Seward’s speech http://international.loc.gov/cgibin/ampage?collId=mtfgc&fileName=1003//mtfgc1003.db&recNum=3&itemLink=r?intldl/mtfront:@field(NUMBE
R+@od1(mtfgc+1003))&linkText=0
“marine treasures of the Territory (whales, sea-otter, fur-seal, hair-seal, walrus)”
“It seems to be the species of poplar… Here it takes on such large dimensions, that the Indian shapes out of a single
trunk even his great war canoe which safely bears over the deepest waters a phalanx of sixty waters” (also birch tree,
elder, alder, crab-apple, other fruit-bearing shrubs and bushes)
Iron (pg 9) “In regard to iron, the question seems to be not where it can be found, but whether there is any place
where it does not exist.”
Albert Bierstadt: ‘Looking Down Yosemite Valley’
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Looking_Down_Yosemite-Valley.jpg)
Jennie White, Tamara Evdokimova, Libby Davis, Amanda Davis
Mr. Heffernan
APUSH
24 October 2013
Westward Expansion DBQ
“To what extent did social forces influence the push westward during the 19th century? What evidence is there to
support this question?”
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Rise in population in cities leads to people needing to move west for land (Map)
Manifest Destiny (John O’Sullivan quote)
Populists were against urban working conditions (Populist source)
Mormons moved away from persecution in cities (NY Times article)
Assimilation of indigenous peoples (Pratt quote)
Nationalism increased within the country due to previous land acquisitions (last source)
Map:
Sources:
“It is our 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.” - John
O’Sullivan, editor of the New York Post arguing for the annexation of Texas (1845)
Source for populism:
http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?itswmIS=WE52&iPin=E14309&SingleRecord=True
Source for Mormons:
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FB0D16F63E581B7493C1AB178DD85F4C8584F9
Assimilation of Indians:
The push westward resulted to Indians being uprooted from ancestral lands, as white settlers continued moving west
so did the natives and eventually the two races had to come face to face. This led to assimilation.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/primary-sources/291
"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been
an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all
the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man…It is a great mistake to think
that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of
savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. . . As we have taken into our national family
seven millions of Negroes, and as we receive foreigners at the rate of more than five hundred thousand a year, and
assimilate them, it would seem that the time may have arrived when we can very properly make at least the attempt
to assimilate our two hundred and fifty thousand Indians…The school at Carlisle is an attempt on the part of the
government to do this. Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large. It has
preached against colonizing Indians, and in favor of individualizing them..."
-Richard H. Pratt (founder of Carlisle Indian School)
Increased nationalism:
The Significance of the Frontier on American History by Frederick Jackson Turner, 1893
“Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly — I was about to say fearfully — growing!” So saying, he
touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development: the germ theory of politics has
been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area;
and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the
United States we have a different phenomenon.
Limiting our attention to the Atlantic Coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a
limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into
complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing
civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each Western area reached in
the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line but a
return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area.”
Scheer/Greenberg/Hart/Khanna
James K. Polk’s State of the Union
Address. (1848).
“It is a war to strengthen the ‘slave power’,
but it is not merely proposed to open new
markets for slavery; it is also designed to
confirm and fortify the ‘slave power’…
slavery is odious as an institution, if viewed
in the light of morals and Christianity. On
this account alone we should refrain from
rendering it any voluntary support, but it has
been made the basis of a political
combination, to which has not inaptly been
applied the designation of ‘slave power’.
The Massachusetts Legislature,
Resolutions on the War with Mexico,
1847.
Gold Rush
Buffalo Hunt, Surround, circa 1832 by George Catlin
“... We shall not follow far this line of thought before there will dawn the realization of
America’s unique position, facing the older worlds of the East and West, her shores washed
by the oceans which touch the one or the other, but which are common to her alone.”
- The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.,
1897)
“[There are] many latent and yet unforeseen dangers to the peace of the western
hemisphere, attendant upon the opening of a canal through the Central American Isthmus.
In a general way, it is evident enough that this canal, by modifying the direction of trade
routes, will induce a great increase of commercial activity and carrying trade throughout the
Caribbean Sea; and that this now comparatively deserted nook of the ocean will become,
like the Red Sea, a great thoroughfare of shipping, and will attract, as never before in our
day, the interest and ambition of maritime nations. Every position in that sea will have
enhanced commercial and military value, and the canal itself will become a strategic center
of the most importance.”
- The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.,
1897)
Mr. Giles, of Maryland- I take it for granted, that we shall gain territory, and must gain
territory, before we shut the gates of the temple of Janus...We must march for ocean to
ocean… We must march from Texas straight to the Pacific ocean, and be bounded only by
its roaring wave… It is the destiny of the white race, it is the density of Anglo-Saxon race…
(The Congressional Globe, February 11, 1847)
“Asia… will be brought to our very doors. Population will flow into the fertile regions of
California. The resources of the entire country… will be developed… The public lands lying
along the route [of railroad] will be changed from deserts into gardens, and a large population
will be settled…”
(unknown naval officer)
Primary Sources
poor urban conditions:
How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (1890)
Lest anybody flatter himself with the notion that these were evils of a day that is happily past and may
safely be forgotten, let me mention here three very recent instances of tenement-house life that came under my
notice. One was the burning of a rear house in Mott Street, from appearances one of the original tenant-houses that
made their owners rich. The fire made homeless ten families, who had paid an average of $5 a month for their mean
little cubby-holes. The owner himself told me that it was fully insured for $800, though it brought him in $600 a year
rent. He evidently considered himself especially entitled to be pitied for losing such valuable property. Another was
the case of a hard-working family of man and wife, young people from the old country, who took poison together in
a Crosby Street tenement because they were "tired." There was no other explanation, and none was needed when I
stood in the room in which they had lived. It was in the attic with sloping ceiling and a single window so far out on
the roof that it seemed not to belong to the place at all. With scarcely room enough to turn around in they had been
compelled to pay five dollars and a half a month in advance. There were four such rooms in that attic, and together
they brought in as much as many a handsome little cottage in a pleasant part of Brooklyn. The third instance was
that of a colored family of husband, wife, and baby in a wretched rear rookery in West Third Street. Their rent was
eight dollars and a half for a single room on the top-story, so small that I was unable to get a photograph of it even
by placing the camera outside the open door. Three short steps across either way would have measured its full
extent.
Trancendentalism
Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854) Excerpt from Chapter 1A-Economy
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming
tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled
by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs
of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt?(8) Why
should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these
things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed
and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its
Augean stables (9) never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The
portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and
cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh
Women’s Suffrage in the West (YEAR???????)
^represents states/territories that allowed women to vote before the 19th amendment
Wyoming State Constitution:
“Since equality in the enjoyment of natural and civil rights is only made sure through political equality, the laws of
this state affecting the political rights and privileges of its citizens shall be without distinction of race, color, sex,....’
source: http://legisweb.state.wy.us/statutes/constitution.aspx
Oregon Trail:
Experience of the Oregon Trail http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/query/D?wpa:3:./temp/~ammem_0Paw::@@@mdb=mcc,gottscho,detr,nfor,wpa,aap,cwar,bbpix,cowellbib,calb
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law,papr,lhbumbib,rbpebib,lbcoll,alad,hh,aaodyssey,magbell,bbc,dcm,raelbib,runyon,dukesm,lomaxbib,mtj,gottlieb,
aep,qlt,coolbib,fpnas,aasm,denn,relpet,amss,aaeo,mff,afc911bib,mjm,mnwp,rbcmillerbib,molden,ww2map,mfdipbib
,afcnyebib,klpmap,hawp,omhbib,rbaapcbib,mal,ncpsbib,ncpm,lhbprbib,ftvbib,afcreed,aipn,cwband,flwpabib,wpapo
s,cmns,psbib,pin,coplandbib,cola,tccc,curt,mharendt,lhbcbbib,eaa,haybib,mesnbib,fine,cwnyhs,svybib,mmorse,afcw
wgbib,mymhiwebib,uncall,afcwip,mtaft,manz,llstbib,fawbib,berl,fmuever,cdn,upboverbib,mussm,cic,afcpearl,awh,a
whbib,sgp,wright,lhbtnbib,afcesnbib,hurstonbib,mreynoldsbib,spaldingbib,sgproto,scsmbib,afccalbib,mamcol
Jenn Vincent, Ankit Kakar, Eric Brubaker, & Joline Hartheimer
Monroe Doctrine expressed during President Monroe’s Seventh Annual Message to Congress(1823):
“...the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are
henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers...In the wars of the
European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our
policy to do so. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make
preparation for our defense. With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately
connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers. The political system of
the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America.”
War of 1812
An Act Declaring War Between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the Dependencies Thereof and
the United States of America and Their Territories.Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the
United States of America in Congress assembled, That war be and the same is hereby declared to exist between the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the dependencies thereof, and the United States of America and
their territories; and that the President of the United States is hereby authorized to use the whole land and naval
force of the United States to carry the same into effect, and to issue to private armed vessels of the United States
commissions or letters of marque and general reprisal, in such form as he shall think proper, and under the seal of
the United States, against the vessels, goods, and effects of the government of the said United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland, and the subjects thereof
APPROVED, June 18, 1812
Adams -Onis Treaty. 1819
“His Catholic Majesty cedes to the United States, in full property and sovereignty, all the territories which belong to
him, situated to the eastward of the Mississippi, known by the name of East and West Florida. The adjacent islands
dependent on said provinces, all public lots and squares, vacant lands, public edifices, fortifications, barracks, and
other buildings, which are not private property, archives and documents, which relate directly to the property and
sovereignty of said provinces, are included in this article....The boundary-line between the two countries, west of the
Mississippi, shall begin on the Gulph of Mexico, at the mouth of the river Sabine, in the sea, continuing north, along
the western bank of that river, to the 32d degree of latitude; thence, by a line due north, to the degree of latitude
where it strikes the Rio Roxo of Nachitoches, or Red River”
Louisiana Purchase Treaty (1803)
Immediately after the ratification of the present Treaty by the President of the United States and in case that of the
first Consul's shall have been previously obtained, the commissary of the French Republic shall remit all military
posts of New Orleans and other parts of the ceded territory to the Commissary or Commissaries named by the
President to take possession--the troops whether of France or Spain who may be there shall cease to occupy any
military post from the time of taking possession and shall be embarked as soon as possible in the course of three
months after the ratification of this treaty.
Missouri Compromise 1850 Map: