How Did the Us Again the Western Territory

Era of U.S. Continental Expansion

The history of Hispanic representation in Congress is entwined with that of U.S. continental expansion in the 19th century.⁷ In the decades of rapid west accelerate and settlement between the signing of the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 and the annunciation of the Castilian-American War in 1898, the House well-nigh doubled in size.^eight

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Due west Expansion

/tiles/non-collection/p/part1_04_madison_james_hc.xml Collection of the U.Due south. Firm of Representatives
About this object Considered the Father of the United states Constitution, James Madison of Virginia served iv terms in the House (1789–1797). Similar Thomas Jefferson, Madison saw the strategic value of securing the United States from foreign encroachment by acquiring East and Westward Florida.

President Thomas Jefferson spearheaded westward expansion when the United States acquired the Louisiana territory from France in 1803 and sponsored Lewis and Clark'due south trek (1805–1807). Jefferson'southward foreign policy goal to aggrandize U.S. territory westward was intended to help the U.South. take greater freedom in dealing with foreign powers on the Northward American continent and to consolidate the power of the immature democracy. It required developing war machine strength and practicing shrewd diplomacy.⁹ The policies Jefferson implemented, especially regarding U.Southward. expansion in the modern Gulf Coast region, persisted through two more presidential administrations.

After securing the Louisiana territory, Jefferson and his successors focused on acquiring Spanish Florida—which encompassed all of modern-day Florida, too as a strip running along the Gulf Declension to the Mississippi River. New possibilities for commerce and ports along the Gulf Coast were one rationale. National security was another: Florida offered strategic value in securing Louisiana, the Mississippi Territory, and Georgia. President James Madison employed his predecessor's tactics. In W Florida—which extended from Baton Rouge, on the due east depository financial institution of the Mississippi River in modern-solar day Louisiana, to Pensacola, in the panhandle of modern-day Florida—U.Southward. settlers became the majority population from 1805 to 1810. The settlers resisted weakened Spanish rule and advocated for American sovereignty. In 1804 Congress passed the Mobile Deed, which extended U.Southward. federal revenue laws to all territories ceded by France, including W Florida. The act likewise granted the President "discretionary dominance" to take possession of the Mobile area.¹⁰ In 1811 Madison asserted U.Southward. jurisdiction over the surface area and had incorporated Westward Florida into Louisiana. The U.s.a. annexed Mobile during the War of 1812.

Adams-Onís Treaty (Transcontinental Treaty)

Spain claimed the lands that constitute present-solar day Florida in addition to the land stretching from its panhandle westward, beyond the southern portions of modern-twenty-four hours Alabama and Mississippi to the eastern banks of the Mississippi River. General Andrew Jackson'southward invasion of Florida during the First Seminole War (1817–1818) spurred the Spanish regime—fearing the loss of its claim to the territory—to the negotiating tabular array. Benefiting from favorable geopolitical circumstances, Secretarial assistant of State John Quincy Adams entered into negotiations with Spanish diplomat Don Luis de Onís in 1819. In return for the United States' renouncing its tenuous claims to Texas and paying $v 1000000 for U.Due south. citizens' claims against Kingdom of spain, Adams secured all of Spanish Florida, finalizing the Louisiana Purchase. The treaty also set a new purlieus running from the oral fissure of the Sabine River on the Gulf Coast (on the eastern border of modern-mean solar day Texas) northwestward along portions of the Sabine, Red, and Arkansas Rivers, so westward on the 42nd parallel to the Oregon coast. It was the start purlieus to traverse the U.South. continent.

/tiles/non-collection/p/part1_05_adams_john_quincy_hc.xml Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives
About this object Secretarial assistant of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, the lead negotiator of the Adams-Onís Treaty, enjoyed a prominent political career as a foreign government minister, U.S. Senator, and President before serving in the U.S. House of Representatives for 9 terms (1831–1848).

The Adams-Onís Treaty also ushered in Congress's first Member of Hispanic descent; Joseph Marion Hernández served as Florida's first Territorial Consul during the 17th Congress (1821–1823).^eleven Pursuing an calendar that was typical for a Territorial Delegate, Hernández sought to secure infrastructure improvements that would benefit economic growth and bolster political arguments for Florida's admission into the Union as a state. A wealthy planter and military figure who had fought for Spanish interests in the Patriot War and the Get-go Seminole War, Hernández helped span the transition from Castilian rule to American governance. Information technology would exist 30 years after Hernández's departure from the House in March 1823 until the next Hispanic Fellow member arrived in Congress. Like many Territorial Delegates in the 19th century, Hernández returned dwelling to a prominent career in local politics and business organisation; he served in the legislature and led a militia in the 2nd Seminole State of war in the 1830s before making an unsuccessful bid for a U.S. Senate seat when Florida became a state in 1845.

Though the Adams-Onís agreement resolved one friction bespeak, it created others. Critics charged that President James Monroe and Secretary of Country Adams yielded legitimate claims to Texas, fueling later demands for Texas' "re-annexation," particularly by pro-slavery advocates in the 1830s. Moreover, the Adams-Onís Treaty validated Mexican ownership of lands that would become targets for U.Due south. expansion during the War with Mexico from 1846 to 1848.

Manifest Destiny

/tiles/not-collection/p/part1_06_manifest_destiny_drawing_lc.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Titled American Progress. Westward the grade of destiny. Due west ho!, this print memorializes the movement of U.Due south. settlers across the continental Us during the 1840s and 1850s.

Powerfully articulated in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, Adams's coolheaded geopolitical calculations provided later generations of U.S. officials with a road map for the advancement of American rule in the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, Americans in the 1830s and 1840s justified their march across the continent under the rubric of "Manifest Destiny." Coined by a New York newspaper, the term described the popular desire for geographic expansion and, every bit such, was more a zeitgeist than an official foreign policy strategy in antebellum America.¹² Though derived from circuitous circumstances, Manifest Destiny was amenable to unlike political agendas and worldviews, and thus its appeal cut across regional, political party, and class lines.^thirteen At the laying of the cornerstone of the Washington Monument on July four, 1848, Speaker of the House Robert Winthrop captured the mood, employing a metaphor that evoked the era's ultimate symbol of progress: "The great American built locomotive 'Liberty' still holds it course, unimpeded and unimpaired; gathering strength as it goes," he said. "Nor tin nosotros fail to observe that men are everywhere beginning to examine the model of this mighty engine, and that not a few take already begun to re-create its construction and to imitate its mechanism.… The whole civilized world resounds with American opinions and American principles," he added. "Every vale is vocal with them. Every mountain has found a natural language for them."^xiv

In the optics of many observers there was petty departure between federal policy and popular will. It was America's obligation, i pundit wrote in 1845, "to overspread and to possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the corking experiment of liberty and federated self regime."¹⁵ Such seemingly inevitable growth justified America'due south rapid conquering of Western lands and amplified the nationalist sentiments of U.Due south. settlers in Texas and the Pacific Northwest in the 1840s.¹⁶

Notwithstanding, the concept of expansion veiled multiple motives and was advocated by Northerners and Southerners for different reasons. While many Americans supported it, such growth awakened sectional debates over slavery. The possibility of new Western lands forced the federal government to face questions that had been somewhat mollified since the Missouri Compromise of 1820: Would new states allow slavery or oppose it? How would Congress maintain its residuum of sectional interests? Expansionists, moreover, did not accost the potential effects of rapid development on African Americans, American Indians, and Mexican citizens living in contested territories.¹⁷

Texas Revolution and Annexation

The boundaries that were ratified in the Adams-Onís Treaty, yielding Texas to New Spain, were swiftly altered in 1821 when Mexico replaced Espana as the sovereign, and U.Southward. settlers rapidly began to cross into East Texas.¹⁸ Throughout the 1820s, Anglos streamed into the Mexican province, outnumbering Hispanic Texans by two to one within a decade. The Mexican government sought to prohibit the slave trade, and in 1830 the Mexican Congress passed a law that suspended U.S. immigration into Texas.

/tiles/non-collection/p/part1_07_santa_anna_lc.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress In this political cartoon, Texas Army Commander-in-Chief Sam Houston (left) accepts the surrender of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. After achieving independence, Texas existed as an independent republic until its admission as a U.S. state in 1845.

In 1834, the year after he causeless power, Full general Antonio López de Santa Anna dissolved the Mexican Congress and set a dictatorship. Revolts erupted in several Mexican states. After the insurrection spread to Texas in June 1835 (largely because of issues related to the quartering of Mexican soldiers and considering of the central government'southward collection of customs duties), a group of rebels in Anáhuac seized a Mexican garrison. Anglos Stephen Austin, William Travis, and Sam Houston became leading insurrectionaries. In March 1836, even as the Republic of Texas alleged its independence, the Mexican Army under General Santa Anna massacred Texan forces at the Alamo in modernistic 24-hour interval San Antonio and at Goliad, 100 miles to the southeast.¹⁹ But under Sam Houston's command, the Regular army of Texas repelled Santa Anna's divided forces at the Battle of San Jacinto near modern-day Houston, killing roughly one-half of them and capturing most all the rest, including Santa Anna himself. Nether the threat of death, Santa Anna ordered his forces to pull out of Texas and across the Rio Grande River, in effect recognizing Texan independence.^xx

/tiles/non-collection/p/part1_08_houston_sam_lc.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Sam Houston was a prominent state of war veteran and politician earlier moving to Texas in 1835. Houston served in the Texas congress and as its first president before his election to the U.Southward. Senate in 1846.

During the side by side decade, the population in Texas increased from approximately 30,000 to 50,000 in 1835 to a total of approximately 125,000 to 140,000 in 1845. Every bit members of a distinct minority who were suspected of disloyalty past Anglo settlers, Hispanic Texans were quickly excluded from the political procedure.²¹

With the population boom Texas' first president, Sam Houston, and subsequent leaders sought to bring together the U.s.a.. The Andrew Jackson administration (1829–1837) and the Martin Van Buren administration (1837–1841) demurred despite their unneutrality, fearing that annexation would provoke all-out war with Mexico—inviting a political backlash driven by critics who believed the push button for Texas was linked to the extension of slavery in the Southwest.²²

But the John Tyler administration (1841–1845) was willing to continue with annexation. Secretary of State Abel Upshur and his successor, John C.Calhoun, completed the negotiations, which were signed on Apr 12, 1844, and which made Texas eligible for admission every bit a U.S. territory, and perhaps after every bit one or more states. Additionally, the U.South. government assumed $10 1000000 in Texan debt in exchange for public lands. The boundaries with United mexican states were left unresolved.²³ On June 8, 1844, with public opinion stirred by antislavery activists after Senator Benjamin Tappan of Ohio leaked the provisions of the hugger-mugger treaty to the printing, the Senate rejected it with a vote of 35 to 16. Only subsequently the autumn 1844 elections, in which James K. Polk triumphed, President Tyler pushed the treaty (H.J. Res. 46) through Congress. It passed the Democratic-controlled House 120 to 98 and the Senate 24 to 21. Tyler signed the treaty into law on March 1, 1845 (5 Stat. 797–798), three days before the end of his term. In the stop, Texas was admitted as a country on December 29, 1845, with the proviso that it could be divided into as many as five states—a prospect that outraged and horrified abolitionist members of the Whig Political party.²⁴

War with Mexico and the Southwest

/tiles/non-drove/p/part1_09_tx_annexation_roll_call_na.xml Original gyre call vote on ratification of treaty to annex Texas; image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration On June 8, 1844, the U.S. Senate refused to corroborate the ratification of a treaty annexing Texas to the U.s.. Shortly before he left office, President John Tyler, with the back up of President-elect James Yard. Polk, maneuvered a articulation resolution through both houses of Congress and signed the annexation treaty into law on March 1, 1845.

James K. Polk gear up an ambitious course when he assumed the presidency on March 4, 1845.²⁵ A strict Jacksonian, Polk achieved what later historians have identified equally three of four primary goals during the starting time session of the 29th Congress (1845–1847).²⁶ With the assist of Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, President Polk had lowered the tariff; he had created an independent treasury; and by diplomacy he had acquired the Oregon Territory from England. The acquisition of California from Mexico was all that remained of his original calendar. Just unlike the acquisition of Oregon, taking possession of such coveted lands required an all-out war.²⁷

Less than 2 years into Polk's presidency, many suspected only few knew about his 1000 designs for California. Revealing niggling, Polk sent diplomats to United mexican states, pressuring the Mexican regime non to interfere with the annexation of Texas. Moreover, Polk claimed that Mexico owed Americans living in Texas millions of dollars for seized and lost property. Mexican officials resisted, banishing Polk's diplomatic envoy. One historian notes, "Given the anti-American mood of their people, Mexican diplomats understood that whatever compromise with the United States at this fourth dimension was tantamount to political suicide." An anxious Polk ordered U.S. troops to encamp merely northward of the Rio Grande River in an area that was claimed by both United mexican states and the United States. Subsequently blockading the river and preparation its cannon on a nearby town, the U.S. armed services ignored Mexican requests to stand down. On April 25, 1846, a skirmish between Mexican and U.South. troops ignited hostilities. Mexican officials blamed the Usa, while Polk blamed United mexican states when he learned of the fighting 2 weeks after.²⁸

/tiles/non-collection/p/part1_10_polk_james_lc.xml Paradigm courtesy of the Library of Congress The first Speaker of the House to go President of the United States, James Chiliad. Polk was an Andrew Jackson protégé who chop-chop rose through the ranks of Tennessee politics. During Polk's term as President (1845–1849), the United States, through war and affairs, secured much of the American Southwest and long coveted Pacific Ocean ports forth the West Coast.

Polk promptly appealed to Congress for "vigorous & prompt measure[s] to enable the Executive to prosecute the War."²⁹ Polk asked for 50,000 volunteers because "by the act of the Commonwealth of Mexico, a state of war exists between that Government and the United States."³⁰ The beak (H.R. 145) met with fiddling open resistance in the House and passed 174 to 14, with just Whigs opposed. Antislavery Whigs, like John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts and Joshua Giddings of Ohio, viewed the war with United mexican states equally proof that Southern interests intended to expand slavery w.³¹Garrett Davis, a moderate Kentucky Whig, was the merely 1 on the flooring that day who voiced whatever opposition to the beak: "It is our ain President who began this war," Davis declared. "He has been carrying information technology on for months in a series of acts. Congress, which is vested exclusively by the Constitution with state of war-making power, he has not designed to consult, much less to ask it for any potency."³² Davis, despite his reservations, voted for the provision of troops and funding.

/tiles/non-collection/p/part1_11_polk_cartoon_lc.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress In this 1846 cartoon, President James G. Polk (center left) challenges Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts (centre correct) to a fight because of Webster's public criticisms of Polk's Texas policies. Supporters and critics of the war stand up backside their respective advocates.

Horrified that the Firm had passed the nib in under two hours, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri told Polk that "19th Century war should non be declared without total discussion and much more consideration."³³ Others in the Senate bristled at Polk's demands. "War could not be made with Mexico," Senator John Crittenden reminded the trunk, "without touching the interests and heady the jealousies of all nations trading with u.s.." Like the House, the Senate somewhen passed the neb with an overwhelming majority, 40 to 2.³⁴ Polk signed it into law (nine Stat. 9–10) the following day, May thirteen, 1846.

The war'due south nominal popularity in Congress disguised many people's reservations. Andrew Jackson Donelson, the former President'due south nephew, advised Polk to resolve the trouble quickly. "Aught can exist gained by a war with United mexican states," he said. "We are non set for another Annexation question, and the Mexicans are not fit for incorporation into our Union."³⁵ In the House, Giddings finally lambasted the war. It would, he noted, exist long, expensive, and disgraceful, and given its "connectedness with slavery," he said, it threatened the "harmony and perpetuity of the Union."³⁶

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

/tiles/non-collection/p/part1_12_pueblo_indians_lc.xml Paradigm courtesy of the Library of Congress A Zia Pueblo family was photographed in the New Mexico Territory in 1885.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed by principal negotiator Nicholas P. Trist on February 2, 1848, and approved by the U.S. Senate on March 10, 1848, concluded the state of war, opened a dramatically different chapter in U.S. relations with Mexico, and nearly completed America's continental empire.³⁷ The war, nonetheless, was non without cost; roughly 12,500 U.South. troops died (near from affliction), and the federal government spent nearly $100 million.³⁸ Moreover, stiff Mexican resistance on the battlefield and at the negotiating table made the conflict last longer than the Polk assistants predictable. Popular back up waned equally the conflict connected, contributing to a change in control; the House flipped to a new Whig bulk in the 1846 elections.³⁹ Moreover, "Mr. Polk'south War" brought the country closer to fratricidal conflict: Would the new territories let or outlaw slavery?

Even counting the human, financial, and political costs of the war, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo represented an American bonanza purchased at a discount. For the equivalent of about one-third of the landmass of the modern continental United States, American officials paid $15 1000000 to Mexico and assumed $iii.25 one thousand thousand in war claims by U.Southward. citizens.^forty In ane fell swoop, America gained control of 530,000 square miles. From Mexico's vantage bespeak, the United states of america gained over 900,000 foursquare miles, including disputed Texas country claims Mexico had long considered illegitimate. The United States obtained nearly all of modern-day New Mexico and Arizona (whose southern portions were later caused in the 1853 Gadsden Purchase); all of Nevada, Utah, and California, with its coveted deep water ports on the Pacific Sea; and portions of nowadays-day Colorado and Wyoming.⁴¹ The state of war likewise engendered resentment amongst Mexicans and other Latin Americans, leaving many wary of U.S. motives.⁴²

/tiles/non-collection/p/part1_13_guadalupe_hidalgo_map_na.xml E. Gilman, Map of the Us Including Western Territories, map (Philadelphia: P.S. Duval's Steam Lith. Printing, 1848); from National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the U.S. Firm of Representatives, RG 233 This 1848 map outlines the territories acquired past the Usa in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The borders of California, New Mexico, and Texas were afterwards formalized as role of the Compromise of 1850.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also began to accost practical problems that arose from the fact that roughly 90,000 Mexican citizens, and substantially more than American Indians of various tribes, were living in the newly acquired lands, almost of them in what became modern-twenty-four hour period New United mexican states.⁴³ The treaty independent provisions pertaining to Mexican citizens—a group that included the nonitinerant Pueblo Indians—which guaranteed their U.S. citizenship and property rights, and permitted indigenous peoples to retain or renounce their Mexican citizenship in favor of U.South. citizenship. The treaty also extended blanket U.S. citizenship to any individual who had non fabricated a declaration inside 1 year of its ratification.

But these guarantees were qualified. For instance, Pueblos, although they were Mexican citizens, were not accorded full civil and political rights. Instead, they were treated like the members of other Indian tribes in U.S. territory, who would eventually be moved to reservations and would not participate in territorial politics. For decades, congressional debates nearly New Mexican statehood were dominated past the question of whether nuevomexicanos were white enough to achieve self-government, leading many Hispano politicians to accentuate their Spanish ancestry and to differentiate themselves from their Mexican and American Indian constituents.⁴⁴

The Senate's consideration of the treaty amplified the calls of Manifest Destiny.⁴⁵ Thomas Ritchie, editor of the pro-Polk Washington Daily Wedlock, wrote, "What we want to obtain from United mexican states is more of territory and less of population, simply we have no objection to the acquisition of a few of her people forth with the soil which we get." Senator Daniel S. Dickinson of New York explained that a "majority" of nuevomexicanos were members of "fated aboriginal races" who could "neither uphold government or be restrained by it" and therefore must "perish under, if they do non recede before, the influences of civilisation."⁴⁶ Given prevailing racial prejudices and lingering concerns about the Catholicism of the Mexicans in the Southwest, the promises of citizenship as outlined past the treaty remained for decades largely unresolved, particularly in territories such as New Mexico and Arizona.

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Source: https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/HAIC/Historical-Essays/Continental-Expansion/Era-of-U-S--Continental-Expansion/

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