The Nineteenth Century
In its first century, the territories and population of the new United States of America expanded at a phenomenal rate. The white population of North America in 1800 stood at around five million, and there were another one million African slaves (of whom thirty thousand were in the north). Of that total, 86 percent lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic, but no US city could rival Mexico City, whose population approached 100,000 inhabitants. (Both New York and Philadelphia reached that figure within twenty years, however, and New York had passed a million fifty years later.) It had suited the British to discourage settlers from venturing west of the Appalachians, where they would be far beyond the reach of British power and therefore inclined to carry on independent existences. For George Washington, however, any agreement to follow such a policy had been a "temporary expedient to quieten the minds of the Indians." Adventurers such as Daniel Boone started to cross the mountains into Tennessee and Kentucky during the 1770s. Soon makeshift rafts, made from the planks that would later be assembled to make log cabins, were careering west along the Ohio River (the only westward-flowing river on the continent). In 1801, the Spanish handed Louisiana back to the French, on the express undertaking that the French would keep it for ever. However, Napoleon swiftly realized that any attempt to hang on to his American possessions would involve spreading his armies too thinly. He chose instead to make the best of things by selling them to the United States for $15 million, in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The new territories extended far beyond the boundaries of present-day Louisiana, and for President Thomas Jefferson it was a matter of urgency to send the explorers Lewis and Clark to map them out. With the help of Sacagawea, their female Shoshone guide, they followed the Missouri and Columbia rivers all the way to the Pacific; in their wake, trappers and "mountain men" came to hunt in the wilderness of the Rockies. The Russians had already reached the Pacific Northwest by this time and established a network of fortified outposts to trade in the pelts of beaver and otter. British attempts to blockade the Atlantic, primarily intended as a move against Napoleon, gave the new nation its first chance to flex its military muscles. Although British raiders succeeded in capturing Washington DC, and burned the White House to the ground, the War of 1812 most significantly provided the US with a cover for aggression against the Native American allies of the British. Thus Tecumseh of the Shawnee was defeated near Detroit, and Andrew Jackson moved against the Creek of the southern Mississippi. Jackson's campaign against the Seminole in Florida enabled the US to gain possession of the state from the Spanish; he was rewarded first with the governorship of the new state, and later by his election to the presidency. During his period in office, in the 1830s, Jackson went even further, and set about clearing all states east of the Mississippi of their native populations. The barren region that later became Oklahoma was designated as "Indian Territory," home to the "Five Civilized Tribes." The Creek and the Seminole, and the Choctaw and Chickasaw of Mississippi, were eventually joined by the Cherokee of the lower Appalachians there, after four appalling months on the forced march known as the " Trail of Tears ." For the citizens of the young republic, it took only a small step from realizing that their country might be capable of spreading across the whole continent to supposing that it had a quasi-religious duty - a " Manifest Destiny " - to do so. At its most basic, that doctrine amounted to little more than a belief that might must be right, but the idea that they were fulfilling the will of God inspired countless pioneers to set off across the plains in search of a new life. Mexico had by now gained its independence from Spain. The Spanish territories of the Southwest had never attracted enough migrants to turn into full-fledged colonies, and the American settlers who arrived in ever-increasing numbers began to dominate their Hispanic counterparts. The Anglos of Texas rebelled in 1833, under the leadership of General Sam Houston. Shortly after the legendary setback at the Alamo , in 1836, they defeated the Mexican army of Santa Ana, and Texas became an independent republic in its own right. The ensuing Mexican War was a bare-faced exercise in American aggression, in which most of the future leading figures of the Civil War received their first experience fighting on the same side. The conflict resulted in the acquisition not only of Texas, but also of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and finally California, in 1848. A token US payment of $15 million to the Mexican government was designed to match the Louisiana Purchase. Controversy over whether slavery would be legal in the new states was rendered academic when it turned out that, on virtually the same day the war ended, gold had been discovered in the Sierra Nevada of California. The resultant Gold Rush created California's first significant city, San Francisco, and brought a massive influx of free white settlers to a land that was in any case utterly unsuitable for a plantation-based economy. Proponents of Manifest Destiny seem never to have given much thought to the Pacific Northwest , which remained nominally under the control of British Canada. However, once the Oregon Trail started to operate in 1841, American settlers there swiftly outnumbered the British. In 1846, a surprisingly amicable treaty fixed the border along the 49th parallel, just as it already did across eastern Canada, and left the whole of Vancouver Island to the British.
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