Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States.
During the Civil War, the Republican-controlled Congress worked to make the dream of a farmer’s paradise a reality by passing the Homestead Act, which granted up to 160 acres of western land to loyal citizens. The US government also helped westward expansion by granting land to railroad companies and extending telegraph wires across the country.
Like Thomas Jefferson, many of these pioneers associated westward migration, land ownership and farming with freedom. In Europe, large numbers of factory workers formed a dependent and seemingly permanent working class; by contrast, in the United States, the western frontier offered the possibility of independence and upward mobility for all.
The railroads opened up the West not only to settlement but to the world market, making it possible to ship meat and crops to distant cities and even across oceans.
However, westward expansion provided the United States with vast natural resources and ports along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts for expanding trade, key elements in creating the superpower America is today.
According to the quote above, what kind of social impact did westward expansion cause? a. It caused a positive impact, allowing Americans to spread out to address the issue of overcrowding in the east.
Because slavery was the backbone of America it helped the expansion a lot. Moving westward helped expand the amount of agriculture that was being produced there for it was helping boost the economy because they were able to make more money because they had more land.
Native Americans lives were ruined by westward expansion. People would come in and they would be forced to move off their land. There were many acts that were created to work against them, such as the one that restricted their religious practices.
Westward expansion, the 19th-century movement of settlers into the American West, began with the Louisiana Purchase and was fueled by the Gold Rush, the Oregon Trail and a belief in "manifest destiny."
A significant push toward the west coast of North America began in the 1810s. It was intensified by the belief in manifest destiny, federally issued Indian removal acts, and economic promise. Pioneers traveled to Oregon and California using a network of trails leading west.
Gold rush and mining opportunities (silver in Nevada) The opportunity to work in the cattle industry; to be a “cowboy” Faster travel to the West by railroad; availability of supplies due to the railroad. The opportunity to own land cheaply under the Homestead Act.
The westward expansion carried slavery down into the Southwest, into Mississippi, Alabama, crossing the Mississippi River into Louisiana. Finally, by the 1840's, it was pouring into Texas. So the expansion of slavery, which became the major political question of the 1850's, was not just a political issue.
Westward expansion was a key theme of nineteenth-century America. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase from France. He hoped that small farmers would move to the newly acquired lands and settle on small farms.
The North wanted the new territories to be free, but the South wanted them to be slave states. The arguments became increasing bitter during the 1850s, and this slowed settlement. After the end of the... (The entire section contains 2 answers and 471 words.)
In 1848 , the US took huge tracts of land from Mexico after winning the Mexican-American War (1846–48). This territory practically completed the boundaries of the continental US as we know it. The acquisition of vast territory led to heated disputes between North and South.
To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation’s health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms.
Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850. Bleeding Kansas. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States.
Westward migration was an essential part of the republican project , he argued, and it was Americans’ “ manifest destiny ” to carry the “great experiment of liberty” to the edge of the continent: to “overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us,” O’Sullivan wrote.
In 1853, the Gadsden Purchase added about 30,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States and fixed the boundaries of the “lower 48” where they are today. In 1845, a journalist named John O’Sullivan put a name to the idea that helped pull many pioneers toward the western frontier.
Manifest Destiny. By 1840, nearly 7 million Americans–40 percent of the nation’s population–lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Following a trail blazed by Lewis and Clark, most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity.
Thousands of people crossed the Rockies to the Oregon Territory, which belonged to Great Britain, and thousands more moved into the Mexican territories of California, New Mexico and Texas. In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors (Texans of Spanish origin) and won independence from Mexico.
However, since no Southern legislator would approve a plan that would give more power to “free-soil” Northerners, Douglas came up with a middle ground that he called “popular sovereignty”: letting the settlers of the territories decide for themselves whether their states would be slave or free.
Westward expansion: economic development. In the late nineteenth century, the West developed into a modern agricultural machine--at the expense of farmers.
The US government also helped westward expansion by granting land to railroad companies and extending telegraph wires across the country. After the Civil War, the dream of independent farms remained, but the reality was more complex.
Railroad monopolies charged shipping rates so high that in some cases it was cheaper for farmers to burn their crops for fuel than to ship them to market. Farm machinery and fertilizer were also subject to steep markups. All of these factors combined to drive farmers into debt and bankruptcy.
When Thomas Jefferson imagined the ideal environment for the republic to thrive, he pictured a country made up of small farms. Independent farmers would make an honest living tilling the soil, and in doing so, they would become virtuous citizens.
The government funded the extension of railroads by giving Native Americans' land to the railroads. If the railroad corporations, whose stock was owned by rich people, could bulid a railroad for less money than the land was worth, they could profit on the exchange, thereby making their rich stockholders even richer.
When crop prices were high, the farmers did well. But if prices dropped, the farmers were in trouble. And in the late nineteenth century, farmers were in trouble. To some extent, they were the victims of their own success: the more they produced, the less it was worth.
Before the Civil War, the Free-Soil movement and the Republican Party embraced this idea for the American West: a territory reserved for small white farmers, unchallenged by the wealthy plantation owners who could buy up vast tracts of land and employ slave labor.