Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War b

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This sweeping history of the 1840s captures America's enormous sense of possibility and shows how the extraordinary expansion of territories forced the nation to come to grips with the deep rift that would bring war just a decade later.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

A sweeping history of the 1840s, Manifest Destinies captures the enormous sense of possibility that inspired America's growth and shows how the acquisition of western territories forced the nation to come to grips with the deep fault line that would bring war in the near future.Steven E. Woodworth gives us a portrait of America at its most vibrant and expansive. It was a decade in which the nation significantly enlarged its boundaries, taking Texas, New Mexico, California, and the Pacific Northwest; William Henry Harrison ran the first modern populist campaign, focusing on entertaining voters rather than on discussing issues; prospectors headed west to search for gold; Joseph Smith founded a new religion; railroads and telegraph lines connected the country's disparate populations as never before.When the 1840s dawned, Americans were feeling optimistic about the future- the population was growing, economic conditions were improving, and peace had reigned for nearly thirty years. A hopeful nation looked to the West, where vast areas of unsettled land seemed to promise prosperity to anyone resourceful enough to take advantage. And yet political tensions roiled below the surface; as the country took on new lands, slavery emerged as an irreconcilable source of disagreement between North and South, and secession reared its head for the first time.Rich in detail and full of dramatic events and fascinating characters, Manifest Destinies is an absorbing and highly entertaining account of a crucial decade that forged a young nation's character and destiny.

Author Biography

Steven E. Woodworth was born in Ohio and grew up in the Midwest. He earned his Ph.D. in history at Rice University in 1987, and is the author, coauthor, or editor of twenty-eight books on American history, including Nothing but Victory- The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865. He is currently a professor of history at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.

Table of Contents

List of MapsPrefacePART ONE: The Two Party SystemThe Log Cabin and Hard Cider Campaign Tyler, Clay, and the Durability of the Two-Party System Abolitionism PART TWO: Westward ExpansionThe Oregon Trail The Allure and the Danger of CaliforniaThe Mormons and Their MigrationPART THREE: The Politics of ExpansionTyler and TexasThe Election of 1844 Texas AnnexationPART FOUR: War with MexicoArmies Along the Rio Grande The Monterrey Campaign New Mexico, Chihuahua, and California Buena Vista Veracruz, Cerro Gordo, and the Politics of Expansion To the Gates of Mexico City A Conquered Capital and a Negotiated Peace PART FIVE: The Political System and the Controversies of ExpansionThe Election of 1848 The California Gold Rush California and the Expansion of Slavery The Struggle for Compromise NotesIndex

Review

"[This] new, magnificent account . . . is full of wonder even for seasoned students of U.S. history." —The Dallas Morning News"A vivid, episodic pageant of westward-ho empire building. . . . This is narrative history writ large and vigorously—with foreshadowings of tragedy." —Publishers Weekly"In this balanced political and military history, Woodworth tracks political tensions exacerbated by continental expansion. . . . Woodworth dramatically presages the collapse of political parties in the 1850s by his accessible account of the 1840s." —Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

Review Quote

"[This] new, magnificent account . . . is full of wonder even for seasoned students of U.S. history." - The Dallas Morning News "A vivid, episodic pageant of westward-ho empire building. . . . This is narrative history writ large and vigorously-with foreshadowings of tragedy." - Publishers Weekly "In this balanced political and military history, Woodworth tracks political tensions exacerbated by continental expansion. . . . Woodworth dramatically presages the collapse of political parties in the 1850s by his accessible account of the 1840s." -Gilbert Taylor, Booklist From the Trade Paperback edition.

Excerpt from Book

chapter one -- The Log Cabin and Hard Cider Campaign Americans in 1840 felt confident that their country was on the verge of greatness. The young Republic might be only three score and four years old, but it was already the world''s biggest and oldest land governed of, by, and for the people, a self-conscious beacon of freedom to the rest of the world. And the future seemed to stand open to the United States, just like the rest of the North American continent, beckoning bold Americans to stride forward and take possession and thus increase the power and expand the extent of what they liked to call the empire of liberty. America was growing. The census the government would conduct that year would reveal that the Republic''s population, centered hypothetically on a point 260 miles west of Washington, D.C., numbered just over seventeen million, an increase of 32.7 percent in the past ten years. New states were joining the Union. Two had joined in the past decade (Arkansas in 1836 and Michigan a few months later in 1837), and more were all but certain to follow in the one now dawning. The Iowa and Wisconsin territories would likely be ready for admission inside the next ten years, and interesting prospects lay farther west, even beyond the broad expanse of the Louisiana Purchase lands that the explorer Meriwether Lewis had described as "the fairest portion of the globe." In 1836 the Christian missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and Henry and Eliza Spalding had traveled all the way across the Rocky Mountains. Fellow missionary Jason Lee had pushed farther west, to the green and fertile Willamette Valley. Their letters home had brought some of the first reports of that inviting country, and other of their countrymen were already beginning to contemplate migrating. Even more exciting had been the news in recent years from the Southwest, where Americans had settled the largely empty Mexican province of Tejas at Mexico''s invitation. When that country had tried to subject the colonists to despotic government, they had risen up and in 1836 overthrown Mexican rule of the province, claiming it and a vast region beyond the provincial boundary as the new Republic of Texas. There had been talk of Texas joining the United States, and by all accounts its citizens were eager. The fast-growing adolescent United States was not without problems. Twenty years before, in 1820, intense political strife had arisen from the very issue of expansion itself, specifically the application of the Missouri Territory to enter the Union as a slave state. Some northern congressmen had objected, and the result had been a prolonged political conflict of alarming proportions. The point of strife was a fundamental contradiction in the nation''s character. Founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and that pursuit of happiness that private property ownership made possible, the "land of the free" counted some two and a half million slaves among its seventeen million inhabitants. The slaves were property, their owners maintained, and therefore had no right to liberty. That this was a gross contradiction of the nation''s ideals was once realized even in the South. Now such admissions were out of fashion below the Mason- Dixon Line, and white southerners were asserting with increasing volume that slavery was a positive good for both blacks and whites. Time would tell whether this fundamental flaw would produce serious consequences for the growing nation. Few in 1840 understood the potential dangers more clearly than the occupant of the White House. Martin Van Buren had recognized, perhaps sooner than anyone else in American national politics, that political conflict was unavoidable and that political parties, far from being the pernicious factions of which James Madison and the other founders had warned, could in fact serve as channels to direct that conflict into safe areas of debate and away from slavery, the one topic that had the potential to destroy the entire system and possibly divide the country. At the time of the Missouri crisis, back in 1820, the country had not possessed a two-party system. All politicians had been at least nominally members of the Republican Party, and this absence of the strife of "factions" had so pleased that generation of Americans that they had referred to the decade after the War of 1812 as the Era of Good Feelings. But feelings had not been at all good when the Missouri issue exploded on the national scene midway through the era. Without the restraints of established political parties, the strife in Congress escalated quickly to a level that former president Thomas Jefferson likened to "a fire bell in the night [that] awakened and filled me with terror." Congress had with difficulty reached a compromise in its dispute, and a much younger Martin Van Buren had taken a lesson from the incident. Van Buren was born in Kinderhook, New York, in 1782, the son of a tavern keeper of Netherlands descent, and the future president''s first language was Dutch. He had received little formal education but had been determined to succeed, studying for six years under a Kinderhook lawyer before being admitted to the bar in 1803. A successful law practice led to an equally successful career in state politics. Van Buren won the nicknames Wizard of the Albany Regency, for his leadership of the state''s most powerful political faction, and Red Fox of Kinderhook, for his considerable political skills. He became a U.S. senator from New York in 1821 and then in 1828, in quick succession, governor of New York and secretary of state under the newly elected president, Andrew Jackson. In Jackson''s second term Van Buren was vice president, and when Old Hickory followed Washington''s example in declining to seek a third term in office, Van Buren was his natural successor. He had won the election of 1836 handily. The eighth president of the United States was very much a self-made man. Van Buren''s ideal of a political party was one that would be national in scope, based on an alliance of North and South. By building a party that drew its strength from every section of the country, Van Buren could force the opposing party to do the same-if it wanted to have any hope of competing successfully for control of Congress and the presidency. Each party would seek to maintain its appeal throughout the nation, and as this pertained to the South, that meant each party would do its best to suppress all criticism of slavery. Once established, the system created a political dynamic that made slavery persistently invisible on the national political stage. Van Buren had done as much as anyone to construct the party system by building the Democratic Party, first as a staunch supporter and trusted advisor of party founder Andrew Jackson and later as the party''s victorious standard-bearer. As president he was now the active leader of the more coherent and powerful of the nation''s two political parties. And he had a serious problem. Within weeks of his taking office, the bottom had fallen out of the American economy. In April 1837 some 250 businesses had failed in New York City alone, and by mid-May every bank in the city had suspended payments of gold and silver. By the end of that month total losses from business failures in New York had reached $100 million. Over the months that followed, 40 percent of the nation''s banks folded, and many of the others were crippled and on the brink of collapse. An epidemic of bankruptcies swept the country. Unemployment was rampant and economic suffering intense as the United States plunged into a depression that dwarfed any other in the national experience prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Why had all this happened? As usual with economics, the root causes are hard to untangle, but it seems that British investors had been bullish on America during the early 1830s, investing so lavishly that the inflow of their gold effectively doubled the U.S. money supply. At the same time, U.S. bankers had recklessly expanded credit, with banknotes in circulation jumping from $95 million to $140 million during the middle years of the decade. With the easy credit provided by scores of eager investors, a number of state governments foolishly borrowed dizzying sums to finance lavish programs of transportation improvements-railroads, canals, and the like. Midway through the decade, the Bank of England became alarmed at the ongoing export of capital and changed its policies so as to make investing in Britain more attractive. The resulting diversion in the flow of British investment capital might at first seem an insignificant cause for the massive financial crash America suffered in 1837, but credit bubbles, such as the one that had formed in the United States during the first half of the 1830s, are notoriously skittish. Like a slight vibration on a snow-covered mountainside, even a small tremor in the money supply can trigger an avalanche that carries away everything in its path. So it was with the U.S. economy of the 1830s, as the withdrawal of British investments triggered an inexorable credit contraction that historians would come to call the Panic of 1837. Van Buren handled the situation about as well as any president could have. He resisted the temptation to get the government entangled in the economy-and thus compound the nation''s troubles and prolong the depression. He worked hard to establish an independent subtreasury system that would keep government funds from distorting the banking and credit markets, and he did his best to secure the federal government''s financial situation so that it at least would not drag the economy down further. That was more than could be said

Details ISBN0307277704 Author Steven E. Woodworth Short Title MANIFEST DESTINIES Language English ISBN-10 0307277704 ISBN-13 9780307277701 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 970.04 Year 2011 Imprint Random House Inc Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Birth 1951 Series Vintage Civil War Library Subtitle America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War Residence TX, US Affiliation Texas Christian University Qualifications PH D Publication Date 2011-11-01 AU Release Date 2011-11-01 NZ Release Date 2011-11-01 US Release Date 2011-11-01 UK Release Date 2011-11-01 Pages 448 Publisher Random House USA Inc Illustrations 8 PP B&W; 19 MAPS Audience General We've got this

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