Period 1 APUSH

World War 1

"The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism run stark mad." Col. Edward House, President Woodrow Wilson's closest adviser, did not exaggerate when he wrote these words. The Europe he described in the spring of 1914 was divided into two armed camps: the Triple Entente (Russia, France, and Great Britain) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria‐Hungary, and Italy). An unprecedented arms race was underway that coincided with revolutionary advances in the technology of warfare. Magazine‐loading rifles, belt‐fed machine guns, and improved artillery dramatically increased the firepower of armies. Relying on an expanding network of railways, the general staffs of the major European powers devised elaborate mobilization and offensive schemes. The smallest details were covered, including the preparation of exact railway timetables and even the registration of farmers' horses for possible use. Universal conscription fostered militarism. Governments identified and registered able‐bodied males of military age. Approximately 4 million men were in uniform when the war started in August 1914; that number had risen to a staggering 20 million by the end of the month. Europe's military elite, accepting Carl von Clausewitz's military principles of "the decisive force, at the decisive place, at the decisive time," were committed to an offensive strategy designed to climax in one or two great decisive battles. Clausewitz's ideas on war may also have influenced society. The historian John Keegan argues that Europe had been transformed into a warrior society by the acceptance of Clausewitz's maxims that war was a continuation of political activity and that "war is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds." A month after House's letter, the assassination on 28 June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro‐Hungarian throne, precipitated a general European crisis that quickly became unmanageable. The Austrians, given unequivocal support by their ally, Germany, blamed Serbia for the archduke's death and decided to crush Serbia's challenge to the fragile Austro‐Hungarian empire. Vienna's determination to go to war triggered a general conflict. The illusion that modern industrialized wars would be short made this decision easier. Few believed the Polish banker and economist, Ivan S. Bloch, the author of The Future of War in Its Economic and Political Relations: Is War Now Impossible? (1898), who argued that modern military technology had made unlimited war mutually destructive for the participants. Compared to the great powers of Europe, the United States was a profoundly peaceful and unmilitaristic nation. Prior to America's entry into the war in April 1917, Wilson's secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels, was decidedly antiwar if not pacifistic, and Newton Baker, secretary of war since 1916, was an ardent antimilitarist. The U.S. Navy had expanded to defend American shores and trade routes, but the U.S. Army ranked seventeenth in the world. The United States was the world's number one industrial power, but the army lacked modern weaponry, including tanks, poison gas, aircraft, heavy artillery, and trench mortars. War mobilization, 1917-18, failed to remedy this deficiency: the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) largely fought with foreign weapons. Although legally neutral, the United States had become a vital factor for the Allies with their growing dependence on American credit and material. Caught between the effective Allied naval blockade and Germany's submarine warfare campaign, America's right to trade overseas was jeopardized. To keep the United States from being drawn into the global conflict, Wilson attempted mediation. With the European belligerents unable to take the U.S. military seriously, he had little diplomatic leverage except for American economic might. The European nations wanted a peace to reflect their immense sacrifices in blood and treasure. But an acceptable peace to one side represented defeat to the other. Wilson's mediation efforts implied that he was prepared to accept a global role for the United States to obtain a compromise peace, but he certainly never imagined any circumstances that would involve American forces in what he referred to as the "mechanical game of slaughter" in France. Nor apparently could he identify any strategic interest for the United States in the total defeat of Germany, which he believed would result in an unbalanced peace of victors. His formula for a satisfactory end to the fighting as he announced in January 1917 was "peace without victory." Pressed into the war in April 1917 by Germany's gamble for quick victory through unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson initially believed that American belligerency would largely be economic and psychological and that the central powers could be forced to the peace table without U.S. troops becoming involved on European battlefields. Pressure from London and Paris and the realization that his voice in any peace conference would be small without an American military presence in Europe changed his mind. Only once before, during the American Revolution, had the United States fought as part of a military alliance. The General Staff in the War Department, however, quickly concluded that the only way that the United States could fight in Europe was through a collective military enterprise with the British and French on the western front. Nonetheless, America's leadership was determined to maintain a distinct military and political position. Wilson immediately disassociated himself from the entente's controversial war objectives by insisting that the United States was an "associate power," with freedom to conduct independent goals. The commander in chief of the AEF, John J. Pershing, proved an excellent choice to defend a separate and distinct U.S. military role in the war. The AEF commander tenaciously adhered to his goal of an independent U.S. force with its own front, supply lines, and strategic goals. His preparations for a win‐the‐war American breakthrough to occur in 1919 in Lorraine to the east and west of Metz profoundly influenced America's military participation. The United States supported unity of command and the selection of Gen. Ferdinand Foch as generalissimo; but Pershing resisted anything but the temporary amalgamation of American units into French and British divisions, even during the grave military crisis confronting the Allies in the spring of 1918. The German High Command, with Russia knocked out of the war in the winter of 1917-18, attempted to destroy the French Army and drive the British from the Continent through a series of offensives. Pershing resisted the only means of immediately assisting the depleted Allied forces: the inclusion of American units in British and French divisions. Small numbers of American soldiers, however, began to enter combat under the American flag in May and June. On 28 May, 14 months after the United States entered the war, a reinforced U.S. regiment (about 4,000 men) captured the village of Cantigny. Several days later, the Second Division (which included a Marine brigade) took up a defensive position west of Château‐Thierry and engaged the advancing Germans. Pershing rebuffed efforts by Allied soldiers to share their increasingly sophisticated tactical techniques with his forces. Revisionists have been critical of his emphasis on riflemen, the American frontier spirit, and open field tactics, arguing that he did not comprehend how science and the machine age had revolutionized warfare. After gaining reluctant approval from Foch for the formation of an independent American force, the U.S. First Army, Pershing went forward with plans to eliminate the threatening salient of St. Mihiel, as a prelude to his Metz offensive. The Battle of St. Mihiel (12-16 September 1918) proved to be an impressive but misleading U.S. victory because German forces were in the process of withdrawing to a new and shorter defensive line when the Americans attacked and cut off the salient. The pressing demands of coalition warfare, however, forced Pershing to delay preparations for his 1919 Metz campaign. Complying with Foch's strategy, he reluctantly shifted most of his troops some sixty miles northward to the Meuse‐Argonne sector, where he was expected to participate in simultaneous and converging Allied attacks against the large German salient. Logistical chaos, flawed tactics, and inexperienced men and officers contributed to a disastrous start to the Meuse‐Argonne offensive (26 September-11 November 1918). Pershing hoped to advance ten miles on the first day; his front, however, had moved just thirty‐four miles by the armistice six weeks later, much of the ground gained only during the last phase of the offensive when Germany had exhausted its reserves. Although only involved in heavy fighting for 110 days, the AEF made vital contributions to Germany's defeat. With tens of thousands of "doughboys" crossing the Atlantic to reinforce the Allies, and with the AEF emerging as a superior fighting force, the exhausted and depleted Germans had no hope of avoiding total defeat if the war continued into 1919. Before Berlin's appeal in early October for a peace based on Wilson's Fourteen Points, the United States was on the verge of brilliantly coordinating its participation in the land war in Europe with its political plans to reshape the postwar world. If the war had continued into the spring of 1919, Pershing's plan to deliver a knockout blow to the German Army probably would have been achieved. Gen. Jan C. Smuts, the South African statesman who served in the British War Cabinet, warned the British government in October: if the war continued another year, the United States would become the "diplomatic dictator of the world." In contrast to Pershing's wishes for total victory, Wilson hoped to avoid placing Germany at the mercy of the Allies. American participation had not been designed to further the British empire, strengthen French security, or even maintain the European balance of power. Wilson stood not with the interests of the nation‐states, but with the rights of humankind. He thus attempted with mixed results to use separate negotiations with Berlin over an armistice to impose his Fourteen Points on the Allies as well as Germany. As the Great War concluded with the armistice on 11 November 1918, American policy was directed toward the repudiation of power politics and the erection of a "permanent" peace. Wilsonianism promised an end to war primarily through democratic institutions, the end of secret diplomacy, the self‐determination for ethnic minorities, and most especially through a League of Nations. It has been argued that this visionary approach raised expectations that were impossible to meet. The war had destroyed the old balance of power in Europe, and the peace settlement made revisionist nations out of the two states that would soon dominate the Continent, Germany and the Soviet Union. The United States, the greatest economic beneficiary of the war, helped make the peace, but with its rejection of the Treaty of Versailles refused responsibility for maintaining it. A war in which over 65 million troops had been mobilized by the belligerents ended in a twenty‐year truce instead of "permanent peace." The failure to achieve Wilson's unrealistic though desirable goal was hardly surprising. But another general war was not inevitable. World War II was caused by many factors, including the flawed peace settlement of 1919, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the psychological scars of World War I, which enfeebled the democracies. But the inability of the victorious powers, especially Great Britain and the United States, to work together to prevent the resurgence of German military power, was certainly one of the most important reasons for the resumption of war in 1939.

Border States

After the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861, a large majority of the people of Maryland, western Virginia, and Missouri rallied to the Union cause, and by September, Kentucky also openly sided with the North in its struggle against the secessionist South. Unionist sentiment ran strongest in the cities and in communities accessible to railroads and navigable rivers. Confederate sympathizers emerged as a significant minority faction in some areas of the border states, particularly among slave-holders. Although much harassed by Confederate raids and guerrilla bands, the border states contributed heavily in men to the Union armies and played a major role in the Confederacy's defeat.

English Settlement

Colonization, extension of political and economic control over an area by a state whose nationals have occupied the area and usually possess organizational or technological superiority over the native population. It may consist simply in a migration of nationals to the territory, or it may be the formal assumption of control over the territory by military or civil representatives of the dominant power (see colony). Overpopulation, economic distress, social unrest, and religious persecution in the home country may be factors that cause colonization, but imperialism, more or less aggressive humanitarianism, and a desire for adventure or individual improvement are also causes. Colonization may be state policy, or it may be a private project sponsored by chartered corporations or by associations and individuals. Before colonization can be effected, the indigenous population must be subdued and assimilated or converted to the culture of the colonists; otherwise, a modus vivendi must be established by the imposition of a treaty or an alliance The Portuguese and Spanish became great colonizing nations at the end of the Middle Ages. Portuguese colonization, which received impetus from the development of greatly improved methods of navigation, began with the establishment of trading ports in Africa and the East, while the Spanish concentrated most of their efforts in the Americas. Both the Spanish and the Portuguese exercised strict governmental control over their colonies and used them primarily as a basis for rich commerce with the parent government. They discouraged them from becoming economically self-sufficient. n the late 16th and early 17th cent., the English, Dutch, and French began to undertake colonization through the agency of chartered companies. The greatest of these private trading companies was the British East India Company, which played a vital role in the history of the British Empire. The French generally adhered to mercantilist theory in establishing their colonies, using them mainly for the economic advantage of France. The English colonists in North America, however, were, in many respects, virtually independent of the parent country, the most serious restriction being the establishment of a trade monopoly by the home government through the Navigation Acts. Because their territory was suitable for settlement, rather than exploitation, the residence of the British colonists in America tended to be permanent. The increase in overseas trade and colonial consumption helped to stimulate the Industrial Revolution, which in turn, because of the increased technological superiority afforded Europe, especially Great Britain, and because of the greater desire for markets and raw materials, gave added impetus to colonization and made it easier to accomplish. Although Great Britain lost most of its North American colonies as a result of the American Revolution, other acquisitions (most notably in India) soon made it the greatest colonial power in the world. The French, stripped of one colonial empire in the colonial wars of the 18th cent., established another in the 19th cent. The Germans and Japanese Germany emerged as an industrial empire in the late 19th cent., but found the colonies of other powers closed to German products and, therefore, embarked upon its own colonial adventures. Japan, also recently industrialized, followed the same path. These ambitions helped to bring on World Wars I and II. Germany was stripped of its colonies after the first conflict; Japan lost its colonies after the second. Decline of Colonization Modern colonization, frequently preceded by an era in which missionaries and traders were active, was largely exploitative, but it did not in the long run prove directly lucrative to the colonial power, because it involved a heavy drain on the treasury of the home government. After World War II, there was increasing agitation and violence in the European colonial empires as subject peoples demanded their independence. Most colonies were granted or won independence from the imperial powers; those belonging to Portugal were among the last major colonies to become independent. Today, only a few remnants of the great colonial empires survive, mainly as self-governing dependencies (e.g., Aruba, Bermuda, and French Guiana). Colonization in its classical form is rarely practiced today and is widely considered to be immoral. In 1585, Richard Hakluyt the elder assured English readers of his pamphlet, Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage Intended towards Virginia, that North America held the economic potential to form the basis of a great English commercial empire. English colonization would open lucrative new American markets for "the Woollen clothes of England" and "sundry [of] our commodities upon the tract of that firme land." The "situation of the climate" and the "excellent soile" would in turn make North America an excellent source of "Oade [a blue dye], Oile, Wines, Hops, Salt," all of which English people could expect to obtain "better cheape than we now receive them." Hakluyt anticipated that the abundance of North American hides, whales, seals, and fish would all give England an edge in a market for these goods which was traditionally dominated by Russian merchants. The "excellent and fertile soile" on both sides of North America's "greate and deep" natural waterways promised "all things that the life of man doth require," and whatever settlers wanted to plant they could expect to harvest in abundance sufficient to "trafficke in." Over the next 178 years, enterprising merchants and traders and hard-working Native Americans and settlers slowly made into reality Hakluyt's vision of North America as an integral part of a British North Atlantic commercial system. The first to feel the effects of this transformation were the Native Americans, who met English vessels at the shore with valuable furs which they readily exchanged for prized English goods such iron tools, glass beads, and woven cloth. Most early English settlements depended heavily on such trade to repay investors who had financed their voyages, and some economies such as New York's continued to rely significantly on the "Indian trade" through much of the colonial period. The fur trade also exerted a profound impact on Native American economic life as imported European goods began displacing traditional tools, weapons, utensils, apparel, and ornamentation. The historian James Axtell has termed this process "the first consumer revolution" in which Native Americans' appetite for European goods spurred the growth of a Native market for European products that extended rapidly into the interior of North America. Trade with Europeans altered nearly everything about Native life, disrupting and redirecting traditional trading patterns, producing a strain on the natural environment through over-hunting and over-trapping, and changing the way that American Indians clothed themselves, cooked their food, cultivated their soil, and hunted their game. Iron tools replaced implements of bone and stone, woolen garments replaced buckskin, muskets replaced arrows and spears. By 1700 many eastern woodland Indians had become permanently dependent on European commerce, and their participation in colonial commerce contributed greatly to North American economic growth. Settlers of Jamestown, the first successful English settlement in North America, shared with the adventurers of the earlier, ill-fated Roanoake settlement of 1585 the hope of tapping into precious sources of New World mineral wealth. The founding settlers expected to exploit Virginia's game, fishing, and agriculture, and establishing a lucrative trade with the neighboring Powhattan empire. Nearly all these hopes were dashed as the Chesapeake colony teetered on the brink of failure for more than a decade. They found no gold or gems, manufacturing enterprises such as a glassworks failed, their Old World work habits ill-prepared them for the demanding task of tilling and planting virgin soil, they were continually racked by disease, and their repeated provocation resulted in perpetual strife with their Indian neighbors. Tobacco, which the settler John Rolfe began cultivating in 1610, eventually became the staple crop that saved the colony. Europeans loved the crop in spite of the denunciations of smoking by prominent figures, including King James I himself. Jamestown planters were soon cultivating the "stinking weed" wherever they could find suitable land. Tobacco plantations began springing up along Chesapeake estuaries, creating a growing demand for labor and land as successful planters increased their holdings to put even more tobacco into cultivation. Settlers who founded the colony of Maryland in 1634 quickly began following the example of their Virginia neighbors. For much of the seventeenth century, Chesapeake planters relied mainly on the labor of indentured servants from England, occasionally supplementing that labor force with captive Indians or Africans whose status varied from person to person. English indentured servants bound themselves to work for a period of four to seven years, after which they were released. Many Africans brought to North America before 1660 shared that status, but a growing number came as slaves for life. Disease and malnutrition made life miserable for both European and African servants. When the supply of European servants began dwindling after 1660, planters turned increasingly to African slaves. By 1700, the economies of Virginia and Maryland had come to depend on the labor of lifetime slaves of African descent who cultivated the main export crop. A very different economy emerged in the colonies of New England as families migrated to Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Haven, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire to escape pressure to conform to the state-sanctioned ceremonies of the Church of England. The colder northern climate prevented the cultivation of staple crops common in England, but the land was suitable for traditional English farming methods. Significant equality in the size of family property was insured in many parts of New England by an orderly process of land distribution. The New England governments granted large tracts to incorporated towns, which would in turn grant parcels to heads of households on the basis of present and future need. Commerce boomed during Massachusetts Bay's first decade of settlement as earlier settlers prospered by producing goods for sale to the thousands of new arrivals who took passage each year. Yet when the flow of migration ceased after the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, the nascent market economy dried up. Massachusetts officials sought to compensate by developing overseas markets, successfully establishing a trading partnership with British colonies in the West Indies that continued throughout the colonial period. Yet the bulk of the New England economy rested on family farms. Their production was oriented toward achieving, not the exorbitant profits sought by great tobacco and sugar planters, but a "competence" in which members and heirs of each household could expect to enjoy an adequate diet, clothing, housing, and the modest comfort and enjoyment of family and community life. Other seventeenth-century Anglo-American economies varied somewhat from these two early models. The Hudson River settlements, founded by the Dutch in 1613 and captured by the English in 1664, early centered on the fur trade but also developed a significant agricultural base. The New York agricultural economy was distinguished by the great Hudson River estates on which a few large landholding families such as the Livingstons achieved great wealth from the large numbers of tenant farmers who farmed their lands. The economies of Pennsylvania and the Jerseys rested on family farming by English, German, Scottish, and Scotch-Irish settlers. South Carolina, like Virginia, became a slave society which produced agricultural goods—in this case rice and indigo dye—for a lucrative European market. Many colonies, like North Carolina, also provided England with important sources of goods such as naval stores—white pine masts for ships, turpentine, pine tar, and hemp for rope. By 1650 the commercial output of England's colonies had grown large enough to begin enriching many English planters as well as the Dutch merchants who transported tobacco and sugar from the English West Indian and Chesapeake markets to European ports. With the Restoration of Charles II to the throne of England in 1660, Parliament and royal officials began an energetic effort to shape a more consistent policy of colonial commerce that would favor English merchants and shippers while cutting the Dutch out of Anglo-American trade. The Navigation Act of 1660 restricted colonial trade to ships constructed in either England or English America which carried a crew at least 75 per cent English or Anglo-American. In addition, the act listed certain "enumerated goods"— tobacco, sugar, cotton, indigo, dyewoods, and ginger—that could be transported only to England or another colonial port. Over the next forty years Parliament refined its commercial policy by passing further Navigation Acts and developing the colonial administrative body that eventually became the Board of Trade. The system, never perfect, suffered from periodic abuse and neglect and was regularly circumvented by smugglers. Nevertheless, by the time the Act of Union united Scotland and England under one Parliament in 1707, a workable administrative framework for Anglo-American trade was in place, fostering the growth of a dynamic eighteenth-century empire of goods that benefited both Britain and her North American colonies. Most historians agree that the colonial economy grew slowly but steadily during the first half of the eighteenth century, stimulating a corresponding rise in the volume of imported British goods. After 1740, however, the volume of cheap British imports to the colonies began an exponential rise in what some historians have termed an Anglo-American "commercial revolution." English manufacturers using traditional methods of production found ways to make more goods available at cheaper prices than ever before, and English merchants found ways to get these goods to prospective buyers through innovative marketing techniques such as paid newspaper advertisements and attractive shop displays. As the volume of imports rose and the prices dropped more colonists purchased more goods each year. In 1700, for example, only the wealthiest colonists could afford to drink tea regularly, and their homes alone were graced with elegant tea sets. Yet by 1760 tea, like the sugar that sweetened it, had become a "decency" enjoyed by the "middling sort" of colonist as well as the wealthy. The building of market roads and the clearing of river channels carried imported English goods a little further inland every year, and colonists found ways to acquire or reallocate the extra income needed to purchase a growing array of items. They could dress in a widening variety of European fabrics adorned with a growing selection of European lace and buttons, and complete their outfits with fashionable silk stockings, gloves, and wigs. They could pane their windows with imported glass, decorate their parlors with fashionable imported candlesticks, and set their tables with inexpensive ceramic tableware. This growing participation in a transatlantic market of goods exerted a variety of pressures on eighteenth-century American life. The colonial appetite for imports produced a chronic trade imbalance between the colonies and England, resulting in a perpetual drain of hard currency from the colonies. Colonists responded in a variety of ways such as borrowing from European merchants against the value of future export crops and authorizing the issue of paper currency to expand the money supply. American Indians' increasing dependence on European goods began producing a backlash after 1740 as native prophets such as Neolin called upon Indians to purge themselves of European textiles, tools, and rum to reassert their native identity and regain their spiritual vitality. In contrast, the growing consumption of British goods contributed to a growing commonality of tastes, experiences, and identity among Anglo-American colonists who came to think of themselves increasingly as British Americans. Indeed, colonial protest and Revolution are almost inconceivable without this process. The Stamp Act and Townshend Duties that sparked the protest might not have been passed if the volume of colonial trade were not so great by the 1760s, and the protest might never have been so widespread or popular had not so many Anglo-Americans felt the sting of taxes on the British goods they wished to purchase.

Spanish Settlement

During the colonial era, from 1492 to 1821, Spain sent explorers, conquerors, and settlers to the New World. The territories that became part of the Spanish empire were called New Spain. At its height, New Spain included all of Mexico, Central America to the Isthmus of Panama, the lands that today are the southwestern United States and Florida , and much of the West Indies (islands in the Caribbean Sea). (It also included the Philippines, off the coast of southeast Asia.) New Spain was governed as a viceroyalty, a province headed by a representative of the king or queen of Spain. Beginning in 1535, its capital was Mexico City. During the colonial period, Spain claimed other territories in the New World in northern and western South America. Most of these holdings fell under the viceroyalty of Peru, which was administered separately from the viceroyalty of New Spain. Spain's mission to build an empire in the New World began with the expeditions of a Genoan seafarer named Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), who convinced the Spanish royalty he could find a western route across the Atlantic Ocean to the Indies (Asia). He sailed west in 1492 and six months later landed on islands in the Caribbean Sea. Columbus mistakenly concluded he had reached the Indies and brought news of his new route back to Spain. In 1501, Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), for whom the Americas were ultimately named, sailed far down the coast of South America. Vespucci proved what had long been suspected: Columbus had landed nowhere near Asia, but he had discovered an unknown continent—the New World. With the aid of several explorers—Vasco Núnez de Balboa (1475-1519), who traveled across the Isthmus of Panama; Juan Ponce de León (1460-1521), who explored Florida; Hernando de Soto (c. 1500-1542), who navigated the Mississippi River; and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (c. 1510—1554), who traveled through northern Mexico and the southwestern United States—the Spanish laid claim to much of both North and South America for their king. Spain was fast and effective in claiming its huge empire in the Americas. Its conquest of American natives happened within a few decades. Spanish conquistadors , or conquerors, destroyed the two most powerful civilizations of the New World, the Aztecs in present-day Mexico in 1521 and the Incas in Peru in 1535. After winning the battles, the conquistadors killed the leaders of each civilization and took over their leadership, Demanding obedience, labor, and conversion to Christianity of the survivors. The Spanish sought wealth in the New World. They had found supplies of gold and silver but needed miners to extract the precious metals. They also established plantations, growing sugar and other crops, and needed farm workers. For labor, the new rulers initially relied on the encomienda system, a system of labor in which the Spanish government awarded individual conquistadors with the labor and goods of the native people of a region. Encomienda virtually enslaved the native people. Spain's arrival in the New World resulted in widespread death and depopulation for the native people of the Western Hemisphere. The conquistadors killed many Native Americans in raids and wars, and they also brought with them deadly epidemic diseases such as measles and smallpox. (See Epidemics in the New World .) In some tribes, the death rate reached 90 percent (nine out of ten people died). This catastrophic death rate disorganized Native American cultures, wiping out political and religious leaders, family life, trade, farming practices, military defense, the arts, and other aspects of their social systems. The Spanish, still requiring laborers, began to import people kidnapped into slavery from Africa. The government of Spain profited greatly from its share of precious metals found in the New World. Historians estimate that between 1500 and 1650 Spain carried more than 180 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver from New Spain to Europe. The extraction of gold during this period was about ten times more than that of all the rest of the world combined. Spain became one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world. But in time, the imported metals caused economic inflation (a major increase in general prices, while income or purchasing power remains the same) in Spain. By the seventeenth century, the American metals were depleted and Spain's economy was in ruins. In 1524 Spanish King Charles V (1519-1556) created the Council of the Indies to govern the New World territories. In New Spain, he appointed two separate audiencias (courts that combined judicial, legislative, and administrative functions) and then named a viceroy. The viceroy was the chief executive, but his powers were limited by the audi-encia. The government of New Spain drew on many Spanish traditions. Towns established cabildos (town councils) and were headed by local officials. On paper, the Spanish government in Mexico City ruled over all the remote areas of New Spain. In reality, there was considerable local self-government. Communication between Spain and the Indies was slow, and local royal officials were as likely to follow the desires of local rulers as they were to carry out the wishes of the Crown. The desire to conquer new lands and to find more gold and silver led explorers into the vast territories of the north. The expeditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries expanded Spanish claims into what are now the southeastern Gulf Coast states and the entire Southwest of the United States. It was far too vast a domain to be held militarily, and it produced no golden cities. Thus only isolated outposts were established, the most important of which were in the present states of Texas , New Mexico , and California . The sparsely populated northern frontier regions had to adapt to frontier life and thus differed in structure from southern New Spain. The most important frontier institutions were the presidios (military garrisons) and the Spanish missions , where Franciscan, Jesuit, and Dominican missionaries attempted to convert Indians to Catholicism and integrate them into colonial society. Towns gradually grew up around some of the missions. The most successful and prosperous of these settlements was the kingdom of New Mexico. By 1821, it had a total population of roughly forty thousand, far outnumbering the thousand or so "Spanish" settlers that each had colonized Arizona , Texas, and California. The kingdom of New Mexico became a relatively prosperous colony, in comparison to the others in northern New Spain, primarily because the Pueblo Indians were already settled farmers with established towns near water. By the early nineteenth century, New Spain was large and well populated, with slightly over six million people. This was only one million fewer than the population of the United States. Mexico City was the largest city in the Americas. In Spain, only Madrid was larger. The people of New Spain were divided into castas, or castes. Indians made up 60 percent of the population. People of mixed racial ancestry made up another 22 percent. The remaining 18 percent were Europeans, of whom nearly all were criollos (people of Spanish ancestry, but born in the New World). Only 0.2 percent were peninsulares, or Spanish-born Spaniards, who held all the high offices in the colonial administration, military, and church. The criollos were usually local leaders, holding nearly two-thirds of colonial administrative offices, and filling the lower ranks of the military and clergy. Criollos also owned mines and haciendas (plantations or large estates). The urban poor lived on the edge of starvation, regularly facing food shortages and plagues. France invaded Spain in 1808, and two years later Mexico began its war of independence. Spain was severely weakened. The United States absorbed much of West Florida in 1810 and 1814. On two occasions, it invaded the parts of Florida still under nominal Spanish rule to suppress raids on U.S. territory by hostile Indians. In 1821, Spain, unable to control the territory, sold Florida to the United States. That same year, a Mexican rebellion ended Spanish rule there (and in Texas) and the colonial empire of New Spain was dissolved. By 1898, Spain had relinquished all its possessions in North America.

Separatists

English Protestants who would not accept allegiance in any form to the Church of England. Included the Pilgrims and Quakers. Pilgrims- separatists who left England for the Netherlands between 1607 and 1609. Hoped to worship freely in Holland. Decided to sail to America and they landed on cape cod, the mainland that they called Plymouth. Mayflower Compact- This document was drafted by the Pilgrims at Plymouth Bay in Massachusetts; the 41 males who signed it agreed to accept majority rule and participate in a government in the best interest of all members of the colony. This agreement set the precedent for later documents outlining commonwealth rule. Quakers- English dissenters who broke from Church of England, preach a doctrine of pacificism, inner divinity, and social equity, under William Penn they founded Pennsylvania. Known for religious tolerance, emphasis on peace, and idealistic Indian Policy.

Huguenots

French Calvinists; brutally suppressed in France. French Protestants who were often times persecuted b the government and Roman catholic church. They left France when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and many emigrated to North America. Samuel de Champlain was a Catholic soldier and explorer who believed that Catholics and Huguenots could work together to convert the Indians. Made 11 trips to Canada and put a Huguenot settlement in Nova Scotia. Sought to make a colony more tolerant than France but failed to do so. On second trip (1604-1606) he sailed up the St. Lawrence River, founded Quebec; failed to unite Catholics and Protestants. Wars of Religion- Religious conflict between the Huguenots (French protestants) and Catholics in France; lasted 1560s-1590s; blocked expansion for France during 16th century Admiral Pedro Méndez de Avilés was in command of Havana when Spain and turned it into a fortified, year round naval base after Huguenots sacked it; attacked Huguenot settlements in 1565 and executed anyone who did not accept Catholic faith. Henry IV- French Protestant king politique who converted to Catholicism during Wars of Religion to restore peace in France; granted toleration (limited) to Huguenots thru Edict of Nantes in 1598, which ended the Religious Wars in France and helped bolster the nation.kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

THE INDIANS:

GEOGRAPHY, CULTURAL TENDENCIES + VALUES, TECHNOLOGIES + LABOR SYSTEMS

Spanish American War

In the late nineteenth century, the United States grew in industrial and economic strength. By the 1880s, the nation was one of the most robust in the Western Hemisphere, wielding increasing power in the region despite a stated policy of neutrality. In 1898, diplomatic relations between the United States and Spain began to sour over Spain's domination of Latin America and some parts of the Caribbean. Reports of the brutal rule of Spanish General Valeriano Wyler in Cuba inflamed public opinion in the United States. The convergence of anti-Spanish public opinion and the government's desire to protect American economic interests in Cuba prompted tense diplomatic meetings between Spain and the United States. Vessel. 266 Navy seamen and two high-ranking officers perished in the accident. The event consumed newspaper headlines for weeks. Sensationalistic reporting, dubbed "yellow journalism," helped to swell the tide of pro-war sentiment in the United States. Within weeks of the sinking of the Maine, intelligence operatives intercepted a private letter between the Spanish Ambassador to the United States and a friend in Havana, Cuba. The letter disparaged U.S. President McKinley, and hinted at plans to commit acts of sabotage against American property in Cuba. The letter was published by several newspapers, further agitating public opinion. On April 19, 1898, Congress resolved to end Spanish rule in Cuba. In the first military action of the war, the United States blockaded Cuban ports on April 22, 1898. The Navy transferred several vessels to neighboring Florida to consolidate the forces available to fight the Spanish in the Caribbean. Naval presence off the Florida coast also facilitated the transfer of information from the battlefront to the government in Washington, D.C. The Office of Naval Intelligence established sophisticated communications intelligence operations in support of their efforts in Cuba. Martin Hellings, who worked for the International Ocean Telegraph Company, was sent to Key West, Florida, to intercept Spanish messages. Hellings convinced other telegraph operators to copy Spanish diplomatic messages and deliver the copies to him. Within a few days, he operated a sizable communications ring, conducting surveillance on underwater and land-based telegraph cables. Hellings also employed a courier to run special messages between his offices and United States ships in the region. The theater of war rapidly expanded to include other Spanish strongholds, including the Philippines. Intelligence operations were not initially as well developed in the Pacific as they were in the region around Cuba. Cuba's proximity to the Florida coast aided intelligence and espionage operations. United States military commanders knew little about the Philippines and the Spanish defenses there. To obtain information, the Office of Navy Intelligence and the Army's Military Intelligence Division employed human intelligence. Agents were sent to the remote islands to obtain information about Spanish defenses, military strength, and island terrain. The operation moved swiftly, and within weeks, United States commanders learned that the Spanish were ill-prepared to fight a strong offensive in the Philippines. On May 1, 1898, the United States Asiatic Squadron, under the command of George Dewey, sailed into Manila Bay and attacked the Spanish. The Spanish fleet was decimated, but the United States sustained no losses. Though the Spanish surrendered the Philippines, the United States fleet remained, and began a campaign to take the island as a United States territory. The ensuing conflict lasted until 1914. Human intelligence was not limited to operations in the Philippines. The United States employed covert agents in Europe, Cuba, and Canada. These agents aided the war effort by spying on Spanish diplomats abroad and providing intelligence information to dissident groups in Cuba. German-educated Henry Ward traveled to Spain in the guise of a German physician. William Sims, an American attaché in Paris, managed a spy ring throughout the Mediterranean. In Cuba, Andrew Rowan united rebel groups and reported on the location and size of the Spanish fleet. He supervised the trafficking of arms to rebel outfits and helped plan their assaults on Spanish targets. Human intelligence also contributed to counterintelligence efforts. Based on agent reports, the United States Secret Service was able to infiltrate and destroy a Spanish spy ring working in Montreal, Canada. In June 1898 United States intelligence learned, via telegraph intercepts, that the Spanish fleet planned to attack the U.S. blockade in Cuba and draw ships into a naval battle in the Caribbean. When the Spanish fleet arrived in the region, United States Naval Intelligence tracked them and gave chase. United States commanders hoped to deplete Spanish fuel reserves before engaging them in battle. The United States backed off, and redeployed to aid blockade ships stationed around Havana. The Spanish ships proceeded undetected to the narrow harbor of Santiago, Cuba. When the Spanish commander telegraphed his government to declare his position, U.S. agents working in Florida intercepted the cable. The United States fleet moved to intercept the Spanish at Santiago. The U.S. Navy blockaded the port and immobilized the Spanish fleet. The Spanish attempted to run the blockade on July 3, but the entire fleet of six ships was destroyed. In the final phase of the war, the United States deployed ground forces to sweep Spanish forces out of Havana and Santiago. The "Rough Riders," the most famous of which was Theodore Roosevelt, worked with rebel groups to take control of the nation's capitol and ferret out remaining Spanish forces in the countryside. The U.S. troops then departed Cuba for Puerto Rico, driving the Spanish from the island. The war ended with the Spanish surrender on July 17, 1898. The event signaled a new international stance for the United States, as the nation began to acquire territories and dominate the politics of the Western Hemisphere. As a result of the Spanish-American War, or in its immediate wake, the United States gained Guantanamo Bay, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Hawaii. The Spanish-American War, though a brief conflict, helped to revolutionize United States intelligence organizations and their operations. Before the war, agencies like the Office of Naval Intelligence relied on openly available sources for their information. After the war, personnel were trained in espionage tradecraft, and covert operations became standard intelligence community practice. Congress briefly entertained the idea of establishing a permanent, civilian intelligence corps, but the agency never materialized. Despite the progress made with technological surveillance, espionage tradecraft, and inter-agency cooperation made during the war, the intelligence community was once again allowed to slip into disarray until the eve of World War I.

Alaska Purchase

In the mid-nineteenth century, the most economically advanced and powerful nations of Europe, such as Britain, France, and Spain, began to scramble for colonies in Asia and Africa. They shared similar motivations—to increase their economic strength through expanding trade networks and to extend their political clout through a worldwide presence. The relatively untapped resources of products and people in Asia and Africa created a trading boom for European imperial nations and increased their international prestige. In the face of growing European imperialism, the relatively young United States began to look about for its own expansion opportunities. The opportunity was found in the United States' backyard. The region of Alaska had for years been a Russian territory. As early as 1854 and 1860 the United States and Russia had been involved in unsuccessful attempts to arrange a purchase of the land, which spanned 586,400 square miles. U.S. westward expansion, once propelled by the doctrine of manifest destiny, had cooled with the additions of Texas, California, and the Oregon territory. Improvements in transportation, including a growing network of roads, canals, and railroads, made settlement and trade in the U.S. states and territories easier. Though some political friction remained over Russian enforcement of an 1824 treaty forbidding Americans from direct trade with the Alaskan natives, Americans frequently visited the Russian harbors in Alaska, to the profit of both sides. Alaska was explored and claimed by Russia in the mid-eighteenth century and contained numerous coastal cities with busy trading businesses. Russian population in the region, however, was low and concentrated mainly along the coastline. One of the more advanced coastal cities was Sitka. Settled in 1830, Sitka was known for its commerce and culture, and was the seat of a lucrative fur trade. Aleuts from the nearby islands gave the land the name Alaska and provided pelts for export. A multitude of Indians, Aleuts, Eskimos, and Russians worked in Sitka's warehouses, shops, flour mill, bakery, tannery, arsenal, and shipyard. Cities similar to Sitka lined Alaska's coastline. The California gold rush in the early 1850s led to a surge in America's western population. Trade out of coastal cities such as San Francisco prospered, and American pioneers and traders soon turned their attention northward. They came to Alaska to investigate its resources and found a wealth of timber, coal, copper, gold, and oil, as well as the world's richest salmon fishing grounds. These discoveries reinvigorated U.S. interest in the area. After 100 years of poor management and regular indifference on the part of the Russians, the territory's profitability had declined markedly by the time of the American purchase. Russia, having turned its attention to East Asia and fresh from defeat in the Crimean War of 1854, needed revenue and was willing to part with its North American territory to get it. The Russian minister to Washington, D.C., Edouard de Stoecki, and U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward successfully arranged the 1867 purchase of Alaska for the bargain amount of two cents an acre—a total of $7.2 million. Both sides thought they were getting the better deal. Report Advertisement Though the land was rich in natural resources and would prove to be a boon in fisheries and fur, the purchase met a dubious response from the American public. Critics of the purchase referred to it as Seward's Folly or Seward's Icebox. American pioneers and traders, however, did not hesitate. Between the purchase date in 1867 and the final Alaskan gold rush in the Klondike tributaries (1896-1897), people flocked to the region, looking to make their fortunes. With the first discovery of gold in Juneau in 1881, there was never a dearth of gold seekers. Large gold strikes at Nome brought more people in a gold rush fever and, behind them, came suppliers of physical and mining needs, who also profited from the region's booming resources. Others came to Alaska to break through the mountain barriers and explore its interior, mapping the Upper Yukon, stringing telegraph line, exploring northern Alaska to the Arctic Ocean, and discovering the glacier-lined shores of 40-mile-long Glacier Bay. Almost completely disorganized from a governmental standpoint, the human stampede to Alaska finally resulted in the passage of the 1884 Organic Act, which placed Alaska under a collection of federal laws and Oregon state laws. Congress enacted a second Organic Act in 1912, providing for land ownership, mail service, and civil government (as the Territory of Alaska). This form of government prevailed until 1959, when Alaska became the forty-ninth state in the federal union. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty resolved many disputed issues in British-American relations during the mid-nineteenth century. Of these, boundary disputes were the most prominent. After the War of 1812, the United States complained that Britain still habitually violated American sovereignty. The dispute over the northeastern boundary, between Maine and New Brunswick, Canada, had brought nationals of the two countries to the verge of armed hostility. This was settled by the treaty through what then appeared to be a wise compromise of territorial claims, which provided the present-day boundary line. (It was a concession that knowledge of Benjamin Franklin's Red-Line Map, not made public until 1932, would have made unnecessary, because the boundary had already been drawn.) The treaty also rectified the U.S.-Canada boundary at the head of the Connecticut River, at the north end of Lake Champlain, in the Detroit River, and at the head of Lake Superior. A useful extradition article and another providing for the free navigation of the St. John River were included in the treaty. Exchanges of notes covering the slave trade ensured the United States protection against "officious interference with American vessels" and the protection of "regularly-documented ships" known by the flag they flew.

Dutch Settlement

In the sixteenth century the United Provinces of the Netherlands rose from the status of a Spanish possession to a great European power. Dutch ships carried goods throughout the world for virtually every European nation, Dutch merchants and bankers made Amsterdam the economic center of Europe, and the Dutch navy was a power to be reckoned with. The Dutch empire was built on industry and trade, and Dutch merchants were remarkably pragmatic in political and economic matters. As a result, Dutch power grew more rapidly than English or French and, when Holland's power had peaked, it did not decline as precipitously as did Spain's. These same traits have helped make the Netherlands one of the world's most prosperous and egalitarian nations, a country that remains an economic powerhouse today. Dutch success was due to a number of political, economic, and military factors. Politically, the Dutch were the only European nation at that time with a republican government, rather than an absolute monarchy. This gave each citizen a greater stake in the nation's success, and a greater responsibility for helping the country to do well. This also gave more power to the Dutch merchants, whose shrewd business sense and pragmatism led them to a position of prominence in Europe. The success of Dutch merchants provided ample tax revenues from which the Dutch government could wage war, protect its borders, establish colonies, and care for its citizens. It also provided a large supply of money for lending at favorable interest rates, which, in turn, helped the Dutch government finance its activities when tax revenues were not sufficient. These three factors reinforced each other and enabled the Netherlands to achieve a prominence that belied its relatively small size and population. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Europe was in a nearly constant state of war. Alliances developed and shifted continually between England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and smaller states as the European nations first built themselves and then jockeyed for power and dominance. The Dutch and English fought three wars before allying against a French-Spanish force trying to reunite the Netherlands with Spain. Other alliances were made and broken over the years as nations sought the most advantageous situation for themselves in the shifting European political scene. Against this backdrop the Dutch were busy defending their borders and carefully building their trade empire. Sturdy Dutch merchant ships carried most of Europe's trade, even trading with their enemy, the Spanish, if the potential profit outweighed their risks (and, ironically, helping deplete Spain's treasury, which helped contribute to Spain's downfall). As Dutch merchants and shipbuilders grew more confident in their respective crafts, Dutch ships began to sail further afield, and the Dutch saw economic advantage in establishing their own colonies, rather than simply carrying goods for others. Although the Dutch colonial empire did not come close to matching the scope of English, French, or Spanish possessions, Dutch colonies were carefully selected and tenaciously defended. After abandoning their North American colonies (in what is now New York), the Dutch established outposts in the Caribbean, South America (what is now Suriname), South Africa, and what is now Indonesia. Holland also established a trading center in Japan, one of only a few European nations to do so. Between 1598 and 1605, 150 Dutch ships sailed to the Caribbean each year. Another 25 ships carried goods to and from Africa, 20 left for Brazil, and 10 plied trade routes to the East Indies. Some of these ships served Dutch colonies, some the colonies of other nations. All added to Dutch wealth and power. The Dutch were not explorers in the same sense as other European nations. Unlike England, Portugal, and Spain, they were not prone to sailing forth on voyages of discovery, planting their flag wherever they set foot, and claiming lands for the Dutch crown. They were, at heart, shrewd and pragmatic businessmen, expanding cautiously and carefully, reluctant to commit themselves to the large investment a colony entailed unless the potential financial gain warranted the risk. This is not to say that every single Dutch move was carefully considered and weighed, but in general the Dutch sailed for profit and not for glory. This caution left an indelible mark on Dutch colonies, Dutch power, and the current Dutch nation. Dutch aims in colonizing new territories were primarily commercial: maximize profit and minimize financial risk. Unlike the English in North America and (later) in South Africa, they had little interest in establishing colonies with a high degree of political autonomy. Instead, their preference was to establish colonial governments that would help organize the efforts of the native populations and the colonists so that the colonies could ship raw materials back to the Netherlands on a regular and continuing basis. This, however, helped make the Dutch poor colonial masters, as they tended to place great demands on Dutch colonists and native populations. At the same time, the Dutch tended to demolish the existing tribal or political structure, ruling almost entirely with Dutch nationals. This combination tended to not only anger the native populations, but also left them in a disadvantaged position when Dutch colonial rule ended. This is most obvious in Indonesia, which, since Dutch rule ended in the mid-twentieth century, has been subject to an endless succession of corrupt governments. Unlike the Spanish, the Dutch did expect their colonies to produce goods on a relatively sustainable basis, and the Dutch colonists expected that a great deal of hard work would be involved. In addition, the Dutch were never as adamantly religious as the Spanish, and religious proselytizing and conversion was not a primary focus of Dutch overseas efforts. So, although the Dutch were not ideal colonial masters, they were better than the Spanish, and they did not plunder their possessions as the Spanish did The Dutch focus on commerce led to huge revenues that poured into the Dutch economy and government coffers, and in a short period of time the Netherlands was one of the wealthiest nations in Europe. In addition to carrying cargo for most European nations, the Dutch also imported raw materials, turning them into finished goods that were subsequently exported at a tidy profit. And Holland's role in trade helped make Amsterdam one of Europe's financial centers, further adding to Dutch revenue. All of this income enabled them to fortify their borders and hire foreign mercenaries to protect against the attempted depredations of their neighbors. With all their shipbuilding experience, the Dutch shipyards built an impressive navy that helped with national defense, escorted Dutch merchant vessels, and protected Dutch colonies from foreign incursions. For a time the Dutch navy was the world's most powerful, and the Dutch army was more than adequate to defend its borders against any European power. There is little doubt that none of this would have been possible without the steady stream of revenue from Dutch commerce, including that from its overseas possessions. Although Dutch military power was rarely sufficient to dominate European politics, it was enough to guarantee the nation's security against both land and sea attack by any great power. And, as all the great powers of the time discovered, the Netherlands's entry into a contest was often sufficient to tip the balance of power against its foes. This gave the Netherlands political "muscle" that was belied by its small size and population. As their overt political and military power was eclipsed by that of England and France, the Dutch seem to have settled (not entirely willingly) into a different role in European politics. Although the term "power broker" is not entirely apt, it is also not entirely inappropriate because Dutch involvement in any close issue could be sufficient to decide the matter. From this, the Dutch seem to have grown into a philosophy of judicious international involvement which, in conjunction with their still-considerable economic might, gives them a continuing prominent role in many international organizations, including NATO and the United Nations. As noted above, the Dutch tended to manage their colonies for long-term profitability rather than short-term gain. Part of this no doubt stemmed from their having established colonies largely in areas that did not appear to have great mineral wealth, but in which spices or tropical hardwoods could be harvested. This forced them to manage their resources with an eye towards some degree of sustainability, for if they harvested every single spice plant, their revenue source would disappear. In turn, this assured the Dutch a long-term source of income, and this income helped cushion the Dutch when they were militarily overtaken by other great European powers. This is also one of the reasons that the Netherlands remains economically strong and politically influential to this day. Finally, all of these events had a distinct impact on the Dutch people, which still reverberates. The Netherlands remains one of the most egalitarian and affluent nations on Earth, and still wields what seems a disproportionate amount of influence in European and world affairs. A great deal of this stems from the Dutch policy of engagement with foreign nations, either through treaties, membership in international organizations, or foreign aid. All of this helps to make the Netherlands a very cosmopolitan nation in which a large number of citizens have an active interest in world affairs. Dutch left their shores to establish the trade and commerce that helped make them a respected European power. Dutch traders were more interested in financial return than exploration or national glory, so they were as happy to be ferrying French trade goods as they were establishing their own colonies, and their explorations were never as extensive as those of other European powers. As colonial masters, they were better than some and not as good as others, but they left their colonies largely unready for self-rule. As a result, though the Netherlands remains economically and politically strong today, its former colonies have not fared as well. The Dutch imperialist drive remained limited to its Asian colonies, however. In contrast, the Netherlands' small possessions in the Americas—Surinam on the Guyana coast and the six small Caribbean islands of the Antilles—hardly attracted attention in the Netherlands. Demographically, they were negligible: the six small islands of the Antilles had about 55,000 inhabitants in 1910 and Surinam around 100,000, compared to about 45 million in the Dutch East Indies. By the turn of the twentieth century, Dutch colonialism developed its own brand of the "white man's burden," called the ethical policy. Its ethics consisted of a mixture of Christian philanthropy, an increasing awareness of state responsibilities toward the poor, and feelings of superiority packaged in a rhetoric of development and uplifting of indigenous peoples. As a consequence, in the popular press and even in official publications, terms such as ereschuld (debt of honor)—the moral duty of the Netherlands to return the profits of colonial exploitation to the Indies—appeared next to disparaging stories about the backwardness of the colonized.

Carribean

It was a geographic nexus between Old and New Worlds, and as such has been global since its inception as a region. Boasting no distinguishable population of direct pre-Columbian descendants apart from a small Carib community in Dominica, its inhabitants are otherwise composed of a highly diverse ethnic and cultural mix of descendants from the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Spain was the initial colonizer of the entire Caribbean, but contiguous Spanish settlement in the Caribbean was limited largely to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Still, one should talk of the Caribbean as a region distinct from Latin America. The Spanish Caribbean islands have been shaped by experiences similar to those of their non-Spanish neighbors. While their cultural connections to Latin America are apparent—in language, culture generally, and perhaps in political philosophy—their Caribbean experience of slavery, plantation agriculture, and the rise of peasantries accord more with the Antilles. It is food (sugar in particular, but also coffee, cocoa, citrus, spices, and bananas), and not language that culturally unifies the Caribbean as a region historically. The Caribbean is generally thought to include the Greater and Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea, as well as the mainland French Guiana, Guyana (formerly colonial British Guiana), and Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana) in South America, and the Central American nation of Belize (formerly British Honduras). It is a geographic nexus between Old and New Worlds, and as such has been global since its inception as a region. Boasting no distinguishable population of direct pre-Columbian descendants apart from a small Carib community in Dominica, its inhabitants are otherwise composed of a highly diverse ethnic and cultural mix of descendants from the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Spain was the initial colonizer of the entire Caribbean, but contiguous Spanish settlement in the Caribbean was limited largely to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Still, one should talk of the Caribbean as a region distinct from Latin America. The Spanish Caribbean islands have been shaped by experiences similar to those of their non-Spanish neighbors. While their cultural connections to Latin America are apparent—in language, culture generally, and perhaps in political philosophy—their Caribbean experience of slavery, plantation agriculture, and the rise of peasantries accord more with the Antilles. It is food (sugar in particular, but also coffee, cocoa, citrus, spices, and bananas), and not language that culturally unifies the Caribbean as a region historically. Caribbean food, like the people who have come to inhabit the region, is not homogeneous, nor can we accurately talk about an indigenous diet without accounting for the effects of the Columbian conquest of the Americas. There were indigenous American food plants and tobacco, but there were also scores of new cultivars, from Africa, Europe, and Asia, as well as domesticated animals, which played a major role in the constitution of the region after 1492. But these two categories were not, however, isomorphic with the categories of domestically consumed and exported categories of post-conquest Caribbean food products. Instead, there are two categories of Caribbean food that better account for its history as a region. One encompasses those products that are responsible for constituting the region through a transatlantic system of trade. These products shape the way in which the region is defined by European and North American tastes. The other includes products grown as a direct response to the rigidities of this global system through culturally elaborated alternative systems of production, exchange, and consumption. Before the seventeenth century, the rights of Spain and Portugal to have colonial monopolies were established by several papal decrees issued in the fifteenth century. Inter Coetera of Pope Calixte III in 1456 gave Portugal the right to colonize lands "discovered" while circumnavigating Africa on South Asian exploration. Later bulls, for instance Inter Coetera II of Alexander VI in 1493, affirmed Spanish rights to colonization west of the Azores. Colonization rights, as conveyed by God's earthly representative, were in effect divided hemispherically. The 1493 Tordesillas Treaty, for instance, recognized Portuguese colonization rights up to 270 leagues west of the Azores, thus establishing Brazil as Portuguese but the rest of what is now regarded as the Caribbean and Latin America as Spanish (Mudimbe, 1995). A common denominator in Spanish and Portuguese colonization should be noted. Rominus Pontifex, a papal bull of Nicolas V in 1454, is explicit that the central mission of colonization was proselytization. Non-Christians could be dispossessed of their lands under the doctrine of terra nullius (no man's land) or even killed for resisting conversion to Christianity. In fact, as Valentin Mudimbe has documented well in his study of these papal instruments, "if [colonial subjects] failed to accept the 'truth' and, politically, to become 'colonized,' it was not only legal but also an act of faith and a religious duty for the colonizers to kill the natives" (Mudimbe, 1995, p. 61). The grounding of New World colonization by the Spanish in such a religious dictum is responsible in part for the violent character of transatlantic contact, both in the Caribbean region and in mainland Latin America. Disease (particularly smallpox), genocide, and enslavement eliminated most of the indigenous populations of the larger settled islands by the end of the sixteenth century. Beginning in the seventeenth century, settlements by other European nations had a similar effect on the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles. Today, only the small eastern Caribbean island of Dominica boasts any bona fide "Carib" Indian population, amounting to no more than two thousand persons. Spanish settlements had been established, mainly on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba. A production system using Amerindian slave labor was attempted, but after subsequent failures, some slaves were imported from Africa. Still, within seventy-five years, these settlements had become largely peasant-oriented and insular. Spain had turned its attention to the mainland of Latin America, pursuing a policy of resource (particularly gold) extraction. In the early seventeenth century, various European nations began to challenge Spain's monopoly on colonization in the Americas on the grounds that many of the islands claimed by Spain were not, nor had they ever been, occupied by Spain. British, French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish explorers began to settle the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles. Though the colonizers differed, there was one common trait on these newly settled lands—the plantation. Columbus's inadvertent happening onto the Americas in 1492 is responsible for a shift of Europe's center from thalassic (focused on the Mediterranean Sea) to oceanic (focused particularly on the Atlantic). The principal historical impact of the American food crops was that they undergirded Europe's rise to world dominion between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. No other continent of the Old World profited so greatly. That was because Europe's climate, and especially its comparatively abundant rainfall, fitted the needs of the American food crops better than anywhere else, except China; and in China rice was so productive that the new crops had less to offer than potatoes and maize did in Europe" The Peruvian potato, for instance, was extraordinarily important to Europe, as it produced four times the caloric intake of rye bread. Potatoes never replaced grain completely: they do not store nearly as well as grain. But the efficient use of acreage is credited with population booms in Germany and Russia and the quick adoption of industry each experienced. The constitution of an Atlantic epicenter is reflected not merely in the exchange of commodities between the Old and New Worlds. It is defined by the manner in which the demands made by Europe's growing populations were accommodated. Taste is essentially what defined the Caribbean as a region. The Caribbean provided a hospitable climate for the cultivation of sugar cane, particularly on the flatter, drier islands of the Antilles and coastal South America. The Spanish had initially developed sugar cane production in Cuba in the seventeenth century (Ortiz, 1947) but had not taken an interest in the mass production of the product. British colonization in the sixteenth century began to exploit sugar cane production using existing regional techniques, as well as methods learned from the Dutch occupation of Brazilian sugar estates. French interest in sugar production quickly followed and was equally influential by the eighteenth century. What was most significant about sugar was not the growing pancolonial interest in the cultivation of another New World commodity, but its rapid transformation from a luxury item to a sweet, tempting product demanded by a growing European working class: "...as sugar became cheaper and more plentiful, its potency as a symbol of power declined while its potency as a source of profit gradually increased" (Mintz, 1985, p. 95). Production of sugar in the Caribbean multiplied to keep up with metropolitan demand. The need for a cheap source of physical labor led to the forced relocation of at least five million African slaves to the Caribbean during this same period. Revolts, slave maroonage (flight from plantations followed by the establishment of communities in remote terrains), and other forms of resistance both on the slave ships and in the colonies did little to slow European expansion of the sugar industry. In fact, at the time that Western Europe began to industrialize in the late eighteenth century, the importation of slaves to the Caribbean, particularly to the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the western third of the island of Hispaniola, was at its highest. Saint-Domingue was so valuable a colony to the French that at the Treaty of Paris they ceded their entire claim to Eastern Canada (now Quebec) in exchange for retaining it, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. During a protracted conflict of 1791 to 1803 in this colony, which in 1804 would be declared the republic of Haiti by revolting slaves, France and England both endured enormous military losses. France lost nineteen generals, including Leclerc, the husband of Napoleon's own sister Pauline, in the conflict. The "unthinkability" of losing the Haitian Revolution helps explain the silence on the subject in West European and American historiography (Trouillot, 1995). It was the profitability of Caribbean sugar colonies that had shaped the military and economic might of Europe generally and of France and England in particular. Following the loss of Saint-Domingue, France retracted its New World interests, selling its remaining North American claims to the newly formed United States under the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Britain's interest in sugar cane production declined along with global prices in the late nineteenth century, as beet sugar production proved more profitable. Prior to its contraction, however, the British employed a number of labor management devices aimed at reducing the costs of labor on their plantations. Between the end of apprenticeship in 1838 and 1917, about 500,000 East Indians were brought, mainly as indentured laborers, into the Caribbean (Williams, 1970, p. 348). The cultural influence is particularly strong where the concentrations of Indians were highest, in Trinidad and Guyana. Chinese laborers were brought, particularly to Cuba. Javanese were brought to Surinam, and African indentured servants to the French West Indies as well. By the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba emerged as the dominant sugar producer in the Americas. Cuban reintegration into sugar production had begun following the British occupation of Havana in 1762 and the concomitant massive importation of slave labor into Cuba by enterprising merchants. Sugar production in Cuba essentially demonstrates an adaptation of the plantation system to a transition from mercantilist to capitalist interests in the New World. American merchant interests in the Cuban sugar industry developed throughout the nineteenth century and serve to explain, in part, American military intervention in the Cuban-Spanish War in 1898. American military and financial involvement in Cuba thereafter typifies the manner in which foreign tastes shape the Caribbean's definition as an area in the twenty-first century. Rather than merely serving to satiate the European taste for sugar, the region has been used to satisfy new tastes: for sun, sex, and sin. The elimination of tropical diseases from the Caribbean by the early twentieth century, coupled with the devastation of Europe during World War I, made the Caribbean an attractive tourist destination. Casinos, brothels, and beaches were set up specifically to pander to North American and European interests. A foreign traveler to the Caribbean is likely to come into contact with a broad range of dishes professing to be authentic in character. Most food produced for tourists reflects the particular tradition of transatlantic shipping from which these contemporary relations emerge: imported goods today compared to the dry provisions of the colonial period; Bacardi, yet another imported rum consumed over locally produced brands. Even the origins of the Daiquirí come from a drink that was consumed on slave ships to prevent scurvy: it was the name of the place where soldiers from the United States first tasted it (Ortiz, 1947, p. 25). As much as Europe's addiction to sugar defined the Caribbean culturally as a region from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, so too does this new addiction affect it today. Even the concept of a Caribbean nation itself must endure the hungers of North American college students on spring breaks, en route to a "Bacardi Nation" that has petitioned for United Nations Perhaps the most contentious debate among contemporary scholars of the Caribbean concerns the origins of the region's cultural influences. Many argue that African cultural influences define the region culturally (Herskovits, 1990; Brathwaite, 1993). Others have suggested the rigidities of the colonial system were so severe as to preclude the survival of any culture (Frazier, 1966). But one thing can be said about the Caribbean over any other region of the world. The Caribbean embodies all of the elements of what we today might call globalization: rapidity and movement of labor and capital; the amalgamation and negotiation of diverse and worldly cultural influences; and integral development of technology and communications. This, however, should not imply that the region is more culturally manufactured than other regions of the world, or that the late establishment of formal national or regional identities (beginning with the failed West Indies Federation from 1958-1962) is reflected in a lack of cultural distinctiveness. A few scholars have correctly noted that the Caribbean is best defined culturally through processes negotiated by its own inhabitants, and not determined by the mere movement of one or another traits from Europe, or Africa or Asia, to the region (Mintz and Price, 1992; Scott, 1991). Inasmuch as the plantation system sought to define its inserted inhabitants in the Caribbean region as a monolithically defined production matrix, there were responses in the production, exchange, and consumption of food. Plantation owners were required by the late seventeenth century to provide rations to their slaves, but these tended to be inadequate. Slaves responded by establishing their own provision grounds adjacent to the plantations, on which they grew a wide range of products, not only for their own consumption but for sale as well (Mintz, 1978a; Mintz, 1978b; Gaspar, 1991; Mintz,1995). So important were these provision grounds that some even revolted to keep them. The 1831 abolition of the Sunday market for the barter and exchange of slave-produced goods in Antigua sparked uprisings and the burning of several plantations (Gaspar, 1991). During the early years of the Haitian Revolution, "the leaders of the rebellion did not ask for an abstractly couched 'freedom.' Rather, their most sweeping demands included three days a week to work on their own gardens and the elimination of the whip" (Trouillot, 1995, p. 103). Often the surplus of these gardens was sold in slave markets, some reaching off-island destinations. Though the available historical record seems unwilling to acknowledge the fact, slaves were, in a strict sense internationally mobile. Market women ("hucksters" in the Eastern Caribbean, "higglers" in Jamaica, "Madan Sara" in Haiti) would traffic agricultural products both in local markets and to other islands in the region, either individually or through third parties. An eighteenth-century soldier's diary establishes that nonproduce, even manufactured items—including textiles, "syrup beer and a country drink called mawbey" (Aytoun, 1984, p. 28)—are being exchanged in local markets in the small Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica by these market women, and legitimated through the payment of an often hefty fee to their owners. The ability of the market women to meet this fee (rumored to be as much as a dollar and a half a week—an immense sum by the standards of the day) in cash payments suggests that slave markets were significantly broader than the historical record has typically suggested. Dry goods such as rice, wheat flour, beans, corn, and salted meats we know were imported, both from Europe and the United States, except during interruptions caused by the American Revolution. Similarly, a number of agricultural products were being cultivated on provision grounds: "ground provisions" (tubers, including yams, potatoes, dasheen, tannia, eddoes), citrus, bananas and plantains, breadfruit, cassava (the flour of which is used to make farina), and various herbs, used as a spice, for medicinal purposes, and in Obeah, Voudun, and other Afro-Caribbean religious ceremonies, particularly as a poison against slavemasters and in rebellions. Until emerging national governments established and enforced customs regulations in the 1960s, the regional circulation of agricultural produce and dry provisions remained primarily a locally constituted economy. Ascendant merchants and entrepreneurs following emancipation began to formalize the importation of dry and canned goods in particular. Local agricultural products continue to have symbolic meanings that reflect the historic articulation of ground provision production with the transatlantic plantation system. In islands where certain agricultural products are abundant, it is not uncommon to see surpluses of certain products—bananas and breadfruit are common in the Eastern Caribbean for instance—given away rather than sold. Land, no matter how small in area, has enormous meaning "as a symbol of person-hood, prestige, security, and freedom for descendants of former slaves in the face of plantation-engendered land scarcity" (Besson, 1987, p.15). The South Asian and Far Eastern contemporary cultural and cuisine influences—for instance in the curry dishes, such as the roti associated with Trinidad, Guyana, and Jamaica but abundant through the Caribbean—are in fact the result of colonial responses to labor shortages on plantations following emancipation. British emancipation implemented a four-year period of apprenticeship designed to reorient slaves to wage labor. Yet freed slaves continued to demonstrate a stronger desire to work provision grounds. An interesting case in which the attachment to provision grounds and transatlantic production intersect involves the emergence of the Eastern Caribbean banana economies from the 1950s onward. Bananas, produced mainly in Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and The Grenadines, and Grenada, were under exclusive license for sale to Britain during this period. Farmers, most of whom were cultivating plots of no more than a few acres, were required to produce exclusively for sale in British supermarkets in exchange for guaranteed markets. Trouillot has noted the reluctance of Dominican banana farmers to diversify their production cycles because of the symbolic qualities that bananas impart: "We can always eat our fig" was the response. While still green, bananas are a starch, and thus an excellent carbohydrate source. Green bananas (or "fig") are frequently used in local Caribbean cooking, as a porridge, used with other ground provisions in a stew (bouyon ), or even used in certain festive cooking dishes, for instance in sankouche (with salted codfish, Creole, and curry seasonings). Bananas require about nine months to come to fruition, and the comparisons to a child's gestation period are sometimes invoked in the care of banana plants. Despite an ideological commitment to local produce, and the proactivity of some small-scale producers, Caribbean tastes are hardly defined by some kind of peasant ethic or veneration of local products. Tubers, once key carbohydrates in the Caribbean diet, are declining in importance. And while even the most prototypical of Caribbean dishes have always to some extent been the product of a Creolization (blending) of locally grown products with imported items such as salted codfish, rice, and flour, imported items, particularly canned items, are gaining as status symbols. Former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley once lamented: "How can we build agriculture if our middle class believes it will surely rot if it can't buy tin mushrooms from abroad?" (Manley, 1988, p. 37). Monetary remittances from Caribbean persons living and working in more lucrative wage employment in Europe, Canada, and the United States has a long tradition in the Caribbean, and has been responsible for infusing cash into these economies. More recently, the remittance of actual packaged food products is becoming more prevalent (Palacio, 1991). The retention of land, particularly for agricultural purposes, by small-scale producers and plantations alike, continues to be under threat, not just by hurricanes, agricultural diseases, and declining prices for many agricultural products, but by a growing nonagricultural sector. Plantations have declined in importance through most of the Caribbean during the last century, and, accordingly, many former estates have been sold off. Despite the dramatic changes to Caribbean food through the postwar period of modernization and international development, local responses to these changes continue to be informed by an ongoing process of Creolization. Foreign phenomena continue to be incorporated into local dishes. Peleau (a specifically Creole dish, but ostensibly the same rice and beans-based dish found throughout the Caribbean) was once regarded in the Eastern Caribbean as a dish that usually included fish. Declining fishery production and the rapid growth of frozen chicken imports have changed the content but not the underlying Caribbean form. Caribbean food has established its distinctiveness historically by creatively and strategically incorporating diverse elements into a localized answer to the rigidities imposed by foreign consumer demands.

Westward Expansion

LOUISIANA PURCHASE. A watershed event in American history, the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 nearly doubled the land mass of the young nation: for a purchase price of $15 million, the United States increased its size by some 828,000 square miles. The region included the Mississippi River and its tributaries westward to the Rocky Mountains, and extended from the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans up the Red River to the Canadian border. The central portion of North America was considered prime land for settlement in the early days of the republic. The Missouri and Red Rivers drained the region east of the Rocky Mountains into the massive Mississippi Valley, offering navigation and fertile farmlands, prairies, pastures and forests. The region also held large deposits of various minerals, which would come to be economic boons as well. Buffalo and other wild game were plentiful and offered an abundant food supply for the Native Americans who peopled the region as well as for later settlers. Report Advertisement From the mid-fifteenth century, France had claimed the Louisiana Territory. Its people constituted a strong French presence in the middle of North America. Always adamant in its desire for land, France engaged the British in the Seven Years' War (1754-1763; also known as the French and Indian War because of the alliance of these two groups against British troops) over property disputes in the Ohio Valley. As part of the settlement of the Seven Years' War, the 1763 Treaty of Paris called for France to turn over control of the Louisiana Territory (including New Orleans) to Spain as compensation for Spanish assistance to the French during the war. By the early 1800s, Spain offered Americans free access to shipping on the Mississippi River and encouraged Americans to settle in the Louisiana Territory. President Thomas Jefferson officially frowned on this invitation, but privately hoped that many of his frontier-seeking citizens would indeed people the area owned by Spain. Like many Americans, Jefferson warily eyed the vast Louisiana Territory as a politically unstable place; he hoped that by increasing the American presence there, any potential war concerning the territory might be averted. The Purchase In 1802 it seemed that Jefferson's fears were well founded: the Spanish governor of New Orleans revoked Americans' privileges of shipping produce and other goods for export through his city. At the same time, American officials became aware of a secret treaty that had been negotiated and signed the previous year between Spain and France. This, the Treaty of San Ildefonso, provided a position of nobility for a minor Spanish royal in exchange for the return of the Louisiana Territory to the French. Based on France's history of engaging in hostilities for land, Jefferson and other leaders were alarmed at this potential threat on the U.S. western border. While some Congressmen had begun to talk of taking New Orleans, Spain's control over the territory as a whole generally had been weak. Accordingly, in April 1802 Jefferson and other leaders instructed Robert R. Livingston, the U.S. minister to France, to attempt to purchase New Orleans for $2 million, a sum Congress quickly appropriated for the purpose. In his initial approach to officials in Paris, Livingston was told that the French did not own New Orleans and thus could not sell it to the United States. However, Livingston quickly assured the negotiators that he had seen the Treaty of San Ildefonso and hinted that the United States might instead simply seize control of the city. With The two sides at an impasse, President Jefferson quickly sent Secretary of State James Monroe to Paris to join the negotiations. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), who had come to power in France in 1799, planned in 1801 to use the fertile Mississippi Valley as a source of food and trade to supply a French empire in the New World. However, in 1801 Toussaint L'Ouverture led a slave revolt that eventually took control of Haiti and Hispaniola, the latter of which Napoleon had chosen as the seat of his Western empire. French armies under the leadership of Charles LeClerc attempted to regain control of Haiti in 1802; however, despite some successes, thousands of soldiers were lost in battle and to yellow fever. Realizing the futility of his plan, Napoleon abandoned his dreams for Hispaniola. As a result, he no longer had a need for the Louisiana Territory, and knew that his forces were insufficient to protect it from invasion. Furthermore, turning his attentions to European conquests, he recognized that his plans there would require an infusion of ready cash. Accordingly, Napoleon authorized his ministers to make a counteroffer to the Americans: instead of simply transferring the ownership of New Orleans, France would be willing to part with the entire Louisiana Territory. Report Advertisement Livingston and Monroe were stunned at his proposal. Congress quickly approved the purchase and authorized a bond issue to raise the necessary $15 million to complete the transaction. Documents effecting the transfer were signed on 30 April 1803, and the United States formally took possession of the region in ceremonies at St. Louis, Missouri on 20 December. Consequences of the Louisiana Purchase The Louisiana Purchase has often been described as one of the greatest real estate deals in history. Despite this, there were some issues that concerned Americans of the day. First, many wondered how or if the United States could defend this massive addition to its land holdings. Many New Englanders worried about the effect the new addition might have on the balance of power in the nation. Further, Jefferson and Monroe struggled with the theoretical implications of the manner in which they carried out the purchase, particularly in light of Jefferson's previous heated battles with Alexander Hamilton concerning the interpretation of limits of constitutional and presidential powers. In the end, however, the desire to purchase the territory outweighed all of these practical and theoretical objections. The increases in population, commerce, mining, and agriculture the Louisiana Purchase allowed worked to strengthen the nation as a whole. The opportunity for individuals and families to strike out into unsettled territory and create lives for themselves helped to foster the frontier spirit of independence, curiosity, and cooperation that have come to be associated with the American character. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the size of the United States, gave the country complete control of the port of New Orleans, and provided territory for westward expansion. The 828,000 square miles purchased from France formed completely or in part thirteen states: Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming. President thomas jefferson was unsure if the Constitution authorized the acquisition of land, but he found a way to justify the purchase. France originally claimed the Louisiana Territory in the seventeenth century. In 1763 it ceded to Spain the province of Louisiana, which was about where the state of Louisiana is today. By the 1790s U.S. farmers who lived west of the Appalachian Mountains were shipping their surplus produce by boat down rivers that flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. In 1795 the United States negotiated a treaty with Spain that permitted U.S. merchants the right of deposit at New Orleans. This right allowed the merchants to store their goods in New Orleans without paying duty before they were exported. In 1800 France, under the leadership of Napoléon, negotiated a secret treaty with Spain that ceded the province of Louisiana back to France. President Jefferson became concerned that France had control of the strategic port of New Orleans, and sought to purchase the port and West Florida. When France revoked the right of deposit for U.S. merchants in 1802, Jefferson sent james monroe to Paris to help robert r. livingston convince the French government to complete the sale. These statesmen warned that the United States would ally itself with England against France if a plan were not devised that settled this issue. Monroe and Livingston were authorized by Congress to offer up to $2 million to purchase the east bank of the Mississippi; Jefferson secretly advised them to offer over $9 million for Florida and New Orleans. Napoléon initially resisted U.S. offers, but changed his mind in 1803. He knew that war with England was imminent, and realized that if France were tied down with a European war, the United States might annex the Louisiana Territory. He also took seriously the threat of a U.S.-English alliance. Therefore, in April 1803 he instructed his foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, to negotiate with Monroe and Livingston for the United States' purchase of the entire Louisiana Territory. Acting on their own, the U.S. negotiators agreed to the price of $15 million, with $12 million paid to France and $3 million paid to U.S. citizens who had outstanding claims against France. The purchase agreement, dated April 30, was signed May 2 and reached Washington, D.C., in July. President Jefferson endorsed the purchase but believed that the Constitution did not provide the national government with the authority to make land acquisitions. He pondered whether a constitutional amendment might be needed to legalize the purchase. After consultations Jefferson concluded that the president's authority to make treaties could be used to justify the agreement. Therefore, the Louisiana Purchase was designated a treaty and submitted to the Senate for ratification. The Senate ratified the treaty October 20, 1803, and the United States took possession of the territory December 20, 1803. The U.S. government borrowed money from English and Dutch banks to pay for the acquisition. Interest payments for the fifteen-year loans brought the total price to over $27 million. The vast expanse of land, running from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border, is the largest ever added to the United States at one time. The settling of the territory played a large part in the debate over slavery preceding the Civil War, as Congress grappled with the question of whether to allow slavery in new states, such as Missouri and Kansas. The issue of the expansion of slavery reared its head even as the Panic of 1819 put a damper on postwar nationalism and patriotism. By 1820 Missouri had a population of about sixty thousand, including ten thousand slaves, making it the first territory within the Louisiana Purchase with enough people to become a state. Before that could happen, Congress had to pass an enabling act to allow Missouri to create a state constitution and then must approve the resulting document. Representative James Tallmadge of New York offered two amendments to Missouri's enabling act that would have barred more slaves from entering the state and emancipated those already there as they reached the age of twenty-five. Without such legislation Missouri was poised to enter the Union as a slave state, bringing more slave-state senators and representatives into the United States Congress. In a purely sectional vote the House passed the Tallmadge amendments; northerners voted eighty-six to ten for the first amendment and eighty to fourteen for the second, while southerners opposed the first, sixty-six to one, and the second, sixty-four to two. In the Senate a unanimous South rejected the amendments with help from a few northerners. Congress, after heated debate, adjourned without resolving Missouri's situation. In the next session Massachusetts representatives broke the impasse by offering to give up the state's northern counties as the free state of THE TOLEDO BORDER WAR Ohio and Michigan went to war in the 1830s for control of Toledo, Ohio. The conflict originated with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which placed Toledo and the Maumee Bay north of the boundary that separated Michigan and Ohio. When Ohio entered the Union in 1803, it altered the boundary in its constitution to include Toledo. In 1835 the Michigan Territory sought a congressional enabling act so it could become a state, but Ohio's congressional representatives delayed action on Michigan's request. Undeterred, Michigan proceeded to create a state government without permission and became a state out of the Union for two years. Michigan's "Boy Governor" Stevens T. Mason, who was actually an Acting Territorial Governor, called out the militia and led an army to the disputed boundary to assert Michigan's control over Toledo and the surrounding area. Ohio also called out its militia and sent surveyors into Michigan. The "war" was on. Fortunately, the only "battle" occurred in an onion field south of Adrian, Michigan, when several militia men fired over the heads of an Ohio surveying party, who were then captured and imprisoned in a local jail. The only casualty was a Monroe (Michigan) Country sheriff who was stabbed with a penknife when he entered Toledo to auction off property. Cooler heads eventually prevailed after President Andrew Jackson dismissed Mason as territorial governor. Michigan voters elected him the first state governor a few months later. Eventually, Congress worked out a compromise, and Michigan was admitted to the Union in January 1837, giving up its claim to Toledo in return for the western half of the Upper Peninsula and a percentage of federal land sales in the state. Source: Peter Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Maine. If Maine and Missouri entered together, one slave and the other free, the balance between North and South would be maintained. Sen. Jesse Thomas of Illinois offered an amendment that banned slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36° 30' line. All seemed fine and admission of both states moved ahead until a second crisis developed over the Missouri constitution's prohibition against the migration of free African Americans into the state, which conflicted with the federal Constitution's guarantee that "the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states" (Article IV, section 1). Missouri agreed not to abridge African American rights, without actually acknowledging that they were citizens. "Gag Rule." In the 1830s northern abolitionists increasingly brought pressure on the federal government to confront slavery. They especially wanted to end slavery in the District of Columbia, the one place where Congress had clear authority to act. Abolitionists began sending thousands of petitions to Congress, asking that slavery be abolished in the nation's capital. Normal routine was for all petitions to be read, and since Congress dealt with the most mundane personal problems during the period, petitions provided the public with access to Congress. Southerners, however, were incensed by the number of petitions seeking abolition in the capital, especially since many were from women and children, who were not able to vote. Southerners demanded that Congress refuse to consider any of these petitions. Every year between 1836 and 1844 one of Congress's first acts was to pass a "gag rule" that tabled all petitions on abolition without reading or acting on them. Many northern congressmen voted with southerners to pass the rule, but northern voters increasingly came to resent the southern "Slave Power" that denied them their right to petition their representatives. Wilmot Proviso. On 8 August 1846, a sweltering day by all accounts, Congress gathered for the last time before adjourning for the year. President James K. Polk sent a hurried request for $2 million to expedite negotiations with Mexico, hoping to end the war before Congress returned. After spending most of the day tying up loose ends, the House late in the evening turned to Polk's request, which seemed likely to pass. With only a few minutes left before adjourning, the chairman recognized David Wilmot, an administration Democrat from Pennsylvania. No one expected what was to follow. As Wilmot rose to speak he stated that he was no Free-Soiler (though he would eventually become an antislavery Republican) and that he supported territorial expansion, the annexation of Texas, and the war with Mexico. But, Wilmot noted, slavery was currently illegal under Mexican law in the areas that the United States might gain after the war. Wilmot questioned why slavery should be reintroduced by the United States. "God forbid that we should be the means of planting this institution upon it." He then offered the following amendment to Polk's request: "That, as an express and fundamental condition of the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico... neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory." The proviso framed the debate over slavery in the territories until the Civil War. Southerners argued that all Americans, including slaveholders, should have access to the new land. Northerners, wanting a safety valve for immigrants and urban laborers, believed that once slavery entered an area it ended all economic opportunity for free white settlers. The House, on a strictly sectional vote, approved the proviso. The Senate rejected it, and Polk's request failed as Congress adjourned. THE MAYSVILLE ROAD VETO Report Advertisement Presidents James Madison and James Monroe had agreed on the need for a better transportation network, but neither believed that the internal improvement bills they received from Congress were constitutional. By the 1820s the federal government opted out of funding improvements, with the exception of the National Road and a few other modest efforts. Even the maintenance of the National Road became a heated issue. John Quincy Adams's massive plans, outlined in his 1825 inaugural address, went nowhere, and his Jacksonian opponents ensured that Henry Clay's American System would not get out of Congress. In 1830 Congress passed the Maysville, Road Bill, to construct a road from Maysville, Kentucky, to Lexington, in order to link the National Road at Cincinnati with the interior. Jackson vetoed the bill, perhaps because it enriched his rival Clay's home state of Kentucky, but mainly because he doubted the constitutionality of a bill to construct a project that lay entirely within a single state and thus could be construed as local rather than federal. Jackson consented to other projects more national in scope, such as territorial roads, that clearly lay within the authority of Congress. Initially Jackson also favored the distribution of federal revenue surpluses to the states, to be used for internal improvements. He realized, though, that even this type of federal intervention could set a dangerous precedent and and encourage Congress to raise tariffs, taxes, and land prices in order to have more to send to their respective states. Source: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945). Compromise of 1850. The failure of the Wilmot Proviso left the question of slavery in the territories unresolved. The California gold rush made the situation worse, as people flooded into California looking to strike it rich. By the end of 1849, tens of thousands had flocked to California, and the region desperately needed the order that a territorial government could provide. California would clearly become a free state, but southerners refused to help create a new territory that barred slavery. The rest of the Mexican cession needed territorial government as well. Several other problems prevented any agreements in Congress. Southerners were upset by northern failure to abide by fugitive slave laws; many northern states had even passed personal liberty laws that freed local officials from the obligation of hunting runaway slaves. Slavery in the federal capitol still was a hot issue. And Texas and New Mexico were engaged in a border dispute that threatened to become a shooting war. Under the guidance of Henry Clay, an omnibus bill that would have resolved all these outstanding issues was introduced to Congress. The legislation would admit California as a free state and would leave the rest of the Mexican cession open to slavery. It would fix Texas's western boundary in New Mexico's favor but would pay the state's debt (incurred while it was an independent republic). Finally, the slave trade in the District of Columbia would end, and a much stronger fugitive slave law would be enacted. There was something for everyone to dislike in the bill, and it failed as a package. Clay, his health failing, left Washington. Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas took over the bill and separated its provisions, which each section's moderates combined to pass individually. President Zachary Taylor, who opposed the compromise, died suddenly after overindulging in cherries jubilee at Fourth of July celebration, and the new president, Millard Fillmore, signed the separate bills into law in September 1850. The compromise was illusory; no one had voted for the portions they opposed. Instead, the compromise was a temporary armistice. THE STRANGE CLAIM OF MARIGNY D'AUTERIVE In December 1814 Andrew Jackson's army pressed into service a man named Warwick, who spent a month delivering wood to the troops with a horse and cart. At the battle of New Orleans he was shot through the left eye and arm. Marigny D'Auterive, a Louisiana slaveholder, was the legal owner of the horse, cart, wood, and Warwick. D'Auterive waited until 1826 before making a claim totaling $1, 094 against the federal government for the use of the horse and cart, ninetyfive cords of wood used by the army, and the disability to Warwick. The congressional committee handling the claim recommended rejecting it, in part because it believed that slaves had not "been put on the footing of property." This outraged southern congressmen and set off a debate over slavery that lasted several months. Most southerners wanted D'Auterive to be paid, but a few wondered what might logically follow. Would paying the slaveholder for Warwick's injury acknowledge the federal government's right to impress slaves? Taken one step farther, would not acceptance of such payment imply consent to the proposition that slaves could be confiscated and emancipated, as long as their masters were compensated? D'Auterive's claim was significant because it arose at the same time that the American Colonization Society had decided to seek federal funding to colonize free blacks and manumitted slaves in Liberia. Also, abolitionist organizations had begun petitioning Congress to end slavery in the District of Columbia. Thus, according to some southerners, paying D'Auterive's minor claim might set a dangerous precedent that would threaten the South's "peculiar institution." In the end Congress never voted on the claim, and D'Auterive was never paid.

French Settlement

Like the Spanish and English, the French were attracted to North America by promises of great wealth in gold, silver, and other precious metals. Like the Spanish, the French also wanted to convert the "pagan" (one who is not Christian, Muslim, or Jewish) Native Americans to Roman Catholicism, thus combining conquest with a Christian mission. Although France did not establish permanent settlements in the territory that became the United States, French explorers extended the frontiers around the Great Lakes (a chain of five lakes along the border of present-day Canada and the United States), along the Mississippi River valley, and around the Gulf of Mexico. The French presence became an obstacle to English expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tensions came to a head during the French and Indian War (1754-63), which marked the end of French power in North America. In 1523 a group of Italian merchants in the French cities of Lyons and Rouen persuaded the king of France, Francis I, to sponsor a voyage by Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano (also spelled Verrazzano; c. 1485-1528) to North America. They hoped to find the Northwest Passage, a direct sea route to Asia via the Pacific Ocean. The king commissioned Verrazano to chart (to make a map of) the entire Atlantic coast of North America, from modern-day Florida to Newfoundland (an island off the coast of Canada). Accompanied by his younger brother Girolamo, a mapmaker, Verrazano set sail aboard the ship La Dauphine in early 1524. The expedition reached the coast and sailed south to Florida. Then, turning north, Verrazano anchored at what is now Cape Hatteras on the Outer Banks, a sandbar separated from the mainland by Pamlico Sound. Unable to see the mainland from this vantage point, he assumed the body of water on the other side of the sandbar was the Pacific Ocean. He concluded he had found the route to China because Girolamo's maps showed North America as a vast continent tapering to a narrow strip of land near the coast of North Carolina. Verrazano could not find a passage to the mainland, so he continued north to the upper reaches of present-day New York Harbor. He anchored La Dauphine at the narrows, which was later named in his honor. (Today the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge spans the entrance of New York Harbor from Brooklyn to Staten Island.) Leaving the harbor, he sailed up the coast to the entrance of Narragansett Bay. He found some islands in the bay and named one of them Rhode Island because it was shaped like Rhodes, the Greek island in the eastern Mediterranean. More than one hundred years later, religious dissident Roger Williams would take the name Rhode Island for new colony he founded on the mainland off Narragansett Bay (see Chapter 4). Verrazano's exploring parties went as far inland as the site of modern Pawtucket. From Rhode Island, Verrazano led his expedition up the coast of Maine to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland before returning to France in July 1524. Immediately after landing in France, Verrazano wrote a report on his expedition for King Francis I, in which he gave one of the earliest firsthand descriptions of the eastern coast of North America and the Native Americans who lived there. (Based on his interactions in North Carolina, Cape Fear) Verrazano's next expedition in 1527 was sponsored in part by Philippe de Chabot, admiral of France, because the king was preparing for war in Italy and could not spare any ships. On this trip Verrazano traveled to the coast of Brazil and brought back a valuable cargo of logwood for use in making textile (cloth) dyes. In 1528 he undertook another voyage to North America to renew his search for a passage to the Pacific, which he still thought could be found just south of Cape Fear, North Carolina. Leaving France in the spring of 1528, his party apparently reached the West Indies (a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea), where they followed the chain of islands north. After landing on one of the islands, probably Guadeloupe, Verrazano was captured and killed by members of the hostile Carib tribe. His ships then sailed south to Brazil, where they obtained another cargo of logwood and returned to France. Although Verrazano did not find the Northwest Passage, he opened the way for other French explorers in North America. The first was Jacques Cartier (1491-1557), who was determined to find a natural waterway to Asia. In 1534 Cartier set off from Saint-Malo with two ships and sixty-one men. His mission was "to discover certain islands and lands where it is said that a great quantity of gold, and other precious things, are to be found." Cartier's fleet sailed to the northern tip of Newfoundland, entering the Strait of Belle Isle, which was known to lead to a large gulf. In order to avoid the barren northern coast in reaching the gulf, Cartier headed south along the western shore of Newfoundland, naming many rivers and harbors. The party continued along the western coast until they came to the channel (strait) that is now called Cabot Strait (in honor of Italian explorer John Cabot, who claimed the area for England). Cartier headed three expeditions to North America (1534, 1535, and 1541), during which he discovered the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Saint Lawrence River. Although he is one of the best-known explorers in American history, historians cite three factors that could diminish his stature. First, Cartier did not thoroughly explore the Saint Lawrence River valley, thus failing to recognize the potential of rich natural resources such as fur-bearing animals. He also had questionable dealings with the Iroquois, whom he reportedly mistreated. For instance, it is debatable whether he took members of the tribe back to France as guests or as prisoners. Finally, Cartier deserted Jean-François de La Rocque, sieur de Roberval, a French nobleman and explorer, who had been commissioned to found a colony in present-day Canada. When Cartier met Roberval in Newfoundland in 1542, he was instructed to join Roberval's expedition. Instead, Cartier secretly returned to France, where he apparently hoped to get rich from "precious" metals he had found (the metals proved to be of little value). Even though he was not punished for leaving Roberval behind, France never again granted him an exploring commission. At Stadacona, or present-day Quebec City, Cartier and his men became the first Europeans to spend the winter in Canada, and they were surprised at the extreme cold. Although the Iroquois were becoming less friendly, they nevertheless helped the Frenchmen survive an epidemic of scurvy (a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C). In February 1536, Cartier wrote an account of the difficult winter, describing the rapid decline of his men. Fortunately, there was good news for the survivors of the epidemic. During a meeting with the Iroquois, Cartier obtained a cure—the juice and sap of the ameda tree (possibly a sassafras tree)—and all of the men recovered. Cartier remarked on the effectiveness of the simple cure, observing that all the doctors in the modern world could not "have done so much in one year as that tree did in six days." Cartier's second voyage had been a great success. He had found a major waterway that might be the sought-after route to Asia, and he even brought back a few pieces of gold. Francis I wanted to send Cartier back to New France, but a war between France and the Holy Roman Empire prevented any plans for exploration. In the meantime, the rights to colonize New France had been granted to a nobleman, Jean-François de La Rocque, sieur de Roberval (1500-1561). Finally, in 1540, Cartier was assigned to conduct reconnaissance (survey of a land's terrain) work for Roberval's voyage the following year. While building a camp at the present-day town of Charlesbourg, north of Quebec, Cartier found some stones he thought were diamonds. After spending a harsh winter at Hochelaga, Cartier decided to head back to France. When he arrived in Saint-Malo, he found that the "gold" he was carrying was iron pyrite and the "diamonds" were quartz crystals. Cartier was not punished for deserting Roberval, but when Roberval returned without starting a new colony, the king decided to abandon plans for settling New France. Twenty years later French Protestants, called Huguenots, attempted to start a settlement off the coast of present-day South Carolina. (Protestants are members of a Christian faith that formed in opposition to Roman Catholicism.) Their plan was to start a refuge for Huguenots. They sailed into the Saint Johns River, which Ribault called the River May, and went ashore in Florida (at present-day Brevard County). Ribault claimed the land for France and then led the party north to Port Royal Sound, off the coast of South Carolina. On an island in the sound (now Parris Island) they built Charlesfort, a small fort. Shortly afterward Ribault left for France, expecting to return to Charles-fort Instead, he fled to England when he found France engulfed in the first of the Wars of Religion (also known as the Huguenot Wars; 1562-98), which lasted for the rest of the century. While Ribault was in England, Queen Elizabeth I tried to persuade him to join an English colonizing expedition to Florida. She then accused him of planning to escape to France on English ships and imprisoned him in the Tower of London. In the meantime, the stranded colonists deserted Charlesfort and made their way back to France. In 1564 another Huguenot leader, René Goulaine de Laudonnière (d. 1682), led a second expedition to the Atlantic coast, founding Fort Caroline near the mouth of the Saint Johns River. Shortly before Laudonnière was to return to France, Ribault showed up with supplies and reinforcements for Fort Caroline. By now the Spanish had become aware of the French presence, and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived from Saint Augustine with ships to drive them out. Nearly all of the Frenchmen, including Ribault and except Laudonniere, who escaped to France, were killed. The Protestants were ultimately victorious in the Wars of Religion, bringing an end to the conflict in 1598. The Protestant king, Henry IV (1553-1610), once again turned France's attention toward North America. In 1603 he commissioned an expedition, headed by François Gravé Du Pont, to the Saint Lawrence River. The navigator on the voyage was Samuel de Champlain (c. 1567-1635), who had been loyal to Henry IV during the war. The expedition landed at Tadoussac, a summer trading post where the Saguenay River runs into the Saint Lawrence. Champlain sailed up the Saint Lawrence past the sites of present-day Quebec, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal. He immediately realized that these lands could be colonized and made a source of wealth for the French king. Champlain also learned of the existence of the Great Lakes. The French found the land sparsely inhabited by Native Americans, some of whom were friendly while others were often hostile. Champlain wrote about the customs of the Native Americans he encountered in Voyages de la Nouvelle France. Returning to Tadoussac in July, the expedition sailed around the Gaspé Peninsula into a region Champlain called Acadia (probably named for Arcadia, the mythical paradise of the ancient Greeks). Champlain urged the French government to explore Acadia, now known as Nova Scotia. The region reportedly had rich mines, and some speculated it might even be the key to finding the elusive Northwest Passage. As a result of his efforts in New France, Champlain was chosen in 1604 to be the geographer on an expedition to Acadia. It was led by Lieutenant-General Pierre du Gua, sieur de Monts, who had been granted the rights to fur trade in the region. Traveling down the coast of New Brunswick, they stopped at the Saint Croix River and built a small fort on a site that is now almost exactly on the border between the United States and Canada. The first winter was disastrous; ten of the eighteen men in the party died of scurvy. The following year they moved across the Bay of Fundy to Port Royal, now called Annapolis Royal, in Nova Scotia. This was to become the center of settlement for the French Acadians. Champlain was the first European to give a detailed account of the region(New England). Champlain lived to see Quebec established on both shores of the Saint Lawrence River. He died in Quebec in 1635. He is considered the father of New France and the founder of Quebec. By 1608 Champlain had secured backing for his most ambitious project in the New World, the founding of a permanent settlement called Quebec. Arriving in July, the party, which included thirty-two colonists, built a fort and prepared to face their first hard winter. Only nine people survived to welcome the reinforcements who arrived the following year. Champlain continued his exploration of New France by traveling up the Saint Lawrence and Richelieu Rivers to the lake that now bears his name. In 1609 he joined the Huron tribe and their allies in a great battle against a band of Iroquois raiders on Lake Champlain near present-day Crown Point, New York. The French and Hurons defeated the Iroquois, thus turning the Iroquois, one of the most powerful tribal nations in North America, against the French. In 1612 Champlain returned to France. On the basis of his report, the king decided to make Quebec the center for French fur trading in North America. During the next few years, Champlain frequently traveled back and forth between New France and France. While in New France he pursued his explorations and tried to nurture the colony of Quebec, but political schemes in France demanded most of his attention. When the fur trade faltered, he had to gain new support for the colony. He came out of this predicament the victor, having been made a lieutenant in New France by the new king, Louis XIII. When Champlain returned to New France in 1613, he explored the Ottawa River to present-day Allumette Island, opening what would become the main river route to the Great Lakes for the next two centuries. By this time the French had made favorable treaties with many Native American tribes, and the fur trade was prospering. Champlain then concentrated on governing the colony. In 1615 he returned from France with the first Roman Catholic missionaries, who came to convert the Native Americans to Christianity. During that summer he saw the Great Lakes for the first time. The Iroquois presence continued to be troublesome to the French colonists. When the French, in alliance with the Hurons and Algonquians, unsuccessfully attacked an Iroquois stronghold at a site in modern-day New York State, Champlain was seriously wounded. He spent the winter recuperating among the Hurons. When he returned to France in 1616 he found his position once again weakened, and he lost the rank of lieutenant in New France. In order to regain his status he proposed an ambitious plan to colonize Quebec, establish agriculture, and search for the Northwest Passage. He gained the king's support and spent part of 1618 in Quebec. In Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, 1604-1618 Champlain provided a detailed account of the aftermath of the battle the Hurons and their allies waged against the Iroquois in 1609. He wrote about the torture of an Iroquois prisoner by the Hurons, a common practice among Native Americans in the seventeenth century. Champlain listed the various techniques they used, including branding, scalping, and mutilation. He admitted that it was difficult to watch another human being suffer, but he also spoke of the strength of the victim, who displayed "such firmness that one would have said, at times, that he suffered hardly any pain at all. The company of One Hundred Associates to rule New France with Champlain in charge was formed after. In 1629 Quebec was attacked by a party of English privateers (pirates licensed by the government) and forced to surrender. Champlain regained his position in 1632 when a peace treaty with the English returned the province to France. Two years later he sent Jean Nicolet (1598-1642), a French trapper and trader, west to extend French claims in the region that is now Wisconsin. Westward expansion was made possible through Champlain's friendly relations with the Hurons. Even though expansion to the south was still impossible, Quebec was a stable French settlement. It was stronger, in fact, than the English colony at Jamestown. The Catholic missionaries who accompanied Champlain to New France were Jesuits (members of the Society of Jesus). They were known throughout the world for their ability to adapt to foreign cultures and thus draw in converts to Catholicism. Attired in distinctive black tunics, the priests were called the "Black Robes" by the Hurons. The Jesuits ministered to French settlers and Hurons until the fall of Quebec in 1629. They then moved south into territory around the Great Lakes, which is now the United States. As the French combined colonization with religion, some of the Jesuits became explorers themselves. One of the most prominent was Father Jacques Marquette (1637-1675), who had settled in New France in 1666. Becoming proficient in six Native American languages, he founded a mission at Saint Ignace (in present-day Michigan) in 1671. The following year the governor of New France, Count of Frontenac (Louis de Buade; 1622-1698), announced plans to send an expedition through Native American country to discover the "South Sea [Gulf of Mexico]" and to explore "the great river they call Mississippi, which is believed to discharge into the sea of California [Gulf of California] Jean Nicolet was a Frenchman who had been living among the Huron, Algonquian, and Nipissing tribes since 1618. He was an interpreter and negotiator between Native American fur traders and French companies. In 1634 French explorer Samuel de Champlain sent Nicolet on a diplomatic mission to the Winnebago tribe, who lived on the shores of Green Bay in the present-day state of Wisconsin. Because the Winnebago were enemies of the Algonquians, the French feared that they would begin trading with the English. Since the theory was that the route to the Great Lakes might also lead to China, Nicolet wore a Chinese robe embroidered with flowers and birds. Nicolet began his journey in July 1634 and traveled via the Ottawa River, Lake Nipissing, and the French River to Lake Huron, where he passed through the Straits of Mackinac to Lake Michigan, then proceeded southwest to Green Bay. He was the first European to follow this route, which eventually became the passage to the west for French fur traders. One of the great scenes of North American exploration is Nicolet coming ashore in Green Bay dressed in his flowery Chinese robe. Impressing the tribe with his elaborate costume, Nicolet successfully completed his mission by signing a peace treaty between the Winnebago and the French. Frontenac chose Marquette to accompany the leader of the expedition, the French-Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet (1645-1700). Jolliet had studied for the Jesuit priesthood in France, but by 1671 he had returned to New France and entered the fur trade. He was also one of the signers of a document in which the French claimed possession of the Great Lakes region. Jolliet's party, which included five Native American guides, left Quebec in October 1672. By early December they reached Saint Ignace, where Marquette joined them. The following May the seven men embarked in two canoes, going west along the north shore of Lake Michigan to present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, then up the Fox River. From there they portaged (carried boats overland) to the Wisconsin River and descended to the Mississippi on June 15, 1673. They stopped at the mouth of the Arkansas River, about 450 miles south of the mouth of the Ohio and just north of the present boundary between Arkansas and Louisiana. Here they stayed among the Quapaw tribe, from whom they heard reports of the Spanish approaching from the west. Fearing the Spanish and concluding that the Mississippi must run into the Gulf of Mexico, the explorers turned back before reaching the mouth of the Mississippi. Joliet and Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette were the first Europeans to travel down the Mississippi River. Jolliet also conducted extensive explorations of Labrador. Jacques Marquette-On the Thursday before Easter 1673, Marquette preached a sermon to a gathering of two thousand. members of the Illinois nation. He partially fulfilled his goal of establishing missions around the Great Lakes and in the Mississippi valley. Yet modern historians conclude that the Jesuits ultimately had little impact on Native American life. In 1679 Joliet led an expedition on an overland route to the rich furtrading regions of Hudson Bay, which the English were exploiting. When he reached Hudson Bay he encountered English traders and learned the extent of their activities. Upon his return to Quebec, Jolliet wrote a report warning that the French risked losing the fur trade if they allowed the English to remain in the area. As a reward for his success, Jolliet was given trading rights and land on the north shore of New France. He was also awarded the island of Anticosti. In 1694 Jolliet was commissioned to map the coastline of Labrador. He drew the first maps of the area, described the landscape, and gathered information about the Inuit (Eskimo) inhabitants. In October 1694 he returned to Quebec, only to discover that the British had seized Anticosti during his absence. After the French government granted Robert de La Salle(Also Jesuit) permission to explore, trade, and construct forts in New France, he and his men set out across the Great Lakes in a specially built ship called the Griffon. During their journey between 1679 and 1681 they established the sites of many present-day cities in the Midwest, and La Salle became the first European to sail down the Mississippi River to its mouth. He also established the only French settlement in Texas. Yet in spite of La Salle's success, he was responsible for several misadventures and disasters that led directly to his being killed in cold blood by his own men in 1687. Through family connections, he was granted land on the island of Montreal (located on the Saint Lawrence River in Canada), which he sold two years later for a profit. With this money La Salle organized an ill-fated expedition to find the Ohio River, which he thought would lead to the South Seas and eventually to China. There is no record of his travels from 1669 to 1670, but many supporters claimed he discovered the Mississippi River(which started with La Salle starting the expedition by constructing a fort on the Niagara River} . Evidence shows, however, that Jolliet and Marquette first found the Mississippi in 1673. In 1677 he went back to France, and the following year he received permission from King Louis XIV to explore North America between New France and Mexico. Louis Hennepin- In addition to being the first European to describe the Niagara Falls, he claimed to have traveled the length of the Mississippi River in 1680—two years before La Salle's historic voyage, Although evidence proved Hennepin's claim was false. He wrote Description of Louisiana in 1682, which became a best seller in multiple languages. He was later expelled from France. De La Salle then headed into the wilderness with a party of forty men, reaching Crèvecoeur in January 1682. From Crèvecoeur they descended the Illinois River onto the Mississippi, passing the mouth of the Missouri. La Salle finally sighted the Ohio River, which had been his goal when he set out on his first expedition thirteen years earlier. On the site of present-day Memphis, Tennessee, he also built a fort called Prud'homme. In March a war party from the Arkansas tribe threatened to attack La Salle and his men. He managed to avert a conflict and took possession of the country in the name of Louis XIV. The Frenchmen then continued down the river and passed the farthest point reached by Jolliet and Marquette. La Salle and his men spent time among the Tensas and Natchez tribes before reaching the Gulf of Mexico. He claimed the territory for France, calling it Louisiana. In the meantime Frontenac had been replaced by a new governor, who believed the charges that La Salle had mismanaged his expedition and mistreated his men. On the governor's orders, La Salle was sent back to France in 1683 to report on his conduct. He found little support in France for his ideas on developing the Mississippi valley. He did learn, however, that an influential group was trying to interest the French government in sending an expedition to the mouth of the Rio Grande on the Gulf of Mexico. Their plan was to seize valuable mines in New Mexico and New Spain (Mexico). In order to be a part of these schemes, La Salle purposely falsified his discoveries, making a map that moved the Mississippi River much farther to the west so that it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico from Texas rather than Louisiana. La Salle succeeded in convincing the king and rich French merchants to sponsor an expedition to the Gulf of Mexico. He left France in 1684, heading a party of four ships and 327 men and women. As a result of bad planning and La Salle's ongoing quarrel with the naval captain, the ships were overloaded, and there was not enough water. The party was forced to stop at the French colony of Haiti (an island in the Caribbean Sea). There they learned that one of their ships, which had been following with most of their supplies, had been captured by the Spanish. Leaving Haiti with the three remaining ships in November, La Salle headed toward the Mississippi delta (a deposit of sand, gravel, clay, and similar material). On December 27 and 28, they saw muddy waters that indicated they were near the mouth of the great river. La Salle had made miscalculations in his navigation, however, and chose to believe unreliable Spanish charts. Therefore, instead of investigating, he headed west. By the time La Salle realized his mistake, the ships were off Matagorda Bay, south of the site of present-day Houston, Texas. After one of the ships ran aground while sailing into the bay, local Native Americans tried to ransack the wreckage. The Frenchmen shot at them, and from then on the two groups were enemies. In May 1685 La Salle constructed a fort at the mouth of the Lavaca River on Matagorda Bay. It was the only French colony to be established in the Southwest. With the fort as a base, La Salle and several members of the party made exploring trips into the surrounding countryside. On the night of March 18, 1687, a mutinous (rebellious) group killed his nephew, servant, and guide. The next morning, at a spot just north of the present-day town of Navosta, Texas, they shot La Salle in cold blood and left his body to be eaten by wild animals. The remaining members of La Salle's expedition reached Montreal in July 1688. In 1717 John Law (1671-1729), a Scottish adventurer and financier, started the French Company of the West. It was granted exclusive development rights in the Mississippi River valley and around the Gulf of Mexico. Soon Law and his partners controlled the tobacco and African slave trades in the Louisiana Territory. A year later they requested that Louisiana Governor Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, establish the city of New Orleans. In 1719 the company changed its name to Company of the Indies and embarked on an elaborate program called the Mississippi Bubble to encourage settlement in Louisiana. Promoters brought in German and Dutch immigrants, promising them property and supplies if they agreed to farm the land. The plan attracted thousands of immigrants to New Biloxi, Natchez, and other settlements. The company also managed to monopolize French trade in the colonies, but by 1720 the scheme had triggered a buying frenzy that inflated company shares to more than thirty times their actual worth. Profits could not keep pace with stock values, causing a stock-market crash in France. As a result, nearly everyone involved in the company was financially ruined. Although the Mississippi Bubble was a failure, it had boosted the population of Louisiana and prevented England or Spain from gaining a foothold in the region. The Mississippi valley was now opened to French settlement in two principal areas: Illinois country (le pays des Illinois) around the Great Lakes and Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico. The Illinois country stretched from a French settlement at Cahokia (across the river from present-day Saint Louis, Missouri) fifty miles downriver to another settlement at Kaskaskia. Cahokia was founded in 1699 as a mission for the conversion of Native Americans, and Kaskaskia was a fort established in 1703. Both attracted coureurs de bois (woods runners), French trappers and traders who lived among the Native Americans. The French also began settling Louisiana in 1699, under the leadership of Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville (1661-1706) and his brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville (1680-1747). Along with two hundred French colonists, they established Old Biloxi on the site of present-day Ocean Springs, Mississippi. In 1701 Iberville returned to Montreal, while Bienville remained at Old Biloxi, which had been made the capital of the Louisiana Territory. Bienville was named governor of Louisiana. The French founded other settlements, such as Fort Louis, on the site that is now Mobile, Alabama. In 1718 Bienville established the city of New Orleans, which became the capital of Louisiana in 1722. The population of Louisiana boomed from 1718 to 1720 as a result of the failed Mississippi Bubble scheme (see box on page 76), which resulted in Bienville being forced out of office. When he began his third term as governor in 1733, more than eight thousand people lived in Louisiana. Over the years the province served as a penal colony (settlement for convicted criminals), a temporary home for indentured servants (laborers contracted to work for a master for a specified period of time), and a slave import center. Yet death rates were high: by 1763, when France surrendered most of Louisiana to the Spanish at the end of the French and Indian War, the inhabitants included 3,654 Europeans and 4,598 African slaves.

The North American Indians

Most Native American groups in North America lived in small, impermanent, matrilinear groups right up to the arrival of European explorers, therefore meaning most Indians in NA lacked dense population concentrations or highly developed social life in the modern sense. Exceptions to above criteria: The Cahokia settlement in the present-day Mississippi Basin and the Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazis) culture in the Four Corners region of the Southwest(place where four states, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado come together; was the home of the Anasazi people. The Native American Mississippian(Ohio) Valley culture is often associated with vast complexes of mound structures constructed around a.d. 1200. Archaeological evidence shows that this group illustrated a much higher level of political organization than was common among most indigenous populations in North America, though the civilization began to decline and vanish nearly a century prior to European arrival in North America.

Trails

OREGON TRAIL, one of several routes traveled in the mid-nineteenth century by pioneers seeking to settle in the western territories. Over a period of about thirty years, roughly 1830 to 1860, some 300,000 Americans crowded these overland trails. The Oregon Trail was first traveled in the early 1840s. Only some 5,000 or so had made it to Oregon Territory by 1845, with another 3,000 making their way to California three years later. This trickle would turn into a flood in the following decade. The Oregon Trail totaled some 2,000 miles. The Oregon and California Trails followed the same path for almost half of this journey, so over landers headed to either destination faced many of the same natural obstacles. Departing from the small towns of Independence or St. Joseph, Missouri, or Council Bluffs, Iowa, miles of open plains initially greeted the travelers. The trail followed first the Missouri and then the Platte River. The water of the Platte was too dirty to drink, not deep enough to float a barge, and so broad that it left great mud flats and quicksand in the way of the unsuspecting settler. As the Rocky Mountains neared, the overlanders shifted to the north side of the Platte, and then maneuvered to cross the Continental Divide at the South Pass, low enough, broad Report Advertisement Enough, and safe enough for wagon transit. At this halfway point, the Oregon and California Trails diverged, the former heading north. Settlers bound for Oregon Country shadowed the Snake River and faced one last mountain obstacle, the Blue Mountains. The Willamette Valley awaited those sturdy enough to complete this passage and some finished their travels on a reasonably safe boat ride down the Columbia River. It took six to seven months to travel the complete length of the Oregon Trail. Ideally, those making this journey departed in May to arrive before November and the first heavy snowfalls. However, those leaving too early risked getting mired in mud, and those leaving too late confronted snow at the end of their travels, a dangerous and foreboding prospect. The overlanders traveled in wagon trains, in groups ranging from ten to one hundred wagons. As the trails became better known and well-traveled, most wagoneers preferred smaller trains. Smaller wagon trains moved more quickly and were delayed less often due to internal arguments. When disputes did arise they might be settled by vote or, especially in larger wagon trains, according to a written constitution. On the trail, hardships and dangers proved numerous and discouraging. Accidents, such as drowning, ax wounds, shootings, or being run over by wagons or trampled by livestock, claimed many victims. Sickness, especially cholera from poor drinking water, weakened countless travelers, eventually killing some. Despite the obstacles, people made the journey for economic reasons. The depression of 1837, the most severe of its day, pushed those contemplating a move west to do so sooner rather than later. California's gold rush, starting in 1848, did much to fuel travel west via the overland trails. Fertile land and the potential for wealth from trapping drew people to the Northwest. Migrants to the West were farmers as well as storekeepers, clerks, saloonkeepers, former soldiers, and other adventurers. They came from all over the United States, including the Upper South, the Midwest, and the Northeast. Because of the difficulty of the journey, most fell between the ages of ten and forty. Much folklore grew up around the overlanders and their journey. Perhaps the biggest legend of all concerns the danger posed to the migrants by Native Americans. In fact, Native Americans aided, directed, and even accompanied the overlanders. Deaths at the hands of Plains Indians probably numbered only in the hundreds, almost certainly not reaching the several thousands reported in legend. Most Indians sought to profit from the wagoneers by imposing either a toll to cross a river, a fee for guidance down an uncertain road, or by offering an exchange of goods for renewed provisions. Horses often acted as currency. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the wagon era came to a close. Yet a change in mode of transportation did little to detract from the accomplishment of those who toughed it out on the Oregon Trail and other trails. These pioneers had opened a land and settled it all in one motion. The Santa Fe Trail was an important commerce route between 1821 and 1880 that extended from Missouri to Santa Fe, New Mexico. American attempts at Santa Fe trade met with summary action by Spanish authorities, who arrested twelve men from Saint Louis in 1812 and imprisoned them for nine years, and arrested Auguste Pierre Chouteau's Saint Louis fur brigade in 1815 for trapping on the Upper Arkansas. After Mexico overthrew Spanish rule, news spread that traders were welcome in Santa Fe. First to arrive was William Becknell of Missouri, who reached Santa Fe on 16 November 1821, and sold his Indian trade goods at from ten to twenty times higher than Saint Louis prices. Becknell started from the steamboat landing of Franklin, Missouri, followed the prairie divide between the tributaries of the Kansas and Arkansas rivers to the Great Bend of the Arkansas, and then followed the Arkansas almost to the mountains before turning south to New Mexico. His route became known as the Santa Fe Trail. The Missouri River terminus later became Westport, now Kansas City. At the western end the trail turned south to Santa Fe from the Arkansas by different routes touching the Colorado-New Mexico border and another near Kansas. Merchants traveled in caravans, moving wagons in parallel columns so that they might be quickly formed into a circular corral, with livestock inside, in the event of an Indian attack. Josiah Gregg reported that up to 1843 Indians killed but eleven men on the trail. Santa Fe trade brought to the United States much-needed silver, gave America the Missouri mule, and paved the way for American claims to New Mexico in the Mexican-American War. Estimates of the heavy volume of westward-bound traffic on the trail vary. Gregg reported in Commerce of the Prairies that 350 persons transported $450,000 worth of goods at Saint Louis prices in 1843. Lt. Col. William Gilpin's register shows 3,000 wagons, 12,000 persons, and 50,000 animals between 1849-1859, a large part of the number bound for California. The register at Council Grove, Kansas, in 1860 showed 3,514 persons, 61 carriages and stagecoaches, 5,819 mules, and 22,738 oxen. Federal mail service by stagecoach was instituted in 1849. Completion of the last section of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad in 1880 ended the importance of the wagon road. CHEROKEE TRAIL, also known as the Trappers' Trail, was laid out and marked in the summer of 1848 by Lieutenant Abraham Buford as a way for both Cherokee and white residents in northeastern Arkansas to access the Santa Fe Trail on their way to the California gold fields. It had previously been followed by trappers en route to the Rocky Mountains. It extended from the vicinity of Fort Gibson up the Arkansas River to a point in the northwestern part of present-day Oklahoma. From there it ran west and joined the Sante Fe Trail. GOLD RUSH: When James Marshall looked into the American River and saw gold alongside John Sutter's sawmill on 24 January 1848, he unintentionally initiated a set of events that dramatically transformed both California and the United States. Although Marshall and Sutter attempted to prevent news of their discovery from spreading, within a few months word had reached San Francisco. A visitor in June found the city nearly abandoned because of "gold fever." By September eastern newspapers offered their readers breathless reports of the incredible riches ready for the taking. The term "rush" is appropriate. By 1850, California's American-and European-born population had increased tenfold, with San Francisco alone growing from a sleepy village of 1,000 to a bustling city of 35,000. Ships that docked in San Francisco Bay at the height of the fever risked losing their entire crews to the goldfields. The state's non-Indian population increased from about 14,000 before the discovery to nearly 250,000 in 1852 even though an average of 30,000 prospectors returned home each year. Although 80 percent of the "forty-niners" were from the United States and all states were represented, this migration also was a global event, drawing gold seekers from California Indian bands, East Asia, Chile, Mexico, and western Europe. For the United States it was the largest mass migration to date, flooding the previously lightly traveled trails to the West Coast as more than 1 percent of the nation's population moved to California in just a few years. Report Advertisement The apparent availability of wealth drew so many so fast. In a time when farm workers could expect to earn a dollar for a long day's work and skilled craftspeople earned perhaps half again as much, it was not uncommon for early arrivals to the goldfields to make $16 a day. The chance for such prosperity struck many Americans as not merely a potential individual windfall but as a fulfillment of their rapidly expanding country's promise of economic democracy. Just nine days after Marshall's discovery, California, ceded in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo by a defeated and occupied Mexico, formally became a part of the United States. It seemed that average Americans, whatever their previous backgrounds or origins, were reaping nature's bounty. The hordes of newcomers made gold rush California a society distinct from the migrants' various homelands. The diversity of nationalities, the sharp fluctuations in economic prospects, and the overwhelming preponderance of men all kept social life in the goldfields unsettled. At the time gold rush California was for many a sharp contrast to the sobriety and respectability of middle-class America. "But they were rough," wrote Mark Twain of the forty-niners in Roughing It. "They fairly reveled in gold, whiskey, fights, fandagos, and were unspeakably happy." It was for good reason that mining camps and towns instantly acquired reputations for wildness. Probably half of the women in early mining camps were prostitutes. Alcohol, isolation, and struggles over access to gold made for high rates of homicide and other violence. Gender roles were less predictable and more flexible than in the homes of most migrants. The small percentage of women meant that men had to perform traditionally feminine domestic tasks or pay others, often women entrepreneurs, good money to do so, and this may have given married women more power and options. But the quick end of Easy riches and the arrival of significant numbers of white women in the 1850s signaled the end of gold rush society. Newly arrived middle-class women saw themselves as "taming" California, curtailing gambling, drinking, prostitution, and much of the openness in gender roles that had characterized the region. While the promise of easy riches drew many migrants, the reality was often not what they had hoped. Miners worked long hours in remote places, generally living in ramshackle accommodations and paying exorbitant prices for food, shelter, and clothing. The gold deposits accessible to hand digging quickly played out, and all that remained were buried veins that could be exploited only by well-capitalized ventures employing hydraulic equipment and other expensive machinery. Most miners who remained were no longer independent prospectors but rather the employees of large mining companies. Indeed, most of the gold rush fortunes were not made by extracting the nearly $300 million in gold dug in six years but rather by marketing supplies to the miners. The German immigrant Levi Strauss, for example, sold so many work pants to gold diggers that his name became the generic term for jeans (Levis). For others the gold rush was an outright disaster. The numbers, diseases, and violence of newcomers over-whelmed most of the state's Native American peoples, initiating a demographic collapse that brought them to the edge of extinction. White discrimination, embodied most clearly in heavy taxes on foreign miners, kept most Chinese, Latin American, and African American prospectors out of the choice diggings. Even the rush's originators failed to profit. Marshall and Sutter were soon overtaken by the course of events and were ruined. Their sawmill was idled by the flight of able-bodied men to the diggings, and squatters occupied much of Sutter's expansive lands, killing most of his livestock and destroying his crops. Both men died in poverty and anonymity. But what destroyed Sutter and Marshall created American California, with important consequences for the nation as a whole. The gold rush made the Golden State the most populous and prosperous western territory even as it removed tens of thousands of men from their families and communities for years. Connecting the West Coast to the rest of the country added to the impetus to build the transcontinental railways, to defeat the last independent Indian nations on the Great Plains, and to settle the interior West. Finally, the wealth it produced, even greater and more easily acquired in legend, made thousands flock to later discoveries of gold in Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Mormon Trail- The Mormon Trail refers to the route the Mormons took after their expulsion from Nauvoo, Illinois, in February 1846. They took a well-beaten trail westward, through what is now Iowa, crossing the Missouri River into Nebraska Territory by permission of the Omaha Indians. In April 1847 Brigham Young led 143 men, 3 women, and 2 children west along the Platte River to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, over the old Oregon Trail to Fort Bridger, Wyoming, southwest through Echo Canyon to the Weber River, through East Canyon, and across the Big and Little Mountains of the Wasatch Range. They entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake in Utah through Emigration Canyon on 24 July 1847.

Transcontinental Railroad

On May 10, 1869, the last tracks of the United States' first cross-country railroad were laid, making North America the first continent to be spanned from coast to coast by a rail line. The event was the fulfillment of a great national dream to knit the vast country closer together. Short-run rail lines had been in use since the 1840s, but the nation lacked a quick and reliable method for transporting people, raw materials, and finished goods between distant regions. In the early 1860s, the U.S. Congress decided in favor of extending the railroad across the country. The federal government granted land and extended millions of dollars in loans to two companies to complete the project. After a long debate that had become increasingly sectional, Congress determined the railroad should run roughly along the 42nd parallel—from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California. This route was chosen for its physical properties: the topography of the landscape would best allow the ambitious project. The Union Pacific Railroad was to begin work in Omaha and lay tracks westward; the Central Pacific Railroad was to begin in Sacramento and lay tracks eastward, crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Work began in 1863, and six years later the two projects met at Promontory in north-central Utah, northwest of Ogden. By the end of the 1800s, fifteen rail lines crossed the nation. Transcontinental railroad, in U.S. history, rail connection with the Pacific coast. In 1845, Asa Whitney presented to Congress a plan for the federal government to subsidize the building of a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific. The settlement of the Oregon boundary in 1846, the acquisition of western territories from Mexico in 1848, and the discovery of gold in California (1849) increased support for the project; in 1853, Congress appropriated funds to survey various proposed routes. Rivalry over the route was intense, however, and when Senator Stephen Douglas introduced (1854) his Kansas-Nebraska Act, intended to win approval for a line from Chicago, the ensuing sectional controversy between North and South forced a delay in the plans. During the Civil War, a Republican-controlled Congress enacted legislation (July 1, 1862) providing for construction of a transcontinental line. The law provided that the railroad be built by two companies; each received federal land grants of 10 alternate sections per mile on both sides of the line (the amount was doubled in 1864) and a 30-year government loan for each mile of track constructed. In 1863 the Union Pacific RR began construction from Omaha, Nebr., while the Central Pacific broke ground at Sacramento, Calif. The two lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah, and on May 10, 1869, a golden spike joined the two railways, thus completing the first transcontinental railroad. Others followed. Three additional lines were finished in 1883: the Northern Pacific RR stretched from Lake Superior to Portland, Oreg.; the Santa Fe extended from Atchison, Kans., to Los Angeles; and the Southern Pacific connected Los Angeles with New Orleans. A fifth line, the Great Northern, was completed in 1893. Each of those companies received extensive grants of land, although none obtained government loans. The promise of land often resulted in shoddy construction that only later was repaired, and scandals, such as Crédit Mobilier (see Crédit Mobilier of America), were not infrequent. The transcontinental railroads immeasurably aided the settling of the west and hastened the closing of the frontier. They also brought rapid economic growth as mining, farming, and cattle-raising developed along the main lines and their branches

Mobilization

Raising an American army has traditionally been complicated by competing political ideologies, the fear of a strong standing army, a reliance on citizen-soldiers, and wartime dissent. From the nation's inception in the late eighteenth century through the Cold War years (1946-1991), America's defenses consisted of state militia forces (later called the National Guard) and a small regular (federal) army—the latter expanded by citizen-soldiers who joined as volunteers and only when necessary as draftees. This two-army tradition of militias and professionals grew out of the colonies' early use of militia forces, the new nation's intense debate over the power of the federal government, and the growing concern that a permanent force of trained soldiers could threaten the liberty of the people. During America's wars, patriotic fervor as well as varying degrees of political dissent converged with each mobilization effort. the mexican war The Mexican War (1846-1848) was no exception. Years of tension stemming from the Texas Revolution and Texas's subsequent declaration of independence from Mexico resurfaced with a boundary dispute and the 1845 admission of Texas into the United States. This was far more than a quarrel over land. President James K. Polk's insistence that Mexico acknowledge the boundary Texas claimed had more to do with the president's desire (and the desire of many other imperialists in the United States) to spread what they thought of as America's superior cultural, political, and economic institutions from sea to sea. A war with Mexico had the potential to add vast lands, from Texas to California, and to extend American commerce to countries across the Pacific. Although most Americans generally supported the idea of expansion westward, others (particularly abolitionists and the northern Whig and the Free Soil political parties) resisted the spread of slavery into any newly acquired lands. Anti-imperialists and pacifists—a small minority of Americans—stood firm against Manifest Destiny, most of them objecting to an attitude they considered presumptuous for violating other peoples' right of self-determination. When war with Mexico began in May 1846, the country's longstanding tradition of maintaining a small regular army brought the United States to the conflict with a force of only about 8,600 men. Polk quickly expanded the military after Congress authorized a regular (federal) army of 15,500 men and an enlistment of over 50,000 one-year (or duration) volunteers. Also called into service were 1,390 three-month militiamen, a call-up which soon expanded to 11,211 six-month militiamen. However, a fierce public debate over the war forced the government to restrict its military efforts. Mobilization was not easy; Northern opposition to the war forced the government to recruit in other regions. The American military victory over Mexico came in 1848 and involved the combined forces of the regular U.S. army, 12,000 militiamen from the Gulf states, and 73,000 volunteers who came primarily from the Southern and Midwestern states. Irish and German immigrants composed some forty-seven percent of the army's recruits during the 1840s, so undoubtedly immigrants made up a significant part of the American regular army during the war. Like native-born enlistees, they were lured into the military by a sense of adventure, a feeling of patriotism for their (adopted) country, and the anticipation of upward mobility. the civil war: volunteers and draftees Mobilizing for war became even more complex during the American Civil War (1861-1865), which was brought about by continued political and economic conflict between the North and the South and exacerbated by conflict over whether slavery would expand westward. Despite the South's rallying cry of states' rights, the Confederacy implemented a national draft before the Union did, on April 16, 1862. In response to increasing casualties, a decreasing number of volunteers, and the expiration of one-year enlistments, the South declared all white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five eligible for the draft. Facing conscription, many men volunteered in order to have some say in which unit they joined. However, a draft-age man was allowed to hire someone to take his place, and substitutes soon charged top dollar (some over $5,000) to take up arms. Of the 120,000 Confederate draftees, 70,000 found substitutes. Although Southern lawmakers later eliminated the substitution option, the new draft system allowed for so many exemptions (particularly for the wealthier classes), that fifty percent of would-be draftees stayed out of service. Attempts to mobilize men in the North resulted in similar problems. President Abraham Lincoln asked Congress for 300,000 three-year volunteers. At the start of the conflict, enlistment of young men eager to fight for the cause and drawn by patriotism, the spirit of adventure, or the promise of a steady paycheck allowed the North to attract a good supply of soldiers. The threat of a possible draft also helped bring volunteers, especially among men who would rather join on their own terms than be forced into the army. Initially, 421,000 volunteers and 87,500 militiamen answered the call. The North's early use of volunteer and militia forces permitted the Union to honor the deeply held beliefs of the founding fathers that a small standing federal army be enlarged in time of crisis by citizen-soldiers. However, as one bloody battle followed another and casualties mounted, an acute manpower shortage left the North no alternative but to institute a draft. The March 3, 1863, Enrollment Act (also called the Conscription Act) made all able-bodied male citizens between twenty-one and forty-five eligible for conscription. This included native-born citizens, naturalized citizens, and immigrants who had declared their intention of becoming citizens. Problems with the Northern draft also quickly became apparent due to special exemptions allowing men to hire substitutes or pay $300 to purchase exemptions. The federalized draft system caused much controversy, further divided Republicans and Democrats, and led to widespread draft resistance, including riots. Peace Democrats saw the draft exemption rules as class based and argued that commutations would cost a worker one year's pay. They vehemently challenged exemptions that allowed the upper class to escape military service while the lower classes died in what was often called a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. Resistance to the Union draft took on a number of forms, including creating fictitious identities, going into hiding, and open violence. More than 161,000 men evaded the draft. Armed draft resistance led to bloodshed and even murder as a growing number of working class Democrats from both native-born and immigrant groups mixed their resentment of the draft with anger over prolonged economic hardships and lingering feelings of exploitation by their Republican bosses. Many from the working class also feared that freed African Americans would compete with them for jobs, especially after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, which freed slaves in the Confederate states. Draft resistance and riots took place in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Vermont, and Wisconsin. The worst draft riot occurred in New York City and began on July 13, 1863, after the first name was drawn from the conscription wheel. The riot lasted five days and included beatings, looting, vandalism, arson, and murder. The frustration of the rioters was directed at not only at upper class Republicans but also at New York's African-American population. The Northern drafts were far from effective. Of the 522,187 men examined, 315,509 received exemptions for medical or other reasons, and many of those who could afford to pay their way out of service did so. Of 206,678 "draftees," 86,724 paid their way out of service and 73,607 found substitutes. Only 46,347 men who served in the Civil War—about six percent—came directly from the conscription system. To attract more volunteers, the government resorted to bounties, payments to entice men to enlist, which eventually cost the government some $700 million. Most of those who served in the Union army came from the lower classes and were brought into the war as draftees, bounty enlistees, volunteers, or substitutes. Irish and German immigrants made up about twenty-four percent of the soldiers and African Americans represented ten percent. Several hundred women also served in the Union Army, however, most women who joined the war effort did so in non-combatant roles. post-civil war period America's rapid demobilization at the close of the Civil War was in keeping with its prewar ideology: The country returned to a small standing army. By 1876, the regular forces were made up of about 27,500 men, and most of them were scattered on the Western frontier. Increased settlement, dramatically accelerated by railroad construction, brought over two million settlers to the West and further disturbed the land and game that sustained the Indian way of life. Government policy forced tribes to live on reservations, often on uninhabitable lands, and treaties with the Indians were commonly invalidated when white fortune hunters found gold and silver on Indian lands. Skirmishes in the Great Plains increased sharply as Indians reacted to this encroachment. Territorial militiamen and volunteers joined the fight, but in many cases they made the situation even more contentious by their cruel treatment of Indian tribes. Before the close of the nineteenth century, the United States fought the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection. Both conflicts forced the nation to rethink its military practices. By the early twentieth century, America was fully industrialized and involved in global trade and international affairs. As an emerging world power, military leaders argued that reform was not only recommended, it was necessary. Although leaders could agree on many aspects of military modernization, they debated America's mobilization practices, especially the use of volunteers and militiamen in combination with a small regular army. Some reformers argued for universal military training, which would require all able-bodied young men to practice as soldiers. Others called for maintaining a larger federal army of professionally trained soldiers. In the end, the tradition of expanding the military only in time of crisis was maintained. Mobilization continued to bring together citizen-soldiers in the form of draftees, volunteers, and the National Guard to assist the regular army. Not until the late twentieth century did the United States break the tradition, forming and maintaining a large professional trained army and stationing it throughout the world. bibliography

Iroquois League

The Iroquois League founded around the 16th century initially consisted of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca and spanned what is now southeastern Canada into New York. While initially consisting of five nations, the league expanded to six when the Tuscarora joined in the 1700s. The purpose was to maintain peaceful relations between the five constituent tribes(militarily) as well as to develop fur trade. the fur trade served to strengthen the confederacy because tribal interests often complemented one another and all gained from acting in concert. The League was skillful at playing French and English interests off against one another to its advantage and thereby was able to play a major role in the economic and political events of northEastern North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Iroquois aggressively maintained and expanded their role in the fur trade and as a result periodically found themselves at war with their neighbors. From 1667 to the 1680s the Iroquois maintained friendly relations with the French, and during this time Jesuit missions were established among each of the five tribes. Iroquois aggression and expansion, however, eventually brought them into conflict with the French and, at the same time, into closer alliance with the English. In 1687, 1693, and 1696 French military expeditions raided and burned Iroquois Villages and fields. During Queen Anne's War (1702-1713) the Iroquois allied with the English and at the war's end were acknowledged to be British subjects, though they continued to aggressively maintain and extend their middleman role Between English traders at Fort Orange (Albany, established by the Dutch West Indies company to facilitate trade with the Iroquois Indians. The Indians brought furs in exchange for firearms and other cheap Dutch goods. The Fort was located in New Netherland and was a replacement of Fort Nassau.) and native groups farther west. The victory of the English over the French in North America in 1763 weakened the power of the Confederacy by undermining the strategic economic and Political position of the tribes and by promoting the rapid Expansion of White settlement. When the American Revolution broke out in 1775 neither the League as a whole nor even the tribes individually were able to agree on a common course of action. Most of the Iroquois allied with the British and as a result during and after the Revolution were forced from their homelands.

Land Ordinances

The Land Ordinance of 1785 was the second of three land ordinances passed by the Confederation Congress after the Revolutionary War (1775-1783). The three ordinances, which included the Ordinance of 1784 and the Northwest Ordinance (1787), were meant to manage the lands of the Old Northwest, ceded by Great Britain at the end of the Revolution. The Treaty of Paris (1783), which established normal diplomatic relations between England and the former colonies after the Revolution, turned the area that is now the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin over to the new U.S. government. In 1784 a committee led by Thomas Jefferson drew up legislation to provide for future statehood for settlers already in the area. The following year, in the Land Ordinance of 1785, Jefferson's committee established the way in which the territory would be measured and divided for sale. The new nation was governed for the most part by the states. The relationship between the states and with the central government was defined by the Articles of Confederation. The central government was the Confederation Congress, a holdover from the Second Continental Congress which had been convened in the spring of 1775 and had coordinated the revolutionary war effort. The Articles of Confederation, ratified by the states in 1781, summarized the existing relationship between the Congress and the states. It was an indication of the distrust with which the American people viewed central authority that the Articles of Confederation did not allow the Congress to tax either the states or individuals. As a way of keeping the nation solvent, the states that claimed western lands from the terms of their colonial charters gave up those lands to the Confederation government. The Confederation government expected to use these lands as a way of meeting governmental expenses. In order to attract land buyers, the Congress declared that these lands would be made into new states, which would enter the Union on an equal basis with the original thirteen colonies. This declaration made possible the creation of the modern United States. The Land Ordinance created the pattern along which American public land would be divided and sold until the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The Ordinance of 1785 ruled that the western lands north of the Ohio River would be divided by surveyors into a square grid. Each square (called a township) measured six by six miles and was subdivided into thirty-six one-mile-square sections. Each section (measuring 640 acres) could then be further divided, usually into half, quarter, eighth, or sixteenth-section lots of 320, 160, 80, or 40 acres. Certain sections had restrictions placed on their sales; for instance, money from the sixteenth section of every township was to be set aside to fund public schools in the township. The first territorial survey took place in what is now southeastern Ohio, and it measured land that stretched westward from Little Beaver Creek to the Tuscarawas River and southward to the Ohio River. A total of about 91 townships were created (although some of them were fractional and did not contain a full 36 sections), with about 3,276 sections comprising 2,096,640 acres of land ready for development by U.S. farmers. Although the Land Ordinance of 1785 was conceived as a way to divide the western territory more evenly than had been the case before the Revolution, in practice it was less than fair. Congress thought that land sales in the territory would help it meet its big debts left over from the war. As a result, land sales were aimed at wealthy purchasers rather than the poorest farmers, who were most in need of land on which to settle. Until 1841 the government also required that public land be offered at auction where syndicates of land speculators usually snatched it up before it could be sold to private individuals. Congress set the minimum amount of land that could be purchased at one section—640 acres—and the purchase price at one dollar per acre. Small purchases on credit were not allowed. The $640 minimum purchase placed the cost of western lands far outside the budget of most U.S. citizens. Most of the lands went instead to wealthy land speculators, who were also given the option of buying on credit. The speculators bought lands from the government, divided them up, and then resold them to small farmers at a profit. An interesting sidelight to the Ordinances was the way that they steered the political culture of the nation. The third Ordinance, passed in 1787, stipulated that future inhabitants would be guaranteed a "bill of rights" guaranteeing freedom of religion and the right to a jury trial. It also prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River, although this applied to the future and did not contemplate the freeing of slaves that were already held in the Old Northwest Territory. The ordinance also contained provisions for the return of escaped slaves. The Northwest Ordinance (officially the Ordinance of 1787) was enacted by the Congress of the Confederation of the States on July 13, 1787. This statute provided for the government of the Northwest Territory, an area bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Great Lakes, and created a procedure by which states could be established within this territory and admitted to the Union. Congress was spurred to enact the ordinance when the Ohio Company of Associates, a group of land speculators, made plans to purchase more than one million acres in the territory. The Northwest Ordinance set several important precedents. It established that unlike many nations, which left their new territories in a position inferior to the old, the United States would admit new states to the Union on an equal basis with the original states. The ordinance also set aside land in each township for schools, thus setting a precedent for federal support to education. In addition, the ordinance prohibited slavery in the territory and included the first full statement of U.S. Indian policy, which stressed that "utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians." Northwest Ordinance Be it ordained by the United States in Congress assembled that the said territory, for the purposes of temporary government, be one district, subject, however, to be divided into two districts, as future circumstances may, in the opinion of Congress, make it expedient. The Southwest Ordinance (1 Stat. 123), approved on May 26, 1790, organized the "Territory of the United States, South of the River Ohio" into one political district and established provisions for its interim governance by Congress and expected transition to statehood. In effect, the Southwest Ordinance served the same purpose for the "Old Southwest" as the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had for the "territory north-west of the Ohio." While the Southwest Territory comprised the former western districts of North Carolina, South Carolina, and possibly Georgia as far west as the Mississippi River, in practice its provisions for territorial government applied only to the future state of Tennessee. Modeled on the landmark Northwest Ordinance, the Southwest Ordinance granted "all the privileges, benefits and advantages" of its sister legislation and instituted a "similar" form of territorial government, except for certain stipulations set by North Carolina in its land cession of December 22, 1789. The principal among these was the preservation of slavery in the territory—in direct contrast to the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance's famed Article VI. "Provided always that no regulations made or to be made by Congress shall tend to emancipate Slaves," the inhabitants of the Southwest Territory had guarantees of freedom of religion, the writ of habeas corpus , trial by jury, proportionate representation in the legislature, and judicial proceedings under common law. Some historians have argued that the defeat of the Ordinance of 1784, which had proposed to end slavery after 1800 in all the western territories, demonstrated Congress's tacit agreement to open the Southwest to slavery if the institution was prohibited in the Northwest. Like its sister legislation, the Southwest Ordinance outlined a three-stage process for the transition from territorial status to statehood. In the first stage, Congress would appoint a governor, secretary, and three judges to administer the territory. Once the district reached a population of five thousand adult free males, the governor, an elected lower house, and an appointed legislative council would assume governing responsibility. When the district crossed the third-stage threshold of sixty thousand free inhabitants, it could adopt a "republican" state constitution and apply to Congress for full statehood. The passage of the ordinance in 1790 brought order to a situation that had been highly chaotic in the 1780s. In the previous decade, the Old Southwest had experienced a failed attempt to organize the independent state of Franklin, controversy with Spanish agents over navigation rights on the Mississippi, the dissatisfaction of land speculators, and friction with Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw tribes. Territorial status paved the way for the nationalization of these problems. William Blount served as joint territorial governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for the entire six-year administrative history of the district. In 1795 the territory elected James White as its nonvoting representative to Congress, the first such member in Congressional history. A 1795 census in the district showed 66,650 free persons and 10,613 slaves, ample proof that slavery had taken root in the southwestern soil. On June 1, 1796, the Southwest Ordinance lost all official force with the admission of Tennessee to the United States as the second state (after Kentucky in 1792) created on the western frontier.

Mexican-American War

The Mexican-American War commenced on May 13, 1846, after President James Knox Polk (1795-1849) pressured Congress for an immediate declaration of war on Mexico. The road to war with Mexico represents a complicated period in U.S. history. By late 1845 political upheaval between the Whigs and the Democrats had reached a crescendo in Congress. The most pressing political issue surrounding war with Mexico had been the potential expansion of slavery to the U.S. Southwest. Many prowar congressional leaders favored battle as a means by which they could increase the influence and lucrative potential of slavery; meanwhile other hawkish war supporters understood the conflict to be a moral struggle for the purpose of spreading freedom and liberty in the absence of servitude. Former president John Quincy Adams (1825-1829), an ardent antislavery advocate, became one of the few voices of dissent in the House of Representatives then dominated by congressmen arguing for war. By 1803 Texas had become a disputed territory between the United States and Mexico. Many Americans loudly proclaimed Texas a part of the Louisiana Purchase brokered by President Thomas Jefferson on April 30, 1803. In 1821 Mexico achieved independence from Spanish control. Most of the Spanish leaders, pejoratively labeled gachupines, were deposed, and in their place native mestizo rulers assumed control of the government. (Gachupines were native Spaniards who oppressed, enslaved, and exploited indigenous Mexicans. This is a pejorative term referring to Spanish imperialists, similar to the word gringo.) The mestizos became known as criollos, most of whom demonstrated ineptitude due to their initial inexperience at governing, for under Spanish rule few indigenous citizens had achieved positions of power (Faulk and Stout 1973, p. xiii). Political turmoil and chronic factionalism followed the Mexican independence movement. Approximately thirty-six changes in leadership occurred between 1833 and 1855. The military remained dominant in political affairs, a circumstance that facilitated the rise of Mexican general turned president Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794-1876), who was elected president of Mexico by a majority vote in 1833. Santa Anna began his military career in 1810 as a cadet under the command of Joaquín de Arredondo. Mexican historians differ on whether he was vulgar and corrupt or a brave and skillful leader. Report Advertisement Provoked by the aggressive movements of volunteer soldiers from Texas in 1836, the fiery Santa Anna set his sights on attacking Texan forces garrisoned at the Alamo mission in San Antonio. A bloody battle ensued at the Alamo. The most popular American interpretation of this incident depicts a small but death-defying American force of roughly three hundred soldiers led by Sam Houston and Davy Crockett pitted against Santa Anna's roughly eight thousand bloodthirsty attackers (Mexican historians present a significantly different version of the battle). The battle officially lasted for thirteen days, from February 23 to March 6, 1836. There is some debate as to whether the Mexican general ordered the execution of American forces surrendering peacefully or if the Americans chose to fight until the bitter conclusion. The undeniable historical result of this tragic event is that no Americans were left alive. Consequently Santa Anna became a virtual public enemy in the United States. While the battle raged at the Alamo, a group of sixty councilmen representing the U.S. citizens of Texas gathered at the "General Convention" in the town of Washington and unanimously declared independence. All sixty signatories to the Texas Declaration of Independence (March 2, 1836), including Sam Houston, declared their independence from the "evil rulers" who brought "oppression" and removed even "the semblance of freedom." Compassion among U.S. observers of the Texans' struggle further developed because of Mexico's Goliad campaign of 1836 (also referred to as the "Goliad massacre"). This event has taken second place to the Alamo in American memory. One of Santa Anna's commanders, General José de Urrea (1795-1848), succeeded in taking prisoner 230 American soldiers who surrendered voluntarily on March 20, 1846. Santa Anna betrayed Urrea's promise of their safety by ordering the execution of many of the unarmed Texas fighters. Their deaths were justified by Santa Anna, who labeled them "foreign pirates" who had attacked a sovereign government without legal cause (Faulk and Stout 1973, p. xv). At the battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, Santa Anna's forces suffered defeat at the hands of an outraged Texan army. Santa Anna sought to avoid capture and punishment by dressing in plain clothing and hiding in the fields. Eventually U.S. forces recognized and seized him. This battle for all intents and purposes secured Texan independence and halted Santa Anna's onslaught. In 1836 Anglo-Americans residing in Texas declared independence. Mexican leaders immediately recognized the danger in the United States receiving an unfettered pass to annex the former Mexican territory. Many feared the U.S. spirit of expansion would whet the appetite of expansionists in Congress and expedite the annexation movement. Meanwhile, in order for Mexican leaders to maintain power, they had to continually promise embittered constituents a reconquest of Texas. Mexico refused to acknowledge Texas as an independent state and asserted both its claims to the disputed territory and its willingness to defend against U.S. violation of its sovereignty. Nevertheless, the U.S. government did not express an absolute commitment to sending military forces to defend Texas against an onslaught. This prompted volunteer soldiers, also known as "soldiers of fortune," to flood into the disputed region (Haynes 2002, p. 115). Despite promises to recover San Antonio and other lost territories, Mexico's promised assaults failed to materialize. In early 1845 the voters of Texas approved the Annexation Ordinance, which prompted a congressional authorization known as the Joint Resolution to Admit Texas as a State; this was subsequently signed into effect by President Polk on December 29, 1845. Northern abolitionists feared that the admittance of Texas into the Union would encourage the expansion of slavery and destabilize the nation. John R. Collins writes that "a small group of Whig abolitionists ... viewed the war as a 'slavocracy conspiracy'" (Faulk and Stout 1973, p. 70). Born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in 1795, Polk became president of the United States in 1844. His political platform consisted primarily of a belligerent attitude toward Mexico's reluctance to relinquish the southwestern territories and an aggressive stance toward Great Britain, who refused to budge on the issue of sharing or relinquishing the Oregon Territory. As a candidate for president, Polk had promised both to reannex Texas and to occupy Oregon from the California boundary to the 54'40" latitudinal line. At this time the theory of manifest destiny was on the rise. The term, coined by the influential Democratic writer and strategist John L. O'Sullivan, addressed the right of the United States to spread freedom and liberty across the North American continent. Supporters of this ideology believed that God, or divine Providence, had empowered the American people with the ability to conquer the continent and thereby civilize and Christianize the world. Although not completely materialized by 1844, the spirit of manifest destiny, teamed with Polk's campaign promises, seemingly offered a mandate to the incipient president to engage those who stood in America's pathway to continental dominance. The United States persisted in its assertion that the Rio Grande represented the legal southern border of Texas, despite the obvious lack of evidence to validate the claim. Polk dispatched minister plenipotentiary John Slidell (1793-1871) to Mexico with the express purpose of settling the border dispute in favor of the Rio Grande rather than the Nueces River, as demanded by the Mexican government. Slidell was also instructed to purchase New Mexico and California. At least two previous presidential administrations, those of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, had sent negotiators to purchase Texas and possibly the surrounding territories from Mexico; their offers were soundly rejected and seemed only to antagonize Mexican leaders. Polk offered $5 million to redraw the boundary of Texas to the Rio Grande and $25 million for the California Territory. The Mexican government repudiated Slidell and the offer. Consequently President Polk decided to station General Zachary Taylor (1784-1850) with U.S. forces along the Rio Grande. In turn Mexican general Mariano Arista (1802-1855) guarded the Mexican side of the river. Border provocations on April 24 and the refusal of the Mexican government to negotiate with the president's ambassador instigated war. After President Polk delivered a war message to Congress, the United States officially declared war on Mexico on May 13, 1846. Combat had already commenced, with Colonel Stephen Kearny's Army of the West traveling to New Mexico and then to California to secure those territories for U.S. migration and General Zachary Taylor's army crushing the Mexican forces in battles at Palo Alto and Resaca de Palma. Kearny fully controlled Santa Fe by August 18, 1846. In California a group of American settlers, along with an exploring party led by John C. Frémont (1813-1890), joined Kearny in what became known as the "Bear Flag Revolution" (Brinkley 2003, p. 352). U.S. soldiers experimented with flying artillery at Palo Alto, and hand-to-hand fighting erupted at Resaca de Palma. The U.S. Navy seized control of Monterey and Los Angeles thanks to Commodore John Drake Sloat (1781-1867). During these tempestuous days of battle, the former Mexican general Santa Anna returned from exile to prepare an army of roughly twenty thousand men with the express purpose of fighting the invaders until any defense would become untenable. Enthusiasm for war in the United States led to 200,000 volunteers responding to the secretary of war's call to arms (Haynes 2002, p. 155). U.S. forces entered battle outnumbered in almost every engagement with Mexico (Eisenhower 1986, p. 35). The most recognizable casualties of war were "Henry Clay, Jr., and Archibald Yell, former governor of Arkansas (both at Buena Vista), and Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers, at Huamantia" (Eisenhower 1986, p. 36). Volunteer forces received only a rudimentary training, and due to the sporadic popularity of the war, many of the soldiers, themselves from different states, never trained together. Many of the volunteers were not supplied with the bare essentials, and this led to sickness and disease. Statistically the greatest challenge to the army, and the most damage inflicted on it, was caused by outbreaks of disease. Of the approximately 100,182 soldiers who fought in the war, nearly 10,790 died from disease and exposure to inclement weather. A much smaller number, 1,548 volunteers, died on the battlefield. Generals George B. McClellan (1826-1885) and Winfield Scott (1786-1866) marveled at the destruction wrought on their forces by rampant diseases. The historian Thomas Irey asserts that nearly 10 percent of all "noncombat" deaths were caused by disease and infection (Faulk and Stout 1973, p. 110). President Polk's troubled relationships with generals Scott and Taylor further challenged the U.S. military's already troubled tactics (Haynes 2002, p. 152). On November 19, 1846, the president reap-pointed General Scott commander of the army, displacing Taylor. On March 9, 1847, General Scott landed at Veracruz with ten thousand soldiers, finally entering Mexican territory to compel surrender. Scott eventually advanced 260 miles across the Mexican National Highway to Mexico City. This major amphibious assault was the first of its kind in U.S. history (Brinkley 2003, p. 352). On April 18 Scott's forces pushed forward at Cerro Gordo, flanking Santa Anna's forces and forcing his retreat, embarrassingly without his artificial leg. Some of the most famous future Civil War generals planned this mission, including Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), McClellan, Joseph E. Johnston (1807-1891), and P. G. T. Beauregard (1818-1893). At Churubusco on August 20, Scott's army defeated a Mexican defensive force of twenty thousand soldiers. The last major confrontation before Scott's forces marched on Mexico City was the battle of Molino del Rey, in which twelve thousand Mexican soldiers lost the battle and the overall struggle and Scott took Chapultepec, overlooking Mexico City. Nevertheless, by September 1847 many Americans had become frustrated by Mexico's refusal to accept terms of surrender (Davis 1999, p. 316). In the summer of 1847 Mexico received Polk's special peace envoy Nicholas P. Trist (1800-1874). In July, Mexico stalled, then rebuffed the ambassador's offer. Although Polk recalled Trist and sought to demand more from Mexico, on February 2, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was negotiated by the envoy. The treaty ceded to the United States 500,000 miles of Mexican territory that would become the U.S. states of New Mexico, California, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado (Davis 2003, p. 192). Mexico also conceded that the Rio Grande would become the permanent border of Texas. The United States compensated Mexico with $15 million in exchange for the lost territory and $3.25 million in remuneration. The Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 38 to 14 on March 10, 1848 (National Archives 2003, p. 72). More so than the Mexican-American War itself, the events that roused the bellicose passions of the American people have been captured in cinematic history. Walt Disney produced a three-episode television series about Davy Crockett that included Davy Crockett at the Alamo (1955), a romantic story depicting a group of outnumbered Americans surrounded by a marauding army waiting to pummel them. There also have been more than twenty major motion pictures produced about Crockett's famous execution after or death in battle at the Alamo. In 1960 John Wayne directed and starred as Crockett in The Alamo. In 2004 Billy Bob Thornton starred as Crockett in another film titled The Alamo alongside Dennis Quaid, who was cast as General Sam Houston. Most of the films on this subject depict a mythologized version of historical events. Report Advertisement Many political theorists point to U.S. imperialism and the insatiable southern drive to further the institution of slavery as the motivations for war with Mexico. Utilizing the writings of the then-congressman Abraham Lincoln, some political scientists assert that Mexican provocations led to the shedding of American blood to be sure but on the Mexican side of the border, thus negating the American claim that Mexico had trespassed on U.S. soil illegally, prompting the U.S. declaration of war. More traditional historians assert that the Mexican leadership believed their nation to be omnipotent because of their enormous success in expelling the Spanish leadership and that, given Britain's inclination to stir up trouble in the region in order to attain California and to retain the Oregon territories, Mexican leaders felt assured of their assistance should their own forces suffer serious setbacks. The British never offered such assistance. According to the historian Kyle Ward, who examines changes in the content of textbooks on U.S. history, late-twentieth-century American political scientists portrayed the U.S. South in a detestable light, alleging that a plot existed to encompass all of Mexico's territory into their slavocracy (Ward 2006, p. 158). Following this line of logic, many historians believe that President Polk and his cohorts would have seized more territory and imposed a harsher indemnity on Mexico if there had not been such widespread domestic and congressional opposition to his policy of expansion. This is why, according to some, Polk never requested a straightforward yes or no vote on the war (Silverstone 2004, p. 198). In lieu of an up-or-down vote, the president asked for reinforcements and war materials for a war that had already been provoked and threatened to engulf the U.S. territory if Congress failed to act quickly and decisively.

Old Southwest

The Old Southwest was the early name for the territories that were acquired by the United States from Spain in the Adams-Onis Treaty (also called the Transcontinental Treaty) of 1819. The region included present-day Florida and the southern parts of Alabama and Mississippi. The Spanish who first colonized the Old Southwest referred to the region simply as East and West Florida. Unfortunately, the Spanish monarch had only a weak hold on the Floridas and many Americans had settled there. In 1811 U.S. settlers in West Florida rebelled and declared their independence. President James Madison (1809-1817) ordered the Governor of Orleans Territory (gained in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803) to take possession of West Florida. This action provided impetus for the U.S. government to claim the East Florida territory, which would allow the country to organize all its territory east of the Mississippi River. Negotiations between Spain and the United States were led by John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), the U.S. Secretary of State, and Luis de Onis (1762-1827), Spain's Minister to the United States. Though the United States gained the Old Southwest, it also made some concessions to Spain in establishing the boundary between Spanish and American claims from Texas to the Pacific Ocean. The treaty was signed in Washington, D.C., in 1819 and was approved by the governments of both countries two years later. Plantation owners largely settled the Old Southwest during the 1800s. Later the region became the state of Florida (admitted to the Union in 1845) and formed parts of what would become Alabama (1819) and Mississippi (1817).

13 Colonies

The Thirteen Colonies were British colonies in North America founded between 1607 (Virginia) and 1732 (Georgia). Although Great Britain held several other colonies in North America and the West Indies, the colonies referred to as the "thirteen" are those that rebelled against British rule in 1775 and proclaimed their independence on July 4, 1776. They subsequently constituted the first thirteen states of the United States of America. Virginia Virginia was the first permanent English settlement in America. The colonists who established Jamestown on May 13, 1607, named Virginia in honor of Elizabeth I (1533-1603), the "Virgin Queen" of England. The successful settlement was sponsored by the London Company, a joint-stock venture chartered by King James I (1566-1625) in 1606. Captain John Smith (c. 1580-1631) led the colony. In 1624 James I revoked Virginia's charter, after which it became a royal colony, which it remained until 1776. Virginia was the first colony to begin the move for independence from England in 1776, and it was a major player in the American Revolution (1775-83). It became the tenth state in the Union on June 25, 1788. Massachusetts Religious persecution drove a group of English Puritans , who wished to separate from the Church of England, to the New World. These Pilgrims were blown off course in their ship, the Mayflower , and landed on Cape Cod in 1620. They settled in an abandoned village, which they named Plymouth . In 1629 a nonseparatist Puritan group settled to the north in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The group was headed by the patriarch John Winthrop (1588-1649). Along with other leaders, Winthrop intended to make the colony an exemplary Christian society. Massachusetts went on to become the sixth state of the Union on February 6, 1788. New Hampshire The first English settlement in New Hampshire was established along the Piscataqua River in 1623. At this time New Hampshire was considered a province of Massachusetts. New Hampshire gained a separate identity as a royal colony in 1679 when the British government declared that it was not part of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Still, Massachusetts overshadowed New Hampshire throughout the colonial period. The boundary between them was not settled until 1740. New Hampshire was the only colony to experience almost no military activity during the American Revolution, and it was the first to declare its independence. New Hampshire was the ninth state to enter the Union on June 21, 1788. Maryland Unlike many other colonies, Maryland was established with an almost feudal system in which the land was considered the property of the English lord who governed it. The territory was given as a proprietorship by England's King Charles I (1600-1649) to George Calvert (c. 1580-1632). Lord Calvert later left the land to his son, Cecilius (1605-1675), who is better known as Lord Baltimore. He named the region Maryland after the queen consort of Charles I, Henrietta Maria (1609-1669) of France. The colony of Maryland was fully under Baltimore's control. Maryland was a somewhat reluctant participant in the American Revolution and was the seventh state to ratify the federal Constitution on April 28, 1788. Connecticut Early Dutch settlers in Connecticut were dislodged by the large migration of English Puritans who came to the colony between 1630 and 1642. The Puritans established settlements at Windsor (1633), Wethersfield (1634), and Hartford (1636). In 1639 these three communities joined together to form the Connecticut colony, choosing to be governed by the Fundamental Orders, a relatively democratic framework for which the Reverend Thomas Hooker (c. 1586-1647) was largely responsible. After a number of years of bitter border disputes, Connecticut received legal recognition as a colony by England in 1662. A relatively autonomous colony and strong supporter of the American Revolution, Connecticut became the fifth state of the Union on January 9, 1788. Rhode Island In 1636 the English clergyman Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683) established a colony at Providence seeking religious freedom for a group of nonconformists from the Massachusetts Bay colony. Others followed, settling Portsmouth (1638), Newport (1639), and Warwick (1642). In 1644 Williams journeyed to England, where he secured a legislative grant uniting the four original towns into a single colony, the Providence Plantations. Williams secured a charter for Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations from King Charles II (1630-1685) in 1663, which guaranteed religious freedom and substantial local autonomy. Stephen Hopkins (1707-1785) signed the Declaration of Independence as a delegate from Rhode Island, which became the thirteenth state on May 29, 1790. Delaware The colony of Delaware belonged to three different countries during the seventeenth century. Permanent settlements were made by the Swedes in 1638 (at Wilmington, under the leadership of a Dutchman, Peter Minuit [1580-1638]) and by the Dutch in 1651 (at New Castle). The Dutch conquered the Swedes in 1655, and the English conquered the Dutch in 1664. The English king's brother James (1633-1701), the duke of York (who later became James II, king of England), ceded the colony to the English proprietor William Penn (1644-1718), who kept Delaware closely tied to his family and to his beloved Pennsylvania until 1776. John Dickinson (1732-1808), a delegate from Delaware, signed both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. On December 7, 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the federal Constitution. North Carolina The Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano (c. 1485-1528) discovered the North Carolina coast in 1524. The English courtier Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618) sponsored the famous "lost colony" at Roanoke , and in 1629 King Charles I began the settlement in earnest of the colony he called, after himself, "Carolana." It was set up as a proprietorship. The colony of South Carolina split off from North Carolina in 1719. In 1729 the proprietors relinquished their rights for money and land, and North Carolina became a royal colony. North Carolina's leaders hesitated before joining the Union, waiting until November 21, 1789, to ratify the U.S. Constitution. The delay helped stimulate the movement for the adoption of a Bill of Rights . North Carolina became the twelfth state. South Carolina The English established the first permanent settlement in South Carolina in 1670 under the supervision of the eight lord proprietors who were granted "Carolana" by King Charles II. The colonists settled at Albemarle Point on the Ashley River, and in 1680 they moved across the river to the present site of Charleston. The original grant had made South Carolina a very large colony, but eventually the separate provinces of North Carolina and Georgia were established, making South Carolina small. The colonists overthrew the proprietors in 1719, and South Carolina voluntarily became a royal colony in 1729. South Carolina took an active part in the American Revolution and became the eighth state on May 23, 1788. New Jersey England assumed control of New Jersey after King Charles II granted a region from the Connecticut River to the Delaware River to his brother James, the duke of York. James deeded part of the land to his friends, Baron John Berkeley (1602-1678) and Sir George Carteret (c. 1610-1680), making New Jersey a proprietorship on June 23, 1664. It was later divided into two separate parts, East Jersey and West Jersey, only to be reunited in 1702 by Queen Anne (1665-1714). A royal governor was appointed in 1738. New Jersey played a pivotal role in the Revolutionary War and became the third state on December 18, 1787. New York As a colony, New York had a checkered history. Originally founded as the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1624, British forces conquered it in 1664. King Charles II of England gave the land to his brother James, the duke of York, who renamed the colony New York. The presence of both Dutch and English colonists in the area created conflicts that haunted New York well into the eighteenth century. By the time of the American Revolution, however, these conflicts lessened, and new conflicts between patriots (Americans who broke from British rule) and Tories (Americans who were loyal to England; also known as Loyalists) replaced them. Because the British army controlled New York City during most of the war, the city became a haven for Loyalists. New York became the eleventh state on July 26, 1788. Pennsylvania The colony of Pennsylvania was granted by King Charles II in 1681 as a proprietorship to William Penn, as payment for debts owed by the king to Penn's father. Penn, a Quaker who espoused pacifism, tolerance, and equality, was given broad powers to make laws and to run the colony as he saw fit. Penn, however, gave up his lawmaking powers and set up a form of representative government. Many immigrants came to this tolerant colony. Pennsylvania's most famous patriot resident was the statesman, scientist, and philosopher Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790). The Declaration of Independence, which Franklin signed, was declared from Philadelphia. Pennsylvania was the second state to join the Union, on December 12, 1787. Georgia The colony of Georgia was founded in 1732 by James Oglethorpe (1696-1785), a soldier, politician, and philanthropist who had been granted a charter to settle the territory by Great Britain. Named after King George II, Georgia was the last of the thirteen British colonies established in the United States. Georgians were among the first colonists to sign the Declaration of Independence. Following the American Revolution Georgia was the fourth state overall and the first southern state to ratify the federal Constitution on January 2, 1788.

Current U.S. Territories and Commonwealths

The United States holds three territories: American Samoa and Guam in the Pacific Ocean and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea. Although they are governed by the United States, the territories do not have statehood status, and this lesser legal and political status sets them apart from the rest of the United States. The three U.S. territories are not the only U.S. government land holdings without statehood status. These various lands fall under the broad description of insular political communities affiliated with the United States. Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean belong to the United States and have the status of commonwealth, a legal and political status that is above a territory but still below a state. The United States also has a number of islands in the Pacific Ocean that are called variously territories and possessions. U.S. possessions have the lowest legal and political status because these islands do not have permanent populations and do not seek self-determination and autonomy. U.S. possessions include Baker, Howland, Kingman Reef, Jarvis, Johnston, Midway, Palmyra, and Wake Islands. U.S. Navy Official Site® - Start Your Navy Journey America's Navy is Forged By The Sea. Choose Your Path In The U.S Navy Today. navy.com | Sponsored▼ Report Advertisement Finally, land used as a military base is considered a form of territory. These areas are inhabited almost exclusively by military personnel. They are governed largely by military laws, and not by the political structures in place for commonwealths and territories. The United States has military bases at various locations around the world, including Okinawa, Japan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A precise definition of territories and territorial law in the United States is difficult to fashion. The U.S. government has long been in the habit of determining policy as it goes along. The United States was established through a defensive effort against British forces and then through alternately defensive and offensive battles against Native Americans. From this chaotic beginning, the United States has struggled to fashion a coherent policy on the acquisition and possession of land. The U.S. Constitution does not state exactly how the United States may acquire land. Instead, the Constitution essentially delegates the power to decide the matter to Congress. Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1, of the Constitution provides that "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed ... by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress." The same section of the Constitution gives Congress the "Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States." Report Advertisement Under international law the United States and other nation-states may acquire additional territory in several ways, including occupation of territory that is not already a part of a state; conquest, where allowed by the international community; cession of land by another nation in a treaty; and accretion, or the growth of new land within a nation's existing boundaries. Through various statutes and court opinions, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court have devised a system that gives Congress and the president control over U.S. territories. Congress delegates some of its policy-making and administrative duties to the Office of Insular Affairs within the interior department. The president of the United States appoints judges and executive officers to offices in the territories. Congress devises court systems for the territories, and the Supreme Court may review decisions made by territorial courts. Congress may pass laws governing a territory with due deference to the customs and sensibilities of the native people. Congress may not pass territorial laws that violate a fundamental constitutional right. Such rights have not been defined concretely by the Supreme Court in the context of territorial law, but they can include the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to freedom of speech, and the rights to equal protection and due process (Torres v. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, 442 U.S. 465, 99 S. Ct. 2425, 61 L. Ed. 2d 1 [1979]). Persons living in U.S. territories do not have the right to vote for members of Congress. They may elect their own legislature, but the laws passed by the territorial legislature may be nullified by Congress. Each territory may elect a delegate who attends congressional sessions, hearings, and conferences in Washington, D.C. These delegates may propose legislation and vote on legislation in committees, but they may not participate in final votes. U.S. territories have less political power than do U.S. commonwealths. Commonwealths are afforded a higher degree of internal political autonomy than are territories. Congress and the commonwealth work together to fashion a political system that is acceptable to both parties. By contrast, Congress tends to impose its will on territories. Commonwealth status once inevitably led to statehood, but such a progression is no longer automatic.

War of 1812-15

The War of 1812 is often referred to as the United States's second war of independence because, like the Revolutionary War, it was fought against Great Britain. The Conflict resulted from the clash between American nationalism and the war Britain and its allies were waging against the empire of Napoleonic France. Many Americans believed that England sought to humiliate the United States, limit its growth, and perhaps even impose a quasi‐colonial status upon its former colonies. Background. Throughout the wars between Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and Great Britain (1793-1801 and 1803-15), the belligerent powers of Europe repeatedly violated the maritime rights of neutral nations. The United States, endeavoring to market its own produce while also asserting the right to profit as an important neutral carrier in the Atlantic commercial system, was particularly hard hit. In order to man the Royal Navy, British naval officers impressed seamen from American vessels, claiming that they were either deserters from British service or British subjects, irrespective of whether they had been naturalized by the United States. The United States defended its right to naturalize foreigners and rejected Britain's claim that it could legitimately practice impressment on the high seas. Relations between the two countries reached breaking point on this issue in June 1807, when the frigate HMS Leopard fired on the USS Chesapeake inside American territorial waters in order to remove, and later execute, four of its crew. The exact number of Americans affected by impressment is difficult to ascertain—American newspapers on the eve of the war claimed that it was in excess of 6,000—and Great Britain and the United States were never able to resolve the dispute. Over time the issue became the most flagrant example of Great Britain's reluctance to respect the sovereignty of the United States, and this was one of the reasons why President James Madison cited impressment in his 1 June 1812 message to Congress as the first major grievance that had to be settled by war. Equally offensive to the United States was the British practice of issuing executive orders in council, particularly those of November 1807 and April 1809, in order to establish blockades of the European coast. The Royal Navy then seized neutral vessels bound for the Continent that did not first call at a British port to pay duties and unload cargo. By these means, Great Britain could simultaneously wage economic warfare against France and control American trade to its advantage. British ministries justified these tactics as fair retaliation against Napoleon's equally antineutral Berlin and Milan decrees, promulgated in December 1806 and December 1807, respectively; but American merchantmen suffered more heavily from British seizures than from French, and the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison never accepted British blockading practices as valid under the law of nations. It was the seriousness of this dispute that ultimately raised the question of whether the United States should go to war to defend its neutral rights. At first, the United States responded with policies of economic coercion rather than war. At the suggestion of President Jefferson, Congress passed a series of embargo laws between December 1807 and January 1809. These laws prohibited virtually all American ships from putting to sea and eventually banned any overland trade with British and Spanish colonial possessions in Canada and Florida. Because the legislation failed to change British policy and seriously harmed the U.S. economy as well, it was replaced by the Non‐Intercourse Act in March 1809. This measure forbade trade with European belligerents until it was replaced in May 1810 by Macon's Bill No. 2. This law reopened American trade with all nations subject to the proviso that in the event of either France or Great Britain repealing its antineutral policies, the United States would then enforce nonintercourse against whichever nation failed to follow suit by lifting the remaining restrictions on trade. In August 1810, Napoleon announced he would repeal the Berlin and Milan decrees on the understanding that the United States would also force Great Britain to respect its neutral rights. President Madison accepted this as proof that French policy had changed, and in November 1810 he imposed nonintercourse against Great Britain. He then demanded the repeal of the orders in council as a condition for the resumption of Anglo‐American trade. When Great Britain refused to comply, Madison, in July 1811, summoned the Twelfth Congress into an early session in November to prepare for war. After eight months of debate, Congress responded to the president's initiatives by declaring war on 18 June 1812. The decision was bitterly controversial and was carried by Republican Party majorities alone. In the House of Representatives, the vote was 79 to 49 for war; in the Senate, 19 to 3. The Federalists, whose constituents (especially in New England) depended heavily on trade with Great Britain, believed that France had equally offended against American neutrality; they opposed the declaration of war and, thereafter, its prosecution. Military and Naval Events. The principal theater of operations in the war was the American‐Canadian frontier between Detroit and Lake Champlain. Upper and Lower Canada were the closest British imperial possessions that were vulnerable to U.S. military and naval power. The rapid growth of their economies in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the timber trade, had transformed them into a significant resource for Great Britain during its protracted maritime struggle against France; this reinforced the American desire to seize them, and fostered a strategy of invasion. To the extent that the British were able to carry the war to the Americans, it was by sea; thus, especially after the summer of 1814, the theater of operations expanded to include the mid‐Atlantic coast and the American territories around the Gulf of Mexico. For this reason, a war that commenced as an invasion of Canada in 1812 concluded in a defense of the city of New Orleans in the early months of 1815. Over the summer and fall of 1812, U.S. forces, under the commands of Brigs. Gen. William Hull, Alexander Smyth, and Stephen Van Rensselaer, and Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn, were directed to invade Canada at Detroit, Niagara, and Montréal; but inadequate preparations, poor leadership, and untrained troops undermined the invasions. The British general Sir Isaac Brock, together with Tecumseh and the Shawnee, Delaware, and other northwestern Indians who had their own complaints about American territorial expansion, captured Detroit in August 1812. In September and October, Brock and Maj. Gen. Roger Sheaffe defeated two American invading armies on the Niagara peninsula, while Dearborn's invasion of Lower Canada was called off after only one minor engagement in November. American efforts made at the same time by Maj. Gen. William Henry Harrison and Brig. Gen. James Winchester to retake Detroit were also unsuccessful; the latter officer surrendered his army to British and Indian forces on the Raisin River in Michigan Territory in January 1813. The only American victories in the opening months of the war occurred on the ocean as the heavy frigates of the tiny U.S. Navy took to the seas to protect American trade and to harass the vastly superior naval forces of their enemy. In August 1812, the USS Constitution, under Capt. Isaac Hull, destroyed HMS Guerrière; in October, Capt. Stephen Decatur's USS United States captured HMS Macedonian; and in December, the Constitution, now under Capt. William Bainbridge, defeated HMS Java in an engagement off the coast of Brazil. Between May and November 1813, the U.S. Army attempted to invade Canada across the Great Lakes and down the St. Lawrence River. American forces were successful inasmuch as they captured Fort George and York (now Toronto) in Upper Canada in May, but subsequent efforts to extend American control in the province were thwarted by British victories at Stony Creek and Beaver Dams in June. A major thrust from Sacketts Harbor down the St. Lawrence toward Montréal under Maj. Gen. James Wilkinson was also aborted, first by British resistance at Crysler's Farm in November 1813, then by Wilkinson's decision to end his offensive after learning that he would be unable to join forces with U.S. troops below Montréal. On the northwest frontier, American naval forces under Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry defeated a British squadron at Put‐in‐Bay on Lake Erie in September. Thereafter, Harrison and his U.S. and Kentucky troops were able first to retake Detroit, and then, in October, to destroy the alliance between the British and the Indians with a victory at the Battle of the Thames. There were no other major American victories in 1813. The Royal Navy avenged the defeats of 1812 by capturing the USS Chesapeake in June 1813, and throughout the year British frigates steadily extended their blockade of U.S. ports, annoying coastal communities and disrupting trade. Yet another setback for the American war effort came in the fall of 1813 when "Redstick" factions in the Creek Nation, who like the Shawnees and Delawares had ample grievances against the United States, attacked forts and settlements on the southwestern frontier. Georgia and Tennessee mobilized troops in response and Tennessee forces under Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson eventually defeated the Creeks at Horsehoe Bend, Mississippi Territory, in March 1814. By 1814, American land forces had improved in both quality and leadership. Disciplined troops under Maj. Gen. Jacob Brown and Brig. Gen. Winfield Scott resumed efforts from the previous year to expel the British from Niagara, and between July and September they fought the enemy on even terms in three major engagements at Chippewa, Lundy's Lane, and Fort Erie. But the defeat of Napoleon in Europe in the spring of 1814 allowed Great Britain to send more troops to North America, and by late summer, the United States had to contend with invasions by combined army and navy forces at Lake Champlain and in Chesapeake Bay. Capt. Thomas Macdonough's victory over a British squadron on Lake Champlain in September compelled one invading army to withdraw to Canada. Meanwhile, another British force had taken and burned the White House, the U.S. capitol, and most other government buildings in Washington, D.C. (in August), and a third had occupied the northeastern section of the District of Maine. Efforts to seize Baltimore failed as Maryland militiamen inflicted heavy losses on the British regulars of Gen. Robert Ross, and the harbor defenses of Baltimore withstood a heavy naval bombardment. It was during the shelling of Fort McHenry on 13-14 September that the poet Francis Scott Key composed the work that became The Star‐Spangled Banner as a tribute to the American defense. Conclusion. Efforts to end the war lasted almost as long as the conflict itself. Great Britain, in fact, repealed its orders in council in June 1812 before it had learned of the declaration of war, but President Madison decided to continue the struggle in order to obtain a comprehensive settlement of American grievances. For this purpose, he accepted in March 1813 a Russian offer to mediate the conflict and dispatched a five‐man negotiating team to St. Petersburg. Britain rejected mediation in July, but later offered to open separate peace negotiations. Madison accepted this offer in January 1814; the opening of the talks was delayed until July, however, because of changes in venue resulting from the defeat of Napoleon. At Ghent, Belgium, Great Britain initially made unrealistic demands, seeking not only to establish a neutral Indian buffer state in the American Northwest but to revise both the Canadian‐American boundary and the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that had established the United States as an independent nation. The United States, which had originally wanted an end to all objectionable British maritime practices and cessions of Canadian territory as well, forbore to press any claims at this time. Its diplomats parried Great Britain's demands until the British ministry, rebuffed by the duke of Wellington (who refused to take command in Canada) and fearing the expense of a long continuation in hostilities decided to settle for a peace based on the status quo ante bellum. Between the signing of the treaty, on 24 December 1814 and the time the news arrived in the United States, the last major battle, the Battle of New Orleans, had been fought on 7-8 January 1815. Neither the War of 1812 nor the Treaty of Ghent secured American maritime rights on a firm basis; but a century of peace in Europe after 1815 meant that they were not seriously threatened again until World War I. Nor did Great Britain pursue its future disputes with the United States to the point of risking war. And though the United States failed to obtain any Canadian territory, the campaigns of the war destroyed Indian opposition to U.S. expansion on the northwestern and southwestern frontiers. Both the United States and Canada emerged from the war with a heightened sense of national purpose and awareness, and particularly in the American case, the war consolidated the nation's military and naval establishments on more secure bases than before 1812. In other respects, though, the war was as much a mixed blessing as an unqualified gain for the United States. The immediate domestic impact of the conflict was to heighten tensions between the northern and the southern states, on the one hand, and the Federalist and Republican parties, on the other. These strains became so serious that in November 1814, New England Federalists met in convention at Hartford, Connecticut, to consider measures to nullify the war effort. The ending of the war shortly afterwards left the Federalists marked with the stigma of disloyalty, and this undoubtedly contributed to the party's rapid demise after 1815. The economic impact of the war was equally complex. The disruptions it entailed on America's international commerce were, to some extent, offset by greater governmental expenditures, an increased demand for domestic manufacturing, and the deflection of capital from shipping to the first large‐scale American industries, especially in New England. Yet not all of the resulting gains survived the unstable economic conditions of the postwar period; and even the American belief that the war marked a significant stride toward cultural, economic, and political independence would ultimately be overshadowed by the Civil War, which profoundly altered the meaning of all America's earlier conflicts in the shaping of the nation's identity and purposes. [See also Neutrality; Rush‐Bagot Agreement; Trade, Foreign.]

Civil War

The election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November 1860 triggered a chain of events that within six months shattered the Union and culminated in the outbreak of the Civil War. The coming to power of a Republican and Northern administration committed to prohibiting the expansion of slavery struck at the vital interests of the slave South; it was the signal eagerly awaited by the proponents of Southern independence to launch a secession movement. Tensions over slavery and the struggles to perpetuate or end the institution that dated back to the incomplete American Revolution of 1776 had now become so polarized along sectional lines that the North and South lacked common ground on which to compromise the issue. The Roots of Sectional Conflict. The democratic revolution in which the United States gained its independence from Britain rested on a profound paradox. The Revolution produced both the world's leading model of political democracy and one of its greatest slaveholding powers. Freedom for whites coexisted uneasily with bondage for African Americans, some 20 percent of the population. The federal Union crafted at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 also embodied this contradiction when the U.S. Constitution recognized the right of a state to regulate slavery within its jurisdiction. Indeed, without this express acknowledgment of their sovereign power over slavery, the slave states would never have joined the proposed Union. Thus, white liberty and black slavery were constitutionally joined in the very creation of the federal Union. Within a generation of the Revolution, all the states north of Maryland embarked on programs of gradual emancipation. By the early nineteenth century, slavery was almost exclusively a sectional institution confined to the South, home to over 90 percent of American blacks. At the same time as the North was moving away from slavery, the invention of the cotton gin and rising demand in English textile factories for raw cotton were stimulating the westward expansion of slavery throughout the southeastern United States. As social and economic patterns of development diverged sharply along sectional lines, the South's national share of political power began to slip. From a rough balance of power with the North in 1790, the South held only 42 percent of the votes in the House of Representatives by 1820. Worried over their growing minority status, and enraged over the attempt of the North to force emancipation upon Missouri when it applied for admission as a slave state in 1819, white southerners for the first time threatened secession during the debates that resulted in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The heart of the compromise was the drawing of a line through the Louisiana Purchase territory that prohibited slavery north of the latitude 36°30′ and allowed it to the south. In addition to proclaiming their right to an equal share of the expanding West, southern proponents of slavery protested protective tariffs that they insisted sacrificed the agricultural export economy of the South on behalf of northern manufacturers. This issue precipitated the sectional crisis of 1832-33 in which South Carolina planters, led by John C. Calhoun, held that a state could constitutionally nullify federal legislation that it determined violated its interests. President Andrew Jackson forced the Nullifiers to back down, but of greater concern in the 1830s to southerners anxious over the future of slavery was the sudden emergence of an abolitionist movement in the North. Inspired by northern evangelical Protestantism and a belief in the right of African Americans to freedom and self‐betterment, the abolitionists denounced slavery as the nation's greatest moral abomination and urged all Americans to begin immediately the work of emancipation. Skillful at spreading their message, the abolitionists launched a major propaganda campaign in the mid‐1830s and deluged Congress with antislavery petitions. The agitation of the slavery issue by the abolitionists predisposed many northerners to see in the admission of the slave republic of Texas in 1845 and the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846 the fearful designs of a conspiracy of slaveholders—the "slave power"—to expand slavery throughout new regions in the West and thereby deprive northern farmers and workers of the opportunity to settle the West for their social and economic advancement. When northern congressmen rallied behind the Wilmot Proviso in 1846 in an effort to bar slavery from any territories gained in the Mexican War, southerners formed their own sectional bloc and forced the ultimate defeat of the proviso. The divisive issue of the expansion of slavery had moved to center stage in American politics and would continue to dominate it through the 1850s. Rising Sectional Tensions in the 1850s. Whether measured by rates of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, or the cultural willingness to embrace reforms such as public education aimed at promoting social improvement, the free and slave states were set apart far more significantly by the mid‐nineteenth century than at the birth of the Union. The North was growing and evolving at a more rapid pace than the predominantly agrarian South. Most ominously for slaveholders, a northern majority was forming that viewed slavery as a moral wrong that should be set on the road to extinction. Northerners also now saw slavery as a barbaric relic from the past, a barrier to secular and Christian progress that contradicted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and degraded the free labor aspirations of northern society. Since slavery within the states was protected by the Constitution, antislavery sentiment focused on keeping it out of the territories. Southerners, arguing that the territories were the common property of all the states, insisted on what they deemed their constitutional right to carry slaves into the territories. Furthermore, slaves and land were the major sources of wealth in the South, particularly with the cotton boom. The result was a decade of sectional strife. A complex sectional agreement, the congressional Compromise of 1850, permitted California to enter the Union as a free state. The remaining land won in the Mexican War was divided into the territories of Utah and New Mexico with no conditions placed on the status of slavery. In 1854, the Kansas‐Nebraska Act reopened the entire controversy. In order to gain essential southern support for his bill organizing the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36°30′, Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois had to revoke the Missouri Compromise restriction on slavery. Northerners reacted by charging that the Slave Power was moving to monopolize the territories for slavery at the expense of free labor. The Whig Party split and collapsed in the storm of northern protest over the Kansas‐Nebraska Act, and a sectionalized Republican Party quickly formed around the core principle of blocking the expansion of slavery. The major Protestant denominations had already split into sectional wings over the slavery issue, and only the Democratic Party now remained as an important national institution that represented northern and southern interests. Democratic unity, however, shattered during the administration of James Buchanan (1857-61). The ruling of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in the territory further polarized sectional attitudes, and northern Democrats led by Douglas lost the trust of the southern wing of the party when they joined Republicans in blocking the admission of Kansas as a slave state. The decade came to a close with abolitionist John Brown's raid against the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Brown's unsuccessful attempt to incite a slave rebellion sent paroxysms of fear and anger through the South and touched off rumors of conspiracies and slave uprisings. Brown was hanged, and although the Republicans denounced him as a wild‐eyed fanatic, many white southerners were convinced that the Republican Party was dominated by abolitionists and plotting with them to unleash a bloodbath in the slave states. Lincoln's Election and the Secession Crisis. Vowing to use federal power both to keep slavery in check and to promote the free labor economy of the North through protective tariffs, subsidies for railroads, and free homesteads in the West, the Republicans ran Abraham Lincoln of Illinois for the presidency in 1860. His victory over three rivals—Stephen Douglas for the Northern Democrats, John C. Breckinridge for the Southern Democrats, and John Bell, the candidate of former Whigs in the Upper South—was achieved with no basis of support in the South. Rather than accept Republican rule, Southern radicals immediately provoked a crisis by organizing a campaign for secession. Pushing the constitutional doctrine of states' rights to its logical extreme, the secessionists held that individual states retained ultimate sovereignty within the Union and could peacefully leave the Union the same way they had entered it through special state conventions. Rejecting any plan of prior cooperation among the slave states, they pursued a strategy of separate state action, accurately predicting that the momentum of secession would force wavering states to join those that had already gone out. South Carolina took the lead on 20 December 1860, and within six weeks seven states from the Lower South left the Union. Delegates from these states set up the provisional government of the Confederate States of America at Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861. This original Confederacy represented those states with the heaviest concentration of slaves and the highest percentage of white families owning slaves. Planters were in the forefront of secession. What opposition they encountered from the majority of nonslaveholding farmers took the form of cooperationism, the argument that secession should be delayed until a united bloc of Southern states agreed to go out together. The cooperationists polled about 40 percent of the vote in the secession elections, but in the end they followed the leadership of the secessionist planters. Fort Sumter and the Outbreak of War. Northerners rejected the doctrine of secession. Believing that the Union was sovereign and perpetual, they viewed secession as illegal, indeed, revolutionary. They equated secession with anarchy and feared that it would lead quickly to a fragmentation of the United States and an end to America's mission of serving as a beacon of free government to the rest of the world. Still, no consensus existed on using coercion to force the seceded states back into the Union. In particular, Democrats were against coercion and favored negotiations to heal the sectional rift, even with the continuation of slavery. At the same time, the Unionists in the Upper South who had turned back secession in their slave states had hedged their Unionism by proclaiming that they would resist any Republican use of military force against a seceded state. When inaugurated on 4 March 1861, Lincoln thus faced a dilemma. If he took no action against the Confederacy, he risked demoralizing his party and subjecting his administration to the same derision that had pilloried the outgoing Buchanan Democrats for standing by while the secessionists broke up the Union. On the other hand, any forceful step against the seceded states threatened to divide the North and drive the Upper South into the Confederacy. Realizing that he could not afford to be locked into an endless policy of drift and delay, Lincoln decided to take a stand for the Union over Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the most visible installation in the Confederacy that was still under federal control. Aware that the garrison at Fort Sumter would be forced to surrender for lack of supplies sometime in early April, he ordered a relief expedition to the fort on 6 April. He stressed that the fort would be supplied "with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made, without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the Fort." Lincoln in effect placed the decision for war in the hands of Confederate authorities. The government of Confederate President Jefferson Davis accepted that burden as the price it had to pay to establish the Confederacy as a sovereign power. On 9 April, Davis ordered Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard to demand the immediate surrender of Fort Sumter. Fearful of Union duplicity and anxious to avoid any possibility of having to fight two Union forces at the same time, Davis wanted Sumter in Confederate hands before the relief expedition arrived. In the predawn hours of 12 April 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter. The capture of Fort Sumter occurred on April 13 and Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered the fort on 14 April. The next day, Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 state militia to put down what he defined as an insurrection. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina scornfully rejected Lincoln's call for troops and joined the Confederacy in the next five weeks. Still, Lincoln now had a Northern majority behind the goal of preserving the Union with force. The Confederacy was cast as the aggressor that had fired the first shot of the Civil War, and the Northern crusade to save the Union persisted through four agonizing years of war.

Pre-Jamestown

The first British-sponsored explorer to visit the New World in the late fifteenth century was probably Genoese-born Giovanni Caboto, also known as John Cabot (1450-c. 1498). He was commissioned by King Henry VII to make several voyages in 1497 and 1498, during which he reached the Cape Breton and Baffin Islands, Newfoundland, and Greenland, though Cabot was lost at sea during his second voyage. Cabot's expeditions revealed that the waters off Newfoundland and New England were alive with marketable fish. Various authorities have suggested that vessels based in Bristol, England, possibly captained by Cabot or others, may have reached some land mass west of the Azores as early as 1480 or 1481, though the available evidence needs verification through further research. What is known is that dynastic and religious quarrels largely prevented the English Crown from again pursuing any American ventures until the late sixteenth century. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) encouraged mariners such as Sir Martin Frobisher (1535-1594) and John Davis (1550-1605) to explore the islands north of Canada for a Northwest Passage in the 1570s and 1580s. Sir Humphrey Gilbert (1539-1583), half-brother to Sir Walter Raleigh, made several voyages to explore and colonize eastern Canada. His first effort failed in 1579, but on his second attempt in 1583, he established St. John's, Newfoundland, the first British colony in North America. An expedition authorized by the Queen and sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) in 1583 explored the coast of North Carolina and Florida. A second initiative established the Roanoke Colony in 1585, but war with Spain prevented Raleigh from sending another expedition in support of the first, as he had planned. The colony failed, but several historians have contended that some of the colonists and their children may have intermarried with the Indians and survived with their aid until the early 1600s. The first two successful efforts at colonization in what is now the continental United States were made at Jamestown in Virginia (1607), and at Plymouth in Massachusetts Bay (1620). Thereafter, the pace of English colonization increased, fueled by various motives including adventure, greater religious freedom, and opportunities for individual economic advancement French- Religious wars during the sixteenth century were the principal preoccupation of France's rulers, but French mariners were not altogether inactive. Giovanni da Verrazzano (1485-1528), a Florentine, was employed to seek a Northwest Passage. Unsuccessful in that effort, he explored the Atlantic coast from North Carolina north to Cape Breton, discovering New York Harbor and Narragansett Bay. Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) made three expeditions to Canada between 1534 and 1542, discovering the St. Lawrence River and sailing up to the point where Montreal now stands. However, his attempts at colonization were unsuccessful. In the mid-sixteenth century, France briefly competed with Spain for control of what is now the southeastern United States. Jan (or Jean) Ribault (1520-1565), sailing under a commission from the French Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, established a short-lived colony at Port Royal, South Carolina in 1562, but it was soon abandoned. A second effort (1564) by Coligny was led by René Goulaine de Laudonnière, but his settlement on the St. Johns River in Florida was destroyed by the Spanish the following year. Ribault made another attempt to support French settlers in Florida, but his fleet foundered in a storm, and he was captured and killed by the Spanish late in 1565. The French then concentrated on exploring lands further to the north and west. Louis Jolliet (1645-1700), selected by the authorities in French Canada to investigate a great river reported by Indians, went down the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi, which he first saw in June 1673. He rafted along it as far south as the mouth of the Arkansas River, reporting his findings to his superiors in Quebec in 1674. Joillet and Père Jacques Marquette (1637-1675), a Jesuit missionary-explorer, returned along the Illinois River to Lake Michigan. Marquette's journal of their travels was published six years after his death. Report Advertisement Sieur Robert Cavalier de La Salle (1643-1687) traveled to Canada and settled in Montreal in 1668. He may have discovered the Ohio River the next year, and then following further explorations in what is now the American Midwest, he sailed down the Mississippi River to its mouth in 1682. Named French Viceroy of North America, La Salle returned to the Caribbean in 1684, but through errors in navigation, missed the Mississippi and landed instead at Matagorda Bay in Texas. While returning east to the Mississippi, he was murdered by his men. Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) accompanied an expedition of explorers and fur traders to the Gulf of the St. Lawrence in 1603, then visited Port Royal and other points in Nova Scotia and New England over the next four years. Appointed lieutenant governor of the French mainland possessions, he founded Quebec in 1608, then explored to the south as far as the present Lake Champlain in 1609. He reached and explored the Great Lakes in 1615, and was named governor of New France in 1633-1635. Finding no gold or other precious metals within their new domains, the French instead developed a thriving fur trade and fishing industry. But efforts at colonization led by several private trading companies with royal charters were not as remunerative as the French crown had wished. King Louis XIV initially turned over the administration of the colony to a newly created Company of New France, but the crown subsequently exercised direct control. The resourceful Dutch, having finally achieved their independence from Spain, became very active in North America at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Sailing under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, English-born Henry Hudson (c. 1565-1611) first explored Greenland (1607) and then the Arctic seas north of Russia. In 1609, in search of a sea Passage to Asia, he traveled up the river which today bears his name, as far as present-day Albany. In 1610, Hudson undertook another voyage, again in search of a Northwest Passage. He sailed through what is now Hudson Strait, spent the winter of 1610-1611 in James Bay, and then discovered Hudson's Bay. There, in June 1611, his mutinous crew marooned Hudson, his son, and six loyal crewmen and they presumably died. Because Hudson had claimed much of what is now New York, the Dutch established a settlement on Manhattan Island in 1624. It was taken over by the English four decades later. Subsequent Efforts to Find a Northwest Passage Report Advertisement Following hard on Hudson's effort, the newly formed "Governor and Company of the Merchants of London" made a number of attempts to find a Northwest Passage. During two voyages between 1610 and 1616, Thomas Button (?-1634), and Robert Bylot (fl. 1610-1616) with his pilot William Baffin (1584-1622), thoroughly surveyed the previously unexplored western and northern reaches of Hudson's Bay, but without success. In 1616, Bylot and Baffin reached Smith Sound, at the northern end of what became Baffin Bay. No other mariner would get this far north again until 1853. An unsuccessful Danish effort led by Jens Munk in 1619-1620 resulted in the death of all but three of his men. In a vessel loaned by King Charles I of England, Luke Fox (1586-c. 1635) reached a point just south of the Arctic Circle in 1631, and demonstrated conclusively that sailing north from Hudson's Bay would not lead to a Northwest Passage. Thomas James (c. 1593-c. 1635) made one final attempt to find a passage in 1631-1632. Thereafter, English efforts to find the elusive passage were abandoned for nearly two centuries. Benjamin Franklin and other Philadelphia investors did mount one exploratory effort in 1753-1754, led by Charles Swaine, which had little success. It was not until 1905 that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, in his privately funded vessel, the Gjoa, finally succeeded in navigating a passage where so many of his predecessors had failed. Activities of Other Nations Colonization efforts were mounted by several Scandinavian nations. An expedition mounted by the Swedish West India Company in 1638 established a colony near the present site of Wilmington, Delaware, but this land was seized by the Dutch in 1655. A Danish West India Company settled on St. Thomas, St. John, and several of the other Virgin Islands after 1666, and the Danes maintained their presence in the Caribbean until 1917. Russian expeditions, underwritten by several tsars and led by Danish mariner Vitus Bering (c. 1681-1741), established in 1728 that a strait existed between Siberia and Bolshaya Zemlya (now Alaska). Bering's second expedition of 1731-1741 made a grueling overland trip from St. Petersburg, and then set sail from Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula early in 1741. In July 1741, Bering landed on Kayak Island, east of Prince William Sound, then briefly tarried on one of the Aleutian Islands (September 1741), before turning back for Siberia. In a second vessel, Aleksey Chirkov (1703-1748), Bering's subordinate, reached a point off the Alexander Archipelago, west of what is now Ketchikan, but could not land owing to the loss of his ship's boats. On the return trip, Bering's vessel foundered on what became Bering Island, in the Komandorskyies. There, he and thirty-one of his men died during the winter of 1741-1742. Bering's survivors and leaders of later Russian expeditions reported the presence of valuable fur animals, several of which were subsequently hunted to near extinction.

Protestant Reformation 1500s

The spread of Protestant faith sparked by Martin Luther and his 95 Theses in November 1517. Spain wanted to stop this reformation but it had already started. Most European Protestants wanted to stop Spains cruelties in the Americas. A religious movement of the 16th century that began as an attempt to reform the Roman Catholic Church and resulted in the creation of Protestant churches. One key dimension was the movement that began in 1517 with Martin Luther's critique of doctrinal principles and church actions in Germany and that led to the establishment of new official churches—the Lutheran, the Reformed or Calvinist, and the Anglican. These were separate from the Latin Catholic Church in organization and different from it in theology. Many other dissident groups and individuals, collectively known as the Radical Reformation, also emerged during the turmoil of the 1520s and 1530s, building communities despite frequent persecution. Ongoing efforts to reform the old church took on new urgency in response to these challenges, leading to a distinct Catholic Reformation. The Protestant Reformation affected patterns of change in Europe through Protestant theology's shifting theological emphases, through Protestant piety's emphasis on reading and knowledge, and through new alignments between organized churches and politics. Lutheranism- Insists salvation comes thru faith, God grants salvation to those who hear his Word preached to them and realize they are damned w/out God's grace. Martin Luther- His opposition to the wealth and corruption of the papacy and his belief that salvation would be granted on the basis of faith alone rather than by works caused his excommunication from the Catholic Church (1521). Calvinism-(Catholicism)John Calvin preached this. Emphasized predestination(everything, even death, is determined by god), predetermination(Calvinist central belief that God has already decreed who will be saved and who will be damned) the sovereignty of God, the supreme authority of the scriptures, and the irresistibility of grace. People are saved through God's grace, not their own merits. John Calvin-Genet, Swiss theologian (born in France) whose tenets (predestination and the irresistibility of grace(elect are selected by god) and justification by faith) defined Presbyterianism (1509-1564) Pro-Calvinism: Huguenot, France; Dutch Reformed Church, Netherlands; Presbyterian Kirk (Church), Scotland; Anglican Church, England (adopted Calvinist doctrine, kept Catholic worship) Arminianism- named after Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius; belief that individual free will determined person's salvation, not divine decree; all humans could be saved if they accepted God's grace. Anglicanism- Catholicism. adheres to the national church of England (and all other churches in other countries that share its beliefs) Puritanism- the Protestants who demanded a more complete reformation insisted that hey were loyal to the true church of England and resisted any relaxation of calvinist rigor. They wanted to erase Catholic vestiges and replace the Anglican Book of Common prayer with the sermons and psalms as the dominant means of worship. They came to America for religious freedom and settled Massachusetts Bay. According to Puritans, only visible saints{in Calvinism, those who publicly proclaimed their experience of conversion and were expected to lead godly lives} should be admitted to church membership Separatists- sub-group of the Puritans who vowed to break completely with the Church of England

Oregon

This agreement set the boundary between the United States and Canada at the 49th parallel west of the Rocky Mountains, veering around Vancouver Island and then proceeding through the Strait of San Juan de Fuca. The Oregon Treaty settled the dispute between the United States and Great Britain over the area in Oregon located between the Columbia River and the 49th parallel. In 1818, both countries had agreed to a joint occupation of Oregon, and this agreement had been renewed by treaty in 1827. After 1838, the issue of who possessed Oregon became increasingly controversial, especially when mass American migration along the Oregon Trail began in the early 1840s. Elected in 1844 on an expansionist platform that included the acquisition of the entire Oregon Territory, which extended to 54 degrees, 40 minutes to the north, President James K. Polk had to satisfy the demands of his countrymen for the region. After a compromise proposal was rejected in July 1845, Polk acquired congressional authority in December to abrogate the 1827 treaty. On 15 June 1846, the Senate ratified a treaty that established the boundary at the 49th parallel. Deteriorating relations with Mexico and favorable public opinion made the compromise acceptable to the United States, while Britain was likewise interested in a peaceful solution because it had more pressing domestic and foreign issues to consider.

Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican Settlements

Through several millennia and up to the present, complex forms of indigenous belief and ritual have developed in Mesoamerica, the area between North America proper and the southern portion of isthmic Central America. The term Mesoamerica, whose connotation is at once geographical and cultural, is used to designate the area where these distinctive forms of high culture existed. There, through a long process of cultural transformation, periods of rise, fall, and recovery occurred. On the eve of the Spanish invasion (1519), Mesoamerica embraced what are now the central and southern parts of Mexico, as well as the nations of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and some portions of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The assertion about the existence of a single religious tradition rests on various kinds of evidence: All over Mesoamerica there were identical calendrical systems which guided the functioning of religious rituals in function of which religious rituals were performed. The Mesoamerican pantheon included a number of deities that were universally worshiped, including the supreme Dual God, Our Father our Mother; an Old God known also as God of Fire; a Rain god; a Young God of Maize; Quetzalcoatl, Kukulcan, god and priest; a Monster of the Earth; and others. The gods also had calendrical names. Rituals performed included various kinds of offerings such as animals, flowers, food and human sacrifices. Self-sacrifice also played an important role. There was a complex priestly hierarchy. The temples were built in a basically similar architectural pattern, truncated pyramids with sanctuaries on top. Recorded texts show the existence of a similar worldview, which included the sequence of several cosmic ages and spatial symbols such as cosmic trees, birds, colors, and deities. Because of lack of evidence, scholarship does not extend back to the religious concerns of the earliest inhabitants of Mesoamerica (c. 25,000 bce). Nevertheless, some archaeological findings show that the early hunter-gatherers had at least some metaphysical or religious preoccupations. Reference can be made to their rock art: paintings and petroglyphs, some of which date to about 10,000 bce, several of which suggest religious or magical forms of propitiation through hunting, fishing, and gathering. Objects that are more obviously religious in function date only from 2500 to 1500 bce, when the earliest village-type settlements appeared in Mesoamerica. By that time, after a slow process of plant domestication that probably began around 6000 bce, new forms of society began to develop. It had taken several millennia for the hunter-gatherers to become settled in the first small Mesoamerican villages. In the evolution of Mesoamerican culture, what has come to be known as the Early Formative period had commenced. Those living during this period employed an ensemble of objects indicative of their beliefs about the afterlife, and of their need to make offerings to their deities. At different sites throughout Mesoamerica (especially in the Central Highlands, the Oaxaca area, and the Yucatán Peninsula), many female clay figurines have been found in what were the agricultural fields. Scholars hypothesize that these figurines were placed in the fields to propitiate the gods and ensure the fertility of crops. Burials in places close to the villages (as in Asia, Africa, and Europe) also appear, with a large proportion of the human remains belonging to children or young people. These burial places are accompanied by offerings such as vestiges of food and pieces of ceramics. For centuries there were claims suggesting that the earliest voyages of exploration to North America were made by Irish monks (St. Brendan), Welshmen (Prince Madoc) and others, but these have never been supported by credible evidence. Late tenth-century Norsemen (Vikings) sailing west from Scandinavia and Iceland colonized the west coast of Greenland, and then in about 1001 moved on to Baffin Island, southern Labrador, and finally the northern tip of Newfoundland. There, at a site now known as L'Anse aux Meadows, they made an abortive effort to establish a colony which they called Vinland. Several attempts to stabilize the infant settlement followed, but the enterprise did not prosper. Repeated attacks by hostile natives (known to the Vikings as Skrellings) may have contributed to its ultimate failure. Over the ensuing five centuries, some Europeans heard of the Norsemen's efforts, but a number of factors precluded any new attempts at exploration. Most European trade continued to center on the Mediterranean region, there was little impetus and few resources available for sailing westward into uncharted waters, and new over-land trade routes to the Far East were established. But in time, a variety of factors affecting Europeans, including population growth, the gradual evolution of nation-states, innovative developments in shipbuilding and navigation, and fresh intellectual initiatives born of titanic religious quarrels, created renewed incentives for exploration. In the 1500s, the Catholic Church's centuries-long control over religious thought and practice began to crumble. Controversies over church reform engendered by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation inspired a new growth of learning and individual initiative. Much of the financial and political power formerly held by the Catholic Church was transferred into the hands of kings in some European nation-states, notably Spain, Portugal, France and England. Larger ships better equipped to carry their crews longer distances, coupled with new devices such as the sextant, came into general use. At the same time, much of the increasingly lucrative overland trade with Asia was controlled by merchants residing in northern Italian city-states, such as Venice, Genoa, and Florence. From the late fourteenth century, however, this commercial activity was increasingly hampered by intermittent warfare with the Ottoman Empire, and the nations bordering the Atlantic began to consider alternative routes to Asian markets. From the early Christian era, ancient geographers had strongly influenced European thinking about distances between various points on the globe. Maps drawn by Claudius Ptolemy (a.d. c. 73-151), for example, depicted the expanse of Eurasia as being a third wider than its actual size. Other ancient writers, notably Eratosthenes, Strabo, and Marinus of Tyre, further exaggerated the distance from Western Europe to Eastern Siberia, or implied that well-supplied mariners heading west across the Atlantic from the coast of Europe might have no great difficulty reaching China or the Indies. The existence of the Americas was not then suspected. Portuguese and Spanish Exploration Catholic Portugal and Spain, relatively untroubled by religious strife and located on the Iberian Peninsula jutting southwest into the Atlantic, were ideally situated to explore the various avenues by sea. Religious and commercial zeal fueled much of their activity into the early modern period. Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) established a school of navigation at Cape St. Vincent, that made significant improvements in shipbuilding and navigation, including vastly better charts, compasses, and quadrants. He dispatched a number of voyages to the south down the West African coast, setting the stage for later expeditions that rounded South Africa and crossed the Indian Ocean. King John II subsequently encouraged the search for a water route to India, and Vasco da Gama (1469-1524) successfully completed the first such round-trip voyage in 1497-1498. In 1498, King John dispatched Duarte Pacheco Pereira (?-c. 1530) in a westerly direction, and Pacheco's later account suggests that he may have encountered parts of the South American continent. Pacheco's description of his voyages of exploration, Principio do Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, was not released for many years by the Portuguese government because of the information it could provide rival mariners travelling to India, and because it contained much valuable geographic data. In 1500, King Emmanuel I sent Pedro Alvarez de Cabral (1460-c. 1520) to establish trade with the Indies. The long-held view that Cabral was the first to sail (or be blown) west instead of south and onto the coast of Brazil is now at least open to question. In 1500-1501, a Portuguese exploratory expedition of three vessels led by Gaspar Corte-Real (c. 1450-1501) may have seen the southern tip of Greenland en route to Labrador. It is believed that they hugged the coast of Labrador and rounded Newfoundland, continuing as far as Cape Sable, Nova Scotia. There his brother Miguel returned to Portugal with two ships, while Gaspar continued further south and was never heard from again. Report Advertisement Queen Isabel of Spain, having with her husband Ferdinand subjugated the Moors early in 1492, was able to turn her attention to other matters. The Genoese-born Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) had for years advocated voyaging west across the Atlantic to Asia, and Isabel provided him with money and a patent of nobility, the latter to enhance his authority when in Asia. Columbus departed Palos in August 1492 and arrived, possibly at Watling Island (one of the Bahamas) in mid-October. But as historian S. E. Morison has noted, "America was discovered by accident, not wanted when found, and early explorations were directed to finding a way through or around it." Early discoverers and explorers also sought precious metals, principally gold and silver, but few found them. For much of the next ten years, which included Three more trips to various parts of the Caribbean region between 1494 and 1502, Columbus remained convinced that he had been navigating the Indian Ocean. Increasingly, however, many of his contemporaries did not agree, contending that a new continent had been discovered, and that the traditional view of world geography needed drastic revision. In 1493, at the request of Spain, Pope Alexander VI established a longitudinal line one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands. Spain was granted an exclusive right to discoveries west of that line not already held by other powers as of Christmas Day, 1492. The Portuguese, unhappy with this decision, urged that this line be moved much further to the west. Some historians have reasoned that this revision was demanded because Portugal may have already been aware of the existence of Brazil, although as previously noted, its official discovery did not take place until 1500. The Treaty of Tordesillas, promulgated on 7 June 1494, established the new line 370 leagues west of the Azores. Portugal was given license to explore and settle everything in the New World east of this line, and Spain, as before, granted everything to the west. Report Advertisement Florentine-born Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), who by 1495 was directing the Seville branch of a Florentine banking and ship chandlery firm, helped to outfit Columbus's third voyage in 1498. Vespucci subsequently participated in several voyages during which he reconnoitered portions of the Brazilian coast. Vespucci's Lettera to his friend Piero Soderini, and his Mundus Novus, a briefer document printed in 1506, prompted Martin Waldseemüller, a young cartographer at the cloister of Saint-Dié, Lorraine, to designate the southern portion of the New World as "America" in a book and map published in 1507. This designation was later extended to both North and South America. In 1508, Vespucci was appointed Pilot Major of Spain, with responsibilities for opening a school of navigation and preparing charts for navigators. He held this post until his death in 1512. In 1513 and 1521, Juan Ponce de Leon (1460-1521) discovered and explored Florida. In 1513, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa (1475-1519) discovered the Pacific Ocean by crossing the Isthmus of Panama. Between 1519 and 1521, Hernán Cortéz (1485-1547), landing on Mexico's east coast, marched inland with several hundred soldiers, and, allying himself with many smaller groups of indigenous Central Mexican peoples, brought about the destruction of the Aztec Empire. He later (1530) discovered lower California. In 1535, Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (1490-c. 1557) explored what is now the American Southwest, and five years later, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado (1510-1554) discovered the Grand Canyon. Other Spaniards, notably Portuguese-born Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (?-1543), explored the California coast as far north as Monterey Bay. His chief pilot, Bartoleme Ferrelo, continued north to what is now the southwest coast of Oregon in February 1543. Other Spanish ship captains subsequently investigated the North Pacific coast, reaching the southern shores of Alaska in the eighteenth century. The Catholic priests who accompanied Spanish conquistadors felt justified in converting Native Americans wherever possible, and in their view, this imperative warranted the slaughter of many of those who resisted Christianity. In addition, numerous natives died from the introduction of unfamiliar European diseases, and from being compelled to work on Spanish colonial estates (haciendas) or to mine for precious metals.

US Imperialism

When the Civil War drew to a close in 1865, the United States had not yet emerged as an imperialist nation, although the groundwork had long been laid. The prehistory of American imperialism lay in the European appropriation of Native Americans' lands and in post-Revolutionary demands that the United States annex Florida and Louisiana. In 1823 President James Monroe (1758-1831), hoping to prevent Spain from reclaiming former colonies in Latin America, declared the entire hemisphere off-limits for European expansion. Labeled the Monroe Doctrine in 1852, this policy provided a pretext for the threat of military intervention in 1895, when, shortly after gold was discovered in Venezuela, Great Britain, which controlled Guiana, disputed boundary lines. Throughout the twentieth century, the United States called on the Monroe Doctrine to justify its dominance over hemispheric conditions, the most notable instance being President John F. Kennedy's invocation of the doctrine during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The United States also had a proto-imperialist history in its several moves to acquire contiguous lands. Calls for the annexation of Canada were frequent throughout the nineteenth century. The most famous—as well as the most successful—move, however, was the Mexican-American War of 1848, ending in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded 529,200 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States—California, New Mexico, and parts of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Texas, also formerly part of Mexico, had already been annexed in 1845. This history of U.S. relations with other American states meant that by the late nineteenth century the people of the United States were already familiar with the idea of taking over neighboring lands or intervening in hemispheric disputes. They were also sharply aware of the ongoing imperialist moves by the European powers, as Great Britain, Spain, Germany, Italy, and France either acquired new colonies or centralized control over existing ones. The Boer War of 1899-1902, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the Belgian exploitation of the Congo, French intervention in northern Africa and the Far East all impressed Americans, some favorably, others unfavorably. What was clear to all was that the European imperial powers were reaping extraordinary economic benefits from lands far from their own geopolitical borders. For many Americans, especially those ambitious to extend American business interests, it became clear that overseas expansion was the way to harness American energies and turn them to profitable development. Many Americans both spoke and wrote to this end; among them Alfred T. Mahan (1840-1914), whose books The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660-1783 (1890) and The Interest of America in Sea Power (1897) advocated development of a world-class navy that could be used to protect U.S. maritime commerce. Integral to this plan was the necessity of a canal cutting through Central America and overseas colonies that could serve as military bases. Mahan's ideas were favorably received, in large part because they fed into a general cultural investment in the idea of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States had a special mission to expand across the entire North American continent and beyond, especially to Central America and the Caribbean. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, in turn, was closely allied to a set of racial ideologies that ranked the world's races according to pseudoscientific criteria of intelligence and character traits and that used Darwin's evolutionary ideas to develop, especially through the writings of the social scientist Herbert Spencer, a philosophy of "survival of the fittest" that could be used to justify military and economic conquest. In most of the charts developed to illustrate racial hierarchies, Anglo-Saxons (people who could trace their origins to the Germanic tribes—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who invaded Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries) were at the top and people of African origin were at the bottom, whereas "Asiastics," as they were called, occupied a variety of middle ranks, often closely related to skin color. The promulgation of these racial ideologies throughout American society encouraged a cultural assumption that American institutions—the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the economic and political systems generally—were Anglo-Saxon inventions. This led to two further assumptions, deeply held even when contradictory. The first was that "inferior races," as they were known, were incapable of understanding democratic principles. The second was that it was America's duty to export U.S. economic, social, and political systems (generally coded under the rubric "civilization") to other nations. This complex was compounded by a Christian missionary tradition that had been operating since John Eliot proselytized to Native Americans in the seventeenth century, a tradition that valorized conversion to Christianity and held that no nation could be truly "civilized" unless it was fully Christianized. It is important to note here that for many Americans, especially those invested in the ideology of Anglo-Saxon superiority, the word "Christian" only referred to Protestants, and "Christianity" referred to the entire complex of Anglo-American cultural values. This meant that Spain's former colonies, which had been Christianized by Catholics, could usefully be regarded as fertile grounds for Protestant missionizing as well as U.S. cultural, political, and economic domination. Most important, it facilitated an American assumption that most non-European countries were militarily vulnerable compounds of inferior races and social, cultural, and religious difference. This compound of vulnerability, inferiority, and difference sanctioned American intervention overseas. Expansionists argued that nations colonized by European powers were oppressed and would welcome American aid in throwing off their oppressors and in establishing American institutions. When the erstwhile colonists resisted appropriation by the United States, the complex of American attitudes enabled the new imperialists to argue that because the insurgents were racially and culturally backward, they would require first pacification, and then a prolonged education in Western values and technologies before they could govern themselves. Invasion of other countries also helped in the national project of post-Civil War reconstruction. Amy Kaplan has noted that one benefit of the imperial push in the late nineteenth century was to provide a means of bringing the North and the South together. Although the Civil War was officially over, sectarian hatreds still festered, and the notion that men would fight again, this time united as Americans against a foreign power, helped overcome sectional differences as the military forces looked outward, beyond U.S. borders. Here, too, emphasis on Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, U.S. political institutions, and America's Christian mission combined to convince Americans that it was, as President William McKinley (1843-1901) stated regarding the Filipinos, America's duty "to educate [them], and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them" (Millis, pp. 383-384). In the process of bringing Western "civilization" to other nations, Americans who had seen each other as enemies began to rediscover their commonalities, and the "work" of imperialism thus also served to facilitate the work of reunification and cultural community. IMPERIALISM AND AMERICAN LITERATURE: 1865-1898 Imperialism rarely appears as a subject in American literature written between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the Spanish-American War, but the complex of ideas and attitudes that would facilitate imperialist activities are reflected in many of the works produced during this time. For instance, The Squatter and the Don (1885), the first novel by Chicana writer Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832-1895), examines the impact of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on wealthy Californios—Mexicans living in the western territories ceded to the United States after the Mexican-American War—whose lands had suddenly come under U.S. control and who were facing dispossession through the openly biased U.S. legal system. An aristocratic Californio married to an American army officer, Ruiz de Burton illustrates the complexities of prevailing attitudes toward U.S. imperialism as she simultaneously argues for justice for Californios, affirms racial hierarchies (her protagonists are all of European ancestry and all scorn the Indians who constitute the worker class), and advocates transportation routes that will link east and west coasts and situate California as a jumping-off point for expanded trade with China. Ruiz de Burton's plea for justice for her own socioeconomic group is aimed at forcing the U.S. legal system to live up to its own ideals of impartiality, not to protest U.S. appropriation of Mexican lands, and her resentment over ethnic discrimination is limited to anger that her aristocrats are lumped together with black and brown peoples. Taking U.S. imperialism as a given, The Squatter and the Don recognizes the importance of technology in facilitating overseas trade and seeks only to ensure that Mexicans of European ancestry maintain their class privileges and be part of the process.

Southwest

it includes Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, the southern half of California, and the southern portions of Kansas and Colorado. With the exception of most of Kansas and Oklahoma, which formed part of the Louisiana Purchase, all of the Southwest was a part of the possessions of Spain, and later of Mexico, well into the nineteenth century and so has, historically, a background that is distinctly Spanish. Kansas is a "marginal state," since its history is partially bound up with that of the Southwest and in part with that of the central prairie states. Oklahoma and Texas each has a history essentially its own. Oklahoma was for more than half a century a great Indian territory, forbidden to settlement by whites. The Five Civilized Tribes, occupying much of it, formed small commonwealths or republics, each with its own government and laws. Texas, settled largely by Anglo-Americans, won its independence from Mexico in 1836. After nearly ten years' existence as a republic, it was annexed by the United States in 1845. The remainder of this southwestern region, except for the small strip of land acquired from Mexico in 1853 in the Gadsden Purchase, became a part of the United States in 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico. Since World War II, the population of the "Sun Belt cities" of the Southwest has swelled with retirees and Mexican immigrants. This demographic trend has transformed Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Albuquerque into crucibles of conservative thought and important battlegrounds during congressional and presidential elections. It is not coincidence that between 1980 and 2002, three presidents—all Republicans—have hailed from the region. California produced Ronald Reagan, while Texas produced George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush—not to mention the surprisingly strong third-party candidacy of billionaire Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. Culturally, the Southwest in the twentieth century has produced a flowering of indigenous and blended cultural forms: Mexican rancheros inspired the macho style of the Anglo cowboy, a staple of American fiction and movies since the 1890s; in the 1920s, painter Georgia O'Keeffe helped to make the pueblo villages of Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, home for the alienated avant-garde; and by century's end, "Tex-Mex" cuisine, a commercialized adaptation of Mexican cuisine, emerged as a mass-market phenomenon. Finally, the status of the Southwest as a borderland between Native American pueblo territory, Anglo-America, and Hispanic Central America has made it a symbol of the increasingly diverse demography of the modern United States. Texas, which had early developed as a great cattle-raising area, sent a stream of cattle northward from 1866 to 1890 to stock ranges on the central and northern Plains; thus, it was the chief factor in the formation of the "cow country" that spanned much of the American West. The production of petroleum and natural gas in California and in the great mid-continent field lying largely in Oklahoma and Texas has been of great significance in the economic life of the nation. The fruit-growing industry of southern California, Arizona, and the lower Rio Grande valley of Texas has also been of great importance to the country as a whole. The production of wheat and cotton in this area adds materially to the nation's crops of these two staples. Manufacture and distribution of motion pictures have long centered in southern California, and the industry's influence on the people of the United States as well as much of the world can hardly be estimated. Since World War II, the Southwest has also become a major center for the aerospace and electronics industries. Los Alamos, New Mexico, a major site of atomic research during the war, continues to host a number of university and government laboratories engaged in sensitive research. Significant as the Southwest has been in the political history of the United States, its importance in U.S. economic history is even more apparent. The discovery of gold in California and Colorado in the nineteenth century brought about one of the most picturesque movements in all American history. The settlement of the Pacific coastal region and the increased production of gold stimulated industry, caused the building of the Pacific railways, and created demands for a canal between the Pacific and Atlantic. The influence of the Southwest on the political history of the United States began early in the nineteenth century. The Louisiana Purchase boundary line, which had been the subject of much controversy, was drawn in 1819, leaving Texas to Spain. Later, the question of the annexation of Texas became an important political issue. After annexation, the dispute over the Texas-Mexico boundary helped to precipitate the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Disputes over the organization of the new territory acquired from Mexico by this war ended in the much-debated Compromise of 1850, under which California entered the Union as a free state but slavery was not restricted in the newly created New Mexico and Utah territories. Four years later came the Kansas- Nebraska Act, allowing the residents of these territories to decide for themselves whether to become free or slave states, and the violent controversies following it attracted the attention of the entire nation.