I.
Manifest Destiny: South and North |
|
A. |
The Push to the Pacific |
|
|
1. |
In 1845, John L. O’Sullivan coined the phrase Manifest Destiny; he felt
that Americans had a right to develop the entire continent as they saw fit,
which implied a sense of cultural and racial superiority. |
|
|
2. |
The
Oregon country stretched along the Pacific
coast from the border with Mexican California to the border with Russian Alaska
and was claimed by both
Great Britain
and the
United States
. |
|
|
3. |
“Oregon fever” raged in 1843 as thousands, lured by reports of fine harbors,
mild climate, and fertile soil, journeyed for months across the continent to
the Willamette Valley. |
|
|
4. |
By 1860, about 250,000 Americans had braved the
Oregon
Trail; many died en route from disease and exposure, although
relatively few died from Indian attacks. |
|
|
5. |
Some pioneers left the Oregon Trail and traveled south along the California
Trail, settling along the Sacramento River in the Mexican
province of
California. |
|
|
6. |
To promote
California’s development, the
Mexican government took over the
California
missions and liberated the 20,000 Indians who worked on them, many of whom
intermarried with mestizos and worked as laborers and
cowboys on large cattle ranches. |
|
|
7. |
The rise of cattle ranching created a new society and economy as agents from
New England firms assimilated to Mexican life and married
into the families of the Californios. |
|
|
8. |
Many American migrants in
California had no
desire to assimilate into Mexican society and hoped for eventual annexation to
the
United States
; however,
at that time American settlers in
California
were too few. |
|
B. |
The Plains Indians |
|
|
1. |
As the
Pacific-bound wagon trains rumbled across
Nebraska,
the migrants encountered the Great Plains, a vast sea of grass stretching north
from
Texas to
Saskatchewan
in
Canada
, and west from the
Missouri River to the
Rocky Mountains. |
|
|
2. |
Nomadic
buffalo-hunting Indian peoples roamed the western Plains, while the tall grass
lands and river valleys to the east were home to semi-sedentary tribes. |
|
|
3. |
A line of
military forts—stretching from Fort Jesup in
Louisiana to Fort Snelling in Minnesota—policed the
boundary between white America and what Congress in 1834 designated as
Permanent Indian Territory. |
|
|
4. |
For
centuries, the Indians who lived on the eastern edge of the Plains, such as the
Pawnees and the Mandan on the upper Missouri River, subsisted primarily on food
crops—corn and beans—supplemented by buffalo meat. |
|
|
5. |
They also
exchanged goods with traders and travelers along the Sante Fe Trail, which cut through Comanche and Kiowa territory as it connected
Missouri and
New
Mexico. By the early 1840s, goods worth nearly $1
million moved along the trail each year. |
|
|
6. |
By the 1830s,
the Kiowas,
Cheyennes,
and Arapahos had also adopted this horse culture and, allied with the Comanches, dominated the Plains between the
Arkansas and Red rivers. |
|
|
7. |
As European
horses enhanced the mobility and wealth of the Plains Indians, European
diseases and guns thinned their ranks. A devastating smallpox epidemic spread
northward from
New Spain in 1779-1781, taking
the lives of half of the Plains peoples. |
|
|
8. |
The powerful
Sioux, who acquired guns and ammunition from French, Spanish, and American
traders along the
Missouri River, also
remained buffalo hunters. As nomadic people who travelled in small groups, the
Sioux largely avoided major epidemics and increased their numbers. |
|
C. |
The Fateful Election of 1844 |
|
|
1. |
The election of 1844 determined the American government’s western policy. |
|
|
2. |
To thwart rumored British schemes of North American expansion, southern
expansionists demanded the immediate annexation of
Texas. |
|
|
3. |
"Oregon
fever" and Manifest Destiny were also altering the political and diplomatic
landscape in the North. Responding to "Oregon
conventions" that called for an end to joint occupation of the region, in 1843
a bipartisan national convention demanded that the
United
States
seize
Oregon
all the way to the 54°40' north latitude. |
|
|
4. |
Texas and
Oregon
became the central issues in the election of 1844; Democrats selected James K.
Polk, a slave owner and expansionist who favored annexation of both
Texas and
Oregon. |
|
|
5. |
The Whigs nominated Henry Clay, who again championed his American System of
internal improvements, high tariffs, and national banking that begrudgingly
supported the annexation of
Texas. |
|
|
6. |
Polk’s strategy of linking the issues of
Texas
and
Oregon was successful; immediately after
Polk’s victory, Democrats in Congress approved annexation of
Texas
by a joint resolution to bring it into the
Union. |
II.
War, Expansion, and Slavery, 1846–1850 |
|
A. |
The War with
Mexico
, 1846–1848 |
|
|
1. |
President Polk saw
Texas as just the
beginning; he wanted American control over all Mexican territory between
Texas and the
Pacific Ocean
and was prepared to go to war to get it. |
|
|
2. |
Mexico
was determined to
retain its territories, and when the
Texas
Republic accepted American statehood
in 1845,
Mexico
broke off
diplomatic relations with the
United
States. |
|
|
3. |
To intimidate the Mexican government, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to
occupy the disputed lands between the
Nueces
River and the
Rio Grande. |
|
|
4. |
Polk also sent John Slidell to
Mexico City on a
secret diplomatic initiative to secure Mexican acceptance of the
Rio Grande boundary and to buy
Mexico
and
California;
Mexican officials refused to see him. |
|
|
5. |
Polk’s alternative plan was to foment a revolution in
California
that, as in
Texas,
would lead to an independent republic and a request for annexation. |
|
|
6. |
In October 1845, at Polk’s request, Thomas O. Larkin encouraged the leading
Mexican residents of
Monterey,
California, to declare
independence and support peaceful annexation. |
|
|
7. |
Polk also ordered naval commanders to seize
California’s coastal towns in case of war,
and dispatched Captain John C. Fremont’s heavily armed troops deep into Mexican
territory. |
|
|
8. |
Hoping to incite an armed Mexican response, Polk ordered General Taylor to the
Rio Grande; when a clash
occurred, Polk blamed the Mexicans for the bloodshed and called for war. |
|
|
9. |
Ignoring Whig pleas for a negotiated settlement, the Democratic majority in
Congress voted for war with
Mexico. |
|
|
10. |
To avoid simultaneous war with
Britain
,
the president accepted a British proposal to divide the Oregon Country at the
forty-ninth parallel. |
|
|
11. |
By the end of 1846, the
United States
controlled much of northeastern
Mexico
,
and American forces secured control of
California
in 1847. |
|
|
12. |
Santa Anna went on the offensive, attacking Zachary Taylor’s units at
Buena Vista in 1847, and only superior artillery enabled
a narrow American victory. |
|
|
13. |
General Winfield Scott’s troops seized
Mexico
City in September 1847; Santa Anna was overthrown and
the new Mexican government agreed to make peace. |
|
B. |
A Divisive Victory |
|
|
1. |
“Conscience Whigs” viewed the Mexican War as a conspiracy to add new
slave states in the West, and Polk’s expansionist policy split the Democrats
into sectional factions. |
|
|
2. |
The Wilmot Proviso (1846) was intended to prohibit slavery in any new
territories acquired from
Mexico
;
the Senate killed the proviso. |
|
|
3. |
To reunite Democrats before the election, Polk and Buchanan abandoned their
expansionist hopes for
Mexico
and agreed to take only
California and
New Mexico. |
|
|
4. |
In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the
United
States
agreed to pay
Mexico
$15 million for
Texas north of the
Rio Grande,
New Mexico,
and
California. |
|
|
5. |
Many northerners joined a new free-soil movement, viewing slavery as a
threat to republicanism and the yeomen farmers (and not, as the Liberty Party believed, a sin against the natural rights of African
Americans). |
|
|
6. |
The Wilmot Proviso’s call for free soil was the first antislavery proposal to
attract broad popular support. Frederick Douglass, the foremost black
abolitionist, endorsed the free-soil movement and began to lecture for William
Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. |
|
|
7. |
Democrats nominated Lewis Cass as their presidential candidate for the election
of 1848; Cass was an avid expansionist who proposed squatter sovereignty and
was deliberately vague on the issue of slavery in the West. |
|
|
8. |
The Free-Soilers nominated Martin Van Buren for
president; the Whigs nominated General Zachary Taylor, a slave owner who had
not taken a position on slavery in the territories. |
|
|
9. |
Taylor and his running mate Millard Fillmore won the election, but the
electoral margin was thin because of the Free-Soil ticket taking
New York’s vote. |
|
C. |
California Gold and Racial Warfare |
|
|
1. |
Even before
Taylor took office, workers for John A. Sutter in the
Sierra Nevada foothills of
California
discovered flakes of gold in January of 1848. |
|
|
2. |
By January
1849, sixty-one crowded ships had left northeastern ports to sail around Cape
Horn to
San Francisco; by May, twelve thousand
wagons had crossed the
Missouri River bound
for the goldfields. By the end of 1849, more than 80,000 people, mostly men,
had arrived in
California. |
|
|
3. |
Most miners
eventually found themselves working for wages for companies that engaged in
hydraulic or underground mining; many others turned to farming. |
|
|
4. |
Farming required arable land, which was owned by Mexican grantees or occupied
by Indian peoples. |
|
|
5. |
The subjugation of the Indians came first. In 1848, there were about 150,000
Indians in
California;
by 1861, there were only 30,000. |
|
|
6. |
European diseases took the lives of thousands of natives. But in
California, white
settlers also undertook systematic campaigns of extermination and local
political leaders did little to stop them. |
|
|
7. |
Congress abetted these assaults. At the bidding of white Californians, it
repudiated treaties that federal agents had negotiated with 119 tribes, and
that provided the Indians with 7 million acres of land. Instead, in 1853,
Congress authorized five reservations of only 25,000 acres each and refused to
provide the Indians with military protection. |
|
|
8. |
Some settlers simply murdered Indians to push them off non-reservation lands.
Other white Californians turned to slave trading. |
|
|
9. |
The Mexicans and Californios who held grants to
thousands of acres were harder to dislodge. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
guaranteed that the land grants made by Spanish and Mexican authorities would
be “inviolably respected.” |
|
|
10. |
Despite the fact that many of the 800 grants in
California were either fraudulent or
questionable, the Land Claims Commission created by Congress upheld the
validity of 75 percent of them. |
|
|
11. |
In the meantime, hundreds of Americans had set up farms on the grants, many of
which had never been settled. American squatters rejected the notion that so
much unoccupied and unimproved land could be held by a few families. They
successfully pressured local land commissioners and judges to void suspect
grants. |
|
|
12. |
In northern
California,
farmers found that they could grow most eastern crops. Ranchers gradually
replaced Spanish cattle with American breeds, which found a ready market as
California’s population
shot up to 380,000 by 1860 and 560,000 by 1870. |
|
|
13. |
Wheat and barley farmers cultivated hundreds of acres, using the latest
technology and scores of hired workers to produce huge crops, which
San Francisco merchants exported to
Europe
at high prices. The gold rush gradually turned into a wheat boom. |
|
D. |
1850: Crisis and Compromise |
|
|
1. |
The
California
gold rush and subsequent influx of settlers revived the national debate over
free soil; in November 1849, Californians ratified a state constitution that
prohibited slavery. |
|
|
2. |
The admission of
California
as a state threatened the carefully maintained balance of slave states versus nonslave states in the Senate. |
|
|
3. |
Southern leaders decided to block
California’s
entry unless the federal government guaranteed the future of slavery. |
|
|
4. |
John C. Calhoun warned of possible secession by slave states and advanced the
doctrine that Congress had no constitutional authority to regulate slavery in
the territories. |
|
|
5. |
Many southerners and some northern Democrats were willing to extend the
Missouri Compromise line to the
Pacific Ocean,
guaranteeing slave owners some western territory. |
|
|
6. |
A third choice, squatter (popular)
sovereignty, placed decisions about slavery in the hands of local
settlers and their territorial governments. |
|
|
7. |
Antislavery advocates were unwilling to accept any plan for
California that might involve the expansion
of slavery in the territories and urged federal authorities to restrict slavery
within its existing boundaries and then extinguish it completely. |
|
|
8. |
Whigs and Democrats desperately sought a compromise to preserve the
Union; Whigs organized the Compromise of 1850. |
|
|
9. |
The Compromise included a Fugitive Slave Act to mollify the South, it admitted
California as a
free state
and abolished the slave trade in
Washington,
DC, to mollify the North, and it organized the rest of
the lands acquired from
Mexico
into the territories of
New Mexico and
Utah on the basis of
popular sovereignty. |
|
|
10. |
The Compromise averted a secession crisis in 1850, but resulted in special
conventions in the South; in exchange for support of the Compromise, moderate
southern politicians agreed to support secession in the future if Congress
abolished slavery anywhere or refused to grant statehood to a territory with a
proslavery constitution. |
|
III.
The End of the Second Party System, 1850–1858 |
|
A. |
Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act |
|
|
1. |
Under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act, federal magistrates in the northern
states determined the status of alleged runaway slaves. The law denied accused
blacks a jury trial and even the right to testify and it allowed the reenslavement of about two hundred fugitives (as well as
some free northern blacks). |
|
|
2. |
The plight of runaway slaves and the appearance of slave catchers aroused
popular hostility in the North and
Midwest,
and free blacks and abolitionists defied the new law. |
|
|
3. |
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which evoked sympathy
for slaves and outrage against slavery throughout the North, increased northern
opposition to the act. |
|
|
4. |
Northern legislatures enacted personal liberty laws, and in Ableman v. Booth (1857), the Wisconsin
Supreme Court said the act violated the Constitution. |
|
|
5. |
The
U.S.
Supreme Court in 1859 upheld the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, but
by then the act had become a “dead letter.” |
|
B. |
The Political System in Decline |
|
|
1. |
The conflict over slavery split both major political parties along sectional
lines and stymied creative political leadership. |
|
|
2. |
The Whig Party chose General Winfield Scott, but many southern Whigs refused to
support Scott because northern Whigs refused to support slavery. |
|
|
3. |
Democrats were divided at their convention and no candidate could secure the
necessary two-thirds majority, so they settled on a compromise nominee,
Franklin Pierce. |
|
|
4. |
The Democrats swept the election, and their party was reunited; conversely, the
Whig Party split into sectional wings and it would never again wage a national
campaign. |
|
|
5. |
Pierce pursued an expansionist foreign policy to assist northern merchants,
secured railroad rights in northern
Mexico
with the Gadsden Purchase, and tried to seize
Cuba
, issuing the Ostend Manifesto
(1854). |
|
|
6. |
Opposition to the manifesto forced Pierce to halt efforts to take
Cuba
, but it
revived the northern fears of a “Slave Power” conspiracy. |
|
C. |
The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Rise of
New Parties |
|
|
1. |
The
Kansas-
Nebraska
Act, constructed by Democrat Stephen Douglas, divided the northern Louisiana
Purchase into two territories,
Kansas and
Nebraska, and voided the
Missouri Compromise line by opening the area to slavery through the principle
of popular sovereignty. |
|
|
2. |
The
Kansas-
Nebraska Act barely passed in 1854 through
the use of patronage and persuasion by President Pierce and proved to be the
end of the Second Party System. |
|
|
3. |
Antislavery northern Whigs and Anti-Nebraska Democrats formed a new party, the
Republicans; the party stood for opposition to slavery and a celebration of the
moral virtues of a society based on “the middling classes.” |
|
|
4. |
The American, or “Know-Nothing” Party, had its origins in the anti-immigrant
and anti-Catholic organizations of the 1840s. It hoped to unite native-born
Protestants against the “alien menace” of Irish and German Catholics, prohibit
further immigration, and institute literacy tests for voting.
|
|
|
5. |
In 1855, the Pierce administration recognized the territorial legislature in
Lecompton,
Kansas,
which had adopted proslavery legislation. |
|
|
6. |
Free-Soilers rejected the legitimacy of the
territorial government; proslavery and antislavery sides turned to violence,
including the “Pottawatomie massacre,” led by John Brown. |
|
D. |
Buchanan’s Failed Presidency |
|
|
1. |
The Republican Party counted on anger over “Bleeding Kansas” to boost its
fortunes and nominated Colonel James C. Frémont, a
Free-Soiler, as its presidential candidate. |
|
|
2. |
The American Party split into sectional factions, the northern faction endorsed Frémont and the southern faction nominated Millard
Fillmore. |
|
|
3. |
The Democrats reaffirmed their support for popular sovereignty and the Kansas-Nebraska
Act and nominated James Buchanan. |
|
|
4. |
James Buchanan won, and the Republicans replaced the Whigs as the second major
party. |
|
|
5. |
Republicans had no support in the South, however; if they were to win in the
next presidential election, it might prompt the southern states to withdraw
from the
Union. President Buchanan was left to
devise a way of protecting free soil in the West and slavery in the South. |
|
|
6. |
In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856), the U.S. Supreme Court opined that a slave’s residence in a
free state did not make
him a free man and that African Americans were not citizens and could not sue
in a federal court. |
|
|
|
7. |
Chief Justice Taney declared that the provisions of the
Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise which prohibited slavery had
never been constitutional, and that Congress could not give to territorial
governments any powers that Congress itself did not possess. |
|
|
8. |
Taney thereby endorsed Calhoun’s interpretation of popular sovereignty: only
when settlers wrote a constitution and requested statehood could they prohibit
slavery. |
|
|
9. |
The Democrat-dominated Supreme Court had declared the Republicans’ antislavery
platform to be unconstitutional; Republicans countered by accusing the Supreme
Court and President Buchanan of participating in the “Slave Power” conspiracy. |
|
|
10. |
In 1858, Buchanan recommended the admission of
Kansas
as a slave state; by pursuing a proslavery agenda—first with Dred Scott and then in
Kansas—he had helped to split his party and
the nation. |
IV. Abraham Lincoln and the Republican
Triumph, 1858–1860 |
|
A. |
Lincoln’s Political Career |
|
|
1. |
Abraham Lincoln came from an impoverished yeoman farming family in
Illinois; in 1831, he
rejected the farmer’s life and became a store clerk. |
|
|
2. |
Lincoln was an ambitious man: he was admitted to
the bar in 1837, married the more socially prominent Mary Todd in 1842, and
served four terms as a Whig in the
Illinois
assembly. |
|
|
3. |
In 1846,
Lincoln
won election to Congress, where he had to take a stand on the issue of slavery;
he felt that slavery was unjust but did not believe that the federal government
had the constitutional authority to tamper with it. |
|
|
4. |
Lincoln argued
that prohibiting the expansion of slavery, gradual emancipation, and the
colonization of freed slaves were the only practical ways to address the issue. |
|
|
5. |
Both abolitionists and proslavery activists derided
Lincoln’s pragmatic policies, he lost his bid
for reelection, and for a while he withdrew from politics in order to devote
his time to law. |
|
|
6. |
Lincoln
returned to politics after the passage of Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska
Act; he attacked the doctrine of popular sovereignty and said he would leave
slavery where it existed but not extend it into the territories. |
|
|
7. |
Lincoln abandoned the Whig Party and joined the
Republicans; he soon emerged as their leader in
Illinois. |
|
|
8. |
In
Lincoln’s
“House Divided” speech, he predicted a constitutional crisis over slavery. |
|
|
9. |
In the 1858 duel for the U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas declared his support for
white supremacy, and
Lincoln, put on the
defensive by
Douglas, advocated economic
opportunity for blacks but not equal political rights. |
|
|
10. |
Douglas’s “Freeport Doctrine” asserted that
settlers could exclude slavery by not adopting local legislation to protect it;
this upset proslavery advocates and abolitionists. |
|
|
11. |
Douglas was elected to the Senate, but
Lincoln
had established a national reputation. |
|
B. |
The
Union Under Siege |
|
|
1. |
Southern Democrats divided into two groups: the “Moderates” (Southern Rights
Democrats) pursued protection of slavery in the territories, and the “Radicals”
actively promoted secession. |
|
|
2. |
In October 1859, John Brown led a raid that temporarily seized the federal
arsenal at
Harpers Ferry,
Virginia; his purpose was to supply the arms
for a slave rebellion and establish a separate African American state in the
South. |
|
|
3. |
Brown was charged with treason, sentenced to death, and hanged. He was a martyr
to abolitionists, which horrified southerners. |
|
|
4. |
In 1860, northern Democrats rejected Jefferson Davis’s program to protect slavery
in the territories, so the delegates from eight southern states quit the
meeting and nominated as their candidate John C. Breckinridge of
Kentucky. Northern and
western delegates nominated Stephen Douglas. |
|
|
5. |
The Republicans chose
Lincoln as their candidate
for his moderate position on slavery, his appealing egalitarian image, and his
important
Midwest political base. |
|
|
6. |
The fourth candidate was John Bell, a former Tennessee Whig, who was the
nominee of the compromise-seeking Constitutional Union Party. |
|
|
7. |
Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but won a majority in the
electoral college by carrying every northern and western state except New
Jersey; Douglas won electoral votes only in Missouri and New Jersey;
Breckinridge captured every state in the Deep South as well as Delaware,
Maryland, and North Carolina; John Bell carried the Upper South states. |
|
|
8. |
The Republicans had united the Northeast, the Midwest, and the
Far West behind free soil and had seized national power;
to many southerners it seemed their constitutional order of slavery was now
under siege. |
|