By the 1873 Treaty of Paris, the boundaries of the new nation had been set. The Constitution of four years later coincided with the end of a serious post-Revolutionary economic depression; a vigorous economic and political life characterized the decade. Equally energetic, settlers moved over the plains and prairies and rolling foothills to the Rockies and the legendary Pacific Ocean, and greatly extended the territories of the United States.

U. S. President, Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, described the country as “a rising nation, spread over a wide and fertile land, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” The third U. S. President was certainly accurate. If the United States was born along the Eastern Seaboard, it grew up moving West, cheap farmland being the chief lure. The first census in 1790 counted less than four million people; the 1820 census, six years before Jefferson’s death, counted ten million—as restless Americans pushed rapidly over the Appalachian Mountains. When Jefferson spoke, in 1801, the nation was limited to 900,000 square miles of combined area; within three years, he had increased the country’s area to 1,700,000 square miles with the purchase of Louisiana, which came after the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, one of the most enlightened measures in our history, and after 1791, the year Vermont entered the Union. With President Jefferson’s encouragement, explorers went out and across the Rockies, and within the lifetime of many people who had known Jefferson in their youth, the county’s size doubled again with the addition of Texas, Florida, California, Oregon, and Alaska. Thus, within fifty years of Jefferson’s death, the United States had become, second only to Russia, the largest nation on the planet.

This breathtaking acquisition of new lands had a profound impact upon the national character. It was not simply a frontier boundary line, the West became a social process. It bred a spirit of local self-determination coupled with respect for national government. It helped shape the nation’s identity, though the states carved out of the territories took on the governing structure off the settled states “back East.” Improbably, the addition of Western territories, peoples, and government produced nationalistic rather than divisive impulses. Yet the West was also the venue for bitterly divisive conflict over the extension of slavery. Witness, for example, the opposition of Missouri’s admission as a slave state, which threatened to destroy the delicate balance of power between the two sections. The controversy was
“like a fire bell in the night,” Jefferson declared. “It awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” Compromise hushed the fire bell, but he knew it was “a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”

Though the West spawned a spread-eagle nationalism, the result was, paradoxically, a greater pluralism than in the past, a heterogeneity reflected in language, politics, and social life. Individual liberty and toleration was a function of this openness unlike two centuries earlier when, with a few exceptions like Pennsylvania, an open society was dotted with closed enclaves. The Europeans who had come to America’s shores in the 1600s were deeply familiar with the denial of religious freedom in the homeland; the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights was the product of this legacy. It not only prohibited the Government from taking actions favoring one religion over another, it forbid assistance to any religion. The Northwest Ordinance and the 1819 treaty with Spain were among a host of documents that reflected this legacy.

The variables in regional culture, politics, and society also had a down-side, which became more pronounced in the 1820s than it had forty years earlier. Northern and Southern sections developed distinctly different social and economic features, each hoping for increased support from the rapidly growing trans-Appalachian West. One section was plantation, the other farm; one was slave labor, the other free; one produced a landed aristocracy, the other lawyers and entrepreneurs; one grew increasingly conservative and fearful of change in the status quo, the other generated widespread social reforms, strange cults, and a great religious revival. The Northeast was undergoing constant and profound change owing to industrialization, urbanization, and, accompanying them, the rise of a wage-earning labor force. The emergence of this labor force produced deep fissures not only between the sections but within them as well. To the urban North came unskilled Irish Protestant labor and then, after 1846,
the overwhelmingly-Catholic famine Irish, who triggered a Protestant nativist crusade against the Catholic newcomers. It warned of a Papist conspiracy and urged immigrant restrictionism. A rough parallel would appear a half century later, especially on the West coast, with the arrival of Chinese labor, who, it was feared, would not only take the jobs of Anglo-Saxon Protestants but also result in racial pollution.

And in yet another, even more profound example of the dark side of American history there was the fact of slavery, which also prompted anxieties about the mongrelization of the pure stock. The slave system, however, did more. Among other things, it produced a large defensive literature that radicalized human bondage by testifying to the inferiority of blacks and by affirming that God, nature, and history destined blacks to be slaves. An extensive set of measures buttressed these claims. They would restrict the slaves’ freedom, frustrate their efforts to become free men, and hedge in control a potentially dangerous but immensely important workforce. The struggle over slavery became entangled with controversy raised by westward expansion. It was more than a conflict between very different sectional social and economic interests. There was a profound moral issue. Slavery itself gave the lie to the contention that men were all born equal, that they were equal in the eyes of God and equal before the law. In sum, growing toleration could take the form of majoritarian tolerance of racism and oppression—in both North and South—resulting in a passionate moral struggle that threatened the American Union.

Now You Know More About What Really Happened……….