The American Promise – Lecture Notes
Chapter 12 – The New West and the Free North, 1840-1860
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I. Economic and Industrial Evolution
A. Agriculture and Land Policy
1. Populating the Midwest—As farmers pushed westward in a quest for cheap
land, they encountered the Midwest’s comparatively treeless prairie; could
spend less time cutting down trees and more time cultivating the land;
Midwest population exploded, and production increased.
2. Technological Innovations—Labor-saving improvements also boosted
productivity; John Deere invented the “singing plow” in 1837; in the 1850s, Cyrus
McCormick’s mechanical reaper allowed famers to harvest twelve acres a day;
reapers and plows allowed farmers to double corn and wheat harvests between
1840 and 1860.
3. Federal Land Policy—Federal policies made possible the agricultural
productivity that fueled the nation’s economy; millions of ordinary farmers bought
land for just $1.25 an acre; millions of others squatted on unclaimed federal land;
speculators also profited from claiming desirable plots and selling them to settlers
at a generous markup; settlers moved west because the government made land
available to millions of Americans on relatively easy terms.
B. Manufacturing and Mechanization
1. The American System—Mechanization allowed manufacturers to produce more
with less labor; practice of manufacturing and then assembling interchangeable
parts became known as the American system; allowed manufacturers to employ
unskilled workers who were cheaper and more readily available than skilled
craftsmen.
2. A Dynamic National Economy—Manufacturing and agriculture meshed into a
dynamic national economy; New England led the nation in manufacturing; southern
states produced commodities such as wheat, pork, whiskey, tobacco, and cotton;
Pennsylvania and Ohio produced millions of tons of coal for industrial fuel.
3. The Domestic Market—American manufacturers specialized in producing for
the domestic market rather than for export; British goods dominated the
international market and, in general, were cheaper and better made.
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C. Railroads: Breaking the Bonds of Nature
1. Increasing Mileage—Railroads captured the imagination of Americans; in 1850,
trains steamed along 9,000 miles of tracks, most of it in New England and the Middle
Atlantic; by 1630, it increased to 30,000 miles of tracks, about as much as the rest of
the world combined; made the United States the world’s second-greatest industrial
power behind Great Britain.
2. Propelling other Industries—Railroads propelled the growth of iron and
communications; by 1861, more than 50,000 miles of Samuel F.B. Morse’s telegraph
stretched across the continent, often alongside railroad tracks.
3. Private Corporations—Almost all railroads were built and owned by private
companies rather than the federal government; the government supported these
investors, especially with federal and grants.
II. Free Labor: Promise and Reality
A. The Free-Labor Ideal
1. Free Labor—The ideal of free labor accounted for both the successes and
the shortcomings of the economy and society taking shape in the North and
West; spokesmen for the free-labor ideal celebrated hard work, self-reliance,
and independence; proclaimed success was open to self-made men.
2. Universal Education—Free-labor spokesmen stressed the importance of
universal education; communities in the North and West supported public schools
to make learning available to young children; textbooks and teachers drummed into
students the lessons of the free-labor system: self-reliance, discipline, and especially
hard work.
B. Economic Inequality
1. Measuring Success—In 1860, the nation had about forty millionaires; most
Americans, however, measured success in more modest terms; average wealth of an
adult white man in the North barely topped $2,000; nearly half had no wealth at all,
and about 60 percent owned no land.
2. Justifying Inequality—Free-labor spokesmen considered economic inequalities
a natural outgrowth of freedom; some individuals were simply luckier and more
able and willing to work; inequalities demonstrated the gap between the promise
and the performance of the free-labor ideal; economic growth allowed some to
become self-employed producers, but left many more landless and working for
wages.
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3. Social and Geographic Mobility—Seeking out new opportunities in pursuit of
free-labor ideals created restless social and geographic mobility; two-thirds of the
rural population moved every decade; population turnover in cities was even
greater.
Immigrants and the Free-Labor Ladder
1. Rising Immigration—Uncertainties of free labor did not deter immigration;
almost 4.5 million immigrants arrived between 1840 and 1860; nearly three out of
every four immigrants who arrived between 1840 and 1860 came from either
Germany or Ireland.
2. German Immigrants—Settled into the middle stratum of independent
producers celebrated by free-labor spokesmen; relatively few worked as
wage laborers or domestic servants.
3. Irish Immigrants and Ethnic Discrimination—Most entered at the bottom of
the free-labor ladder and had difficulty climbing up; roughly three out of four
worked as laborers or domestic servants; faced widespread prejudice (“No Irish
Need Apply”), but they still earned more money in America than they did in Ireland;
free-labor system often did not live up to expectations; many wage laborers could
not realistically aspire to become independent, self-sufficient property holders.
III. The Westward Movement
A. Manifest Destiny
1. “Civilizing” the West—Most Americans believed that the superiority of their
institutions and white culture bestowed upon them a God-given right to spread their
civilization across the continent; they imagined the West as an underdeveloped
wilderness that needed the civilizing power of whites.
2. Manifest Destiny—Term coined in 1845 by New York journalist John L.
O’Sullivan; called on Americans to resist any foreign power that attempted to thwart
their move westward; as important as national pride and racial arrogance were to
manifest destiny, economic gain made up its core.
B. Oregon and the Overland Trail
1. Joint Occupation—Expansionists soon looked to the Oregon Country in the
West; both the British and the Americans claimed the territory; the United States
and Great Britain decided in 1818 on “joint occupation” that would leave Oregon
“free and open” to settlement by both countries.
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2. The Plains Indians—In the late 1830s, settlers began to trickle along the
Oregon Trail; by 1869, approximately 350,000 emigrants had made the trip
in wagon trains; emigrants encountered the Plains Indians; some Indians
were peaceful, sedentary farmers, but the majority of the tribes from the
central and southern Plains were horse-mounted, nomadic, nonagricultural
peoples whose warriors symbolized the “savage Indian” in the white mind.
3. Indian Concentration—Emigrants insisted the federal government provide
them with protection, even though, in reality, the Native Americans perished far
more than whites due to alcohol, diseases, and white overhunting; the government
built forts and, in 1851, developed the new policy of concentration; persuaded chiefs
to sign agreements to clear a wide corridor for the wagon trains by restricting
Native Americans to specific areas that whites promised they would never violate.
C. The Mormon Exodus
1. Joseph Smith—Joseph Smith published The Book of Mormon in 1830; claimed to
have translated the work from tablets buried near his home; founded the Church of
Latter Day Saints; converts were attracted to the promise of a pure faith in the midst
of antebellum America’s social turmoil and rampant materialism.
2. Exodus and Brigham Young—Neighbors branded Mormons heretics;
persecution drove Smith and his followers from New York to Ohio, then to Missouri,
and finally in 1839 to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they built a prosperous community;
dissenters accused Smith of advocating polygamy; opponents of the church arrested
Smith and his brother; on June 27, 1844, a mob stormed a jail and shot Smith and his
brother; the church turned to Brigham Young as its new leader; the Mormons
arrived in their new home by the Great Salt Lake in 1847.
3. Annexation of Utah—Annexed to the United States as the Utah Territory in
1850; outraged at the Mormon practice of polygamy, the United States sent an army
of 2,500 troops to invade Salt Lake City in what was known as the Mormon War;
demonstrated most Americans viewed Mormons as a threat to American morality.
D. The Mexican Borderlands
1. The Mexican Southwest—Westward-moving Americans confronted northernmoving Spanish-speaking frontiersmen; national cultures, interests, and aspirations
collided; Mexico’s northern provinces were sparsely populated and suffered from
internal conflicts; Mexico found it increasingly difficult to defend its ill-defined
borders, especially when faced with a northern neighbor convinced of its supremacy
and bent on territorial acquisition.
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2. Americans in Texas—Began quietly, with Anglo-American trappers, traders, and
settlers drifting into Mexico’s far northern provinces; soon the Mexican province of
Texas attracted a flood of Americans who wanted to settle, not trade; Mexican
government wanted to populate and develop the northern territory; granted
Stephen F. Austin a huge grant of land; thousands of Americans arrived in Texas, and
they brought their slaves with them; established plantation economy by the 1830s.
3. Texans Revolt—In 1830, the Mexican government began to fear it would lose
Texas to the new arrivals; banned further immigration from the United States and
outlawed the introduction of additional slaves; Americans in Texas believed this to
be tyranny; settlers rebelled and fought several violent battles against Mexican
General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna; in 1836, Sam Houston’s army crushed Santa
Anna and declared the independent republic of Texas; the United States recognized
Texas’s independence the following year.
4. California—The Mexican government tried to lure Mexicans to California by
granting them huge estates called ranchos, but the plan did not work; Americans
who championed manifest destiny sought to woo American emigrants from Oregon
Country to California; as more settlers arrived, the Mexican government grew
alarmed; the U.S. government made no secret of its desire to acquire California;
President Jackson tried to purchase it in 1846; John C. Frémont raised an
independence movement known as the Bear Flag Revolt in 1846.
IV. Expansion and the Mexican-American War
A. The Politics of Expansion
1. The Problem of Texas—Texans sought admission to the Union as soon as
winning their independence from Mexico, but Mexico never relinquished its claim;
annexing Texas raised the question of adding another slave state to the Union; also
dangerous because Great Britain had scouted Texas, apparently contemplating
adding it to its empire.
2. The Politics of Annexation—President Tyler decided to risk annexing Texas;
inflamed sectional tension; for the 1844 election, the Whigs nominated Henry Clay,
an opponent of annexation; the Democrats chose expansionist James K. Polk, who
promised to deliver Texas and Oregon to the United States; Polk won the election on
a campaign based on manifest destiny.
3. “Fifty-four Forty or Fight”—In February 1845, Congress approved a joint
resolution offering the Republic of Texas admission as the fifteenth slave state;
rather than risk war with Great Britain, Polk agreed to a compromise, dividing the
Oregon Territory along the forty-ninth parallel; the Senate approved the treaty, and
the United States gained a huge amount of territory peacefully.
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B. The Mexican American War, 1846–1848
1. Polk’s Desire for Land—From the day he entered the White House, Polk craved
California and New Mexico; Mexico refused to sell the land; Polk concluded that
military force would be required to acquire it.
2. Divisive War—Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to march his 4,000-man
army from its position on the Nueces River, the southern boundary of Texas
according to the Mexicans, to the banks of the Rio Grande 150 miles south, the
boundary claimed by Texas; on April 25, 1846, Mexican cavalry attacked American
soldiers; Congress passed a declaration of war and began raising an army.
3. Polk’s Plan—Polk envisioned a quick war; American armies would occupy
Mexico’s northern provinces and defeat the Mexican army in a decisive battle or
two; Mexico would then sue for peace and the United States would keep occupied
territory.
4. Early Successes—Taylor won several victories over Mexican armies, earning the
reputation as a war hero; Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny occupied Los Angeles after
several severe losses; by September 1845, Taylor had driven into the interior of
Mexico; in February 1847, after a five-day siege, Santa Anna finally withdrew his
army.
C. Victory in Mexico
1. Mexican Persistence—Despite heavy losses on the battlefield, Mexico refused to
trade land for peace; Polk sent General Winfield Scott 250 miles inland to Mexico
City, while Taylor’s troops still occupied the North; Scott won Mexico City on
September 14, 1847.
2. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—Signed February 2, 1848; Mexico agreed to
give up all claims to Texas north of the Rio Grande and to cede the provinces of New
Mexico and California—more than 500,000 square miles—to the United States. The
United States agreed to pay Mexico $15 million and to assume $3.25 million in
claims that American citizens had against Mexico; gave America a two-ocean
economy while Mexico faced a sharply diminished economic future.
D. Golden California
1. The Gold Rush—James Marshall discovered gold in the American River in the
foothills of the Sierra Nevada in January 1848; led to the California gold rush;
between 1849 and 1852, more than 250,000 forty-niners entered California, hoping
to strike it rich.
2. Life in the Mining Towns—Quiet Mexico became a roaring mining and town
economy; miners rarely had much money or mining experience; life in the gold
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fields was nasty, brutish, and often short; San Francisco grew into a raw, booming
city; “Committees of Vigilance” attempted to bring order to the city, but they could
not establish civic order.
3. Anti-Immigrant Sentiment—Chinese people faced particular discrimination;
25,000 Chinese lived in California in 1851; California levied higher taxes on nonAmericans to drive them from the goldfields; Chinese people fought back, but they
still faced racial violence.
4. Effects on Native American Population—The gold rush devastated Indians;
California’s Indian population dropped from 150,000 in 1848 to 25,000 in 1854;
starvation, disease, and a declining birthrate took a heavy toll; whites also murdered
Indians indiscriminately.
V. Reforming Self and Society
A. The Pursuit of Perfection: Transcendentalists and Utopians
1. Transcendentalists—A group of New England writers who believed individuals
should not conform to the dictates of the materialistic world or the dogma of
religion; instead, people should look within for guidance; leading transcendentalists
were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.
2. Fourier Phalanxes—Unlike transcendentalists, some reformers tried to change
the world by organizing utopian communities; followers of Charles Fourier formed
phalanxes, communities that believed that individualism and competition were
evils; phalanxes aspired to replace competition with cooperation based on
communal ownership of property; few survived more than two or three years.
3. Oneida Community—Believed in economic and sexual communalism; led by
John Humphrey Noyes; established “complex marriage”; sexual intercourse was
permitted between any consenting man and woman in the community; despite
being ostracized from the mainstream, the community survived long after the Civil
War.
B. Woman’s Rights Activists
1. Seneca Falls—In 1848, about three hundred reformers led by Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Lucretia Mott gathered at Seneca Falls, New York, for the first national
woman’s rights convention; delegates published the Seneca Falls Declaration of
Sentiments, an ambitious agenda that demanded civil liberties for women; nearly
two dozen other woman’s rights conventions assembled before 1860, repeatedly
calling for suffrage, but they all had difficulty receiving a respectful hearing.
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2. Free-Labor Arguments—Stanton and other activists sought fair pay and
expanded employment opportunities for women by appealing to free-labor
ideology: women should have the opportunity to work and learn for themselves; in
1860, woman’s rights activists were successful in protecting married women’s
rights to their own wages and property in New York, but discrimination persisted.
C. Abolitionists and the American Ideal
1. Tactics and Response—Abolitionists published newspapers, held conventions,
and petitioned Congress, but never attracted a mass following among white
Americans; many white Northerners became convinced slavery was wrong, but they
still believed blacks were inferior; many others believed slavery was civilizing to the
slaves themselves.
2. Black Abolitionists—During the 1840s and 1850s, a new generation of black
leaders came to the forefront, including Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, Sojourner
Truth, Henry Highland Garnet, William Wells Brown, and Martin R. Delany; black
abolitionists founded their own newspapers and held their own antislavery
conventions, although they still cooperated with sympathetic whites; confronted
white supremacy their whole lives.
3. Emigration—Some blacks cooperated with the efforts of the American
Colonization Society to send freed slaves and other black Americans to Liberia in
West Africa; others sought to move to Haiti or Canada; most black Americans,
however, refused to embrace emigration and worked against racial prejudice in
their own communities, organizing campaigns against segregation, particularly in
transportation and education.
4. The Underground Railroad—Organized by escaped slave Harriet Tubman, who
repeatedly risked her life to return to the South to export slaves to freedom; free
blacks provided fugitive slaves with food, a safe place to rest, and a helping hand;
this “underground railroad” ran mainly through black neighborhoods, black
churches, and black homes.
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