James L. Roark ● Michael P. Johnson
Patricia Cline Cohen ● Sarah Stage
Susan M. Hartmann
The American Promise
A History of the United States
Fifth Edition
CHAPTER 12
The New West and the Free North,
1840-1860
Copyright © 2012 by Bedford/St. Martin's
I. Economic and Industrial Evolution
A. Agriculture and Land Policy
1. Populating the Midwest
2. Technological innovations
• 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
B. Manufacturing and Mechanization
1. The American system
2. 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
• 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.
I. Economic and Industrial Evolution
C. Railroads: Breaking the Bonds of Nature
1. Increasing mileage
• in 1830, trains steamed along 9,000 miles of tracks, most of
it in New England and the Middle Atlantic
• by 1850, 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
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
2. 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
• 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
3. Social and geographic mobility
• created restless social and geographic mobility
• two-thirds of the rural population moved every decade; population
turnover in cities was even greater.
II. Free Labor: Promise and Reality
C. Immigrants and the Free-Labor Ladder
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
1. Rising 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
relatively few worked as wage laborers or domestic
servants.
3. Irish immigrants and ethnic discrimination
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
2. Manifest Destiny
•
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
2. The Plains Indians
•
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 horsemounted, nomadic, nonagricultural peoples whose warriors symbolized the
“savage Indian” in the white mind.
3. Indian concentration
4. Women’s hardships
III. The Westward Movement
C. The Mormon Exodus
1. 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
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
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.
III. The Westward Movement
D. The Mexican Borderlands
1. The Mexican Southwest
• 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.
2. Americans in Texas
3. Texans revolt
4. California
• 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 MexicanAmerican War
A. The Politics of Expansion
1. The problem of Texas
2. The politics of annexation
•
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”
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
B. The Mexican American War, 1846–1848
1. Polk’s desire for land
2. Divisive war
•
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
4. Early successes
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.
IV. Expansion and the MexicanAmerican War
C. Victory in Mexico
1. Mexican persistence
2. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
•
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
•
•
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
3. Anti-immigrant sentiment
25,000 Chinese lived in California in 1851; California levied higher taxes on non-Americans
to drive them from the goldfields; Chinese people fought back, but they still faced racial
violence.
4. Effects on Native American population
V. Reforming Self and Society
A. The Pursuit of Perfection: Transcendentalists
and Utopians
1. Transcendentalists
2. Fourier phalanxes
3. Oneida community
B. Woman’s Rights Activists
1. Seneca Falls
2. Free labor arguments
V. Reforming Self and Society
C. Abolitionists and the American Ideal
1. Tactics and response
2. Black abolitionists
3. Emigration
4. The Underground Railroad