RCWR - The Road to Civil War and Reconstruction Key Concepts (Lesson)
The Road to Civil War and Reconstruction
Before you begin...
Notes are given here as well as in the Readings Document from Boundless that is available to download below. There are several presentations to view as well.
The Key Concepts lesson is very important as it covers the main areas of the Advanced Placement frameworks and the Georgia Performance Standards. Many of the test questions will relate to items found here. Many of the test questions will relate to items found here.
Boundless: PDF of readings for this module Links to an external site.
Key Concepts:
Download the key concepts questions that are found below and answer these as you read and view the information in the module. The answers are found in the text on this and the following pages, the readings, the online textbook links, and in the presentation. After you have done this, you will use these answers to review for the multiple-choice test for this module.
Key Concepts Questions Links to an external site.
Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny
Between 1800 and 1860, the United States more than doubled in size, and the number of states expanded from 16 to 33. There were three primary motivations for America's westward growth:
- The desire of most Americans to own their own land. (Land was the path the “independence” ---being self-reliant rather than working for another person.)
- The discovery of gold and other valuable resources.
- The belief that the United States was destined to stretch across North America (Manifest Destiny) as a part of God’s plan. There were strong economic motivations behind this belief as well as racist beliefs about Native Americans and the Mexican people, but it became a popular political belief in the United States during the early 19th century.
Manifest Destiny was the name given to the idea that the United States would naturally occupy the territory between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. The word manifest means "obvious," and the word destiny means "fate." According to Manifest Destiny, the obvious fate of the United States was to expand "from sea to shining sea." Americans even began interacting with people on the opposite side of the world. The efforts of Commodore Matthew Perry began to open up Japan to Western influence and trade.
View the presentations on the Election of 1844 and the Oregon Trail below. Be sure to take notes on the presentations to help you review later.
Mexican-American War
In 1845, the United States annexed Texas into the Union and set its sights on the Mexican territories of New Mexico and California. U.S. annexation of Texas and other factors led to war in 1846. During the conflict, the United States occupied much of northern Mexico. When the United States eventually won the war, this region was ceded to the United States as a part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
The Mexican-American War is not intuitively a part of “westward expansion,” yet the resulting land acquisitions from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo are definitely related to westward expansion and Manifest Destiny.
The causes of the conflict originated with the tensions between the United States and Mexico over control of Texas.
The central issue of the Election of 1844 was the annexation of Texas as a national issue. Democratic candidate James K. Polk vowed to advance the cause of annexation plus a resolution to a border dispute with Great Britain in Oregon---which offered a benefit to northern and southern voters. By the Election of 1844, the Democratic Party emerged as the most expansion-focused and pro-slavery party when compared with the Whig Party.
The Democrats had a challenge in choosing a candidate and Polk turned out to be a “compromise candidate” and pushed John Tyler out of the running as a candidate.
In the general election in November 1844, James K. Polk defeated Whig candidate Henry Clay (KY.)
Before Polk’s inauguration in early 1845, outgoing President John Tyler saw the election of Polk as a mandate from voters that they wanted Texas annexed into the United States, so Tyler pushed the annexation through Congress before Polk took office.
With Congress’ approval, Texas entered the Union as the 15th slave state in early 1845. The issues related to the annexation reemerged as an important political division after the Mexican-American War and into the 1850s.
The Mexican government was incensed that the United States annexed Texas; however, President Polk and American expansionists had set their sights on acquiring the remainder of the northern Mexican provinces. Tensions between the United States and Mexico escalated as a result of the border dispute over the southern border of the new state of Texas. Mexico held that the border was the Nueces River and the United States said the southern border was the Rio Grande (the present-day border between Texas and Mexico.) which is 150 miles south of the Nueces River.
The border dispute and resulting skirmishes led to the Mexican-American War in 1846.
The war lasted until 1848 (and many of the military leaders on both sides in the Civil War gained combat experience in this war.)
View the presentation below and read this information on the Mexican-American War from Boundless. Links to an external site.
Wilmot Proviso
During the Mexican-American War, Congress again debated whether slavery would be allowed in New Mexico and California if these territories were acquired from Mexico. The antislavery position was outlined in a proposal called the Wilmot Proviso, but the House of Representatives failed to approve it and the issue of whether to allow or prohibit slavery in new states remained unresolved throughout the 1850s despite multiple attempts at resolution.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by Mexican government officials in 1848 and the treaty gave up Mexican claims to territory in Texas and Mexico agreed to sell California and New Mexico (known as the Mexican Cession) for $15 million. (The Mexican Cession now includes present-day California, Nevada and Utah plus parts of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona.)
California Gold Rush
Soon after the Mexican Cession, gold was discovered by John Sutter at Sutter’s Mill in northern California in 1848. The gold rush led to a massive population explosion in the area from all over the world---people who wanted to try their hand at gold mining to “get rich quick.” The population increased to 300,000 in the wake of the discovery of gold.
It soon became clear that the question of slavery in the newly acquired territories would be an important issue in the short term as President Taylor rushed to fast-track California’s statehood in order to control the territory and the valuable gold there.
California applied for statehood (bypassing the territory phase) in 1849 at the behest of President Taylor to both California and New Mexico. Both areas’ inhabitants were mostly anti-slavery. (New Mexico didn’t apply at the time, but California did apply to enter the United States as a free state after its state constitution was written.)
Gadsden Purchase
The last land acquisition and the completion of Manifest Destiny was the Gadsden Purchase which was not acquired from Mexico until 1853. This purchase added more land to the United States for possible use as a southern route for a transcontinental railroad in the future.
Compromise of 1850
During the 1840s, many members of Congress became increasingly concerned that the issue of slavery, especially its extension into new states, threatened the survival of the nation. Those who favored slavery and those who opposed slavery, therefore, agreed to five laws that addressed these concerns. Collectively, the five laws are known as the Compromise of 1850. This compromise stated:
Southern states objected to California’s admission to the Union as a free state because it upset the balance of power in Congress (and by extension the electoral college since the number of electoral college votes is determined by the number of representatives in Congress.)
Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky led the way in negotiating the Compromise of 1850, a series of laws enacted to solve the ongoing sectional conflicts over slavery.
The most important parts of the Compromise of 1850 were (1) the admission of California as a free state which was favorable for the Northern politicians and (2) a stricter Fugitive Slave Law which suited Southern lawmakers.
Other legislation included (3) allowing Utah and New Mexico to determine their own statuses as free or slave states based on popular sovereignty, (4) accepting a new boundary with Mexico and (5) abolishing the slave trade (but not slavery) in Washington, D. C.
Western expansion continued to cause conflicts with the indigenous people and the Mexican-Americans in the West.
As settlers moved west and the United States’ boundaries continued to move, violent conflicts erupted over control of the land. The “Indian wars” led to the ultimate defeat of the indigenous people by the 1870s as the United States government controlled increasing amounts of land in the western third of the continent. The conflicts caused important changes in the cultures and lifestyles of the groups involved in the conflicts on the front lines. As a consequence of the conflicts and encounters, questions arose about the legal status of the groups related to citizenship and rights.
The Elections of 1848 and 1852 and Popular Sovereignty
In the Election of 1848 both parties’ candidates, Whigs and Democrats, avoided the topic of slavery. Senator Lewis Cass ran on the Democratic ticket and he lost to Whig and Mexican-American War veteran and hero General Zachary Taylor. In response to the lack of stance from either party on the issue of slavery, anti-slavery members of the Whig and Democratic parties left and founded the Free-Soil Party in 1848.
Senator Lewis Cass (MI) proposed a compromise on the slavery issue in newly acquired territories—the concept of popular sovereignty.
(Popular sovereignty is the concept that the issue of slavery should be determined by the voters---remember—that's white men---living in a given territory.)
Northerners hope that the vote on slavery would happen early in the territory phase because they believed that the first settlers would be small farmers from the more densely populated North and would vote against slavery quickly. Southerners hoped the vote would occur later—just before the territory applied for statehood---to allow time for a slavery system to develop.
Cass considered popular sovereignty to be a “compromise;” but in fact, it angered Northern Democrats and some of them supported the Free-Soil candidate in the 1848 election.
Congress didn’t immediately rule on the idea of popular sovereignty, but it became an increasingly important issue in the 1850s.
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