What Phrase Did Slave Planters Like Thomas Jefferson Use to Justify Slavery in the Late 1700s?

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $fifteen 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 The states. To Jefferson, westward expansion was the fundamental to the nation'southward 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 pocket-sized farms. ("Those who labor in the earth," he wrote, "are the chosen people of God.") In order to provide enough country to sustain this ideal population of virtuous yeomen, the United States would accept to continue to expand. The west expansion of the United states is one of the defining themes of 19th-century American history, only it is not but the story of Jefferson's expanding "empire of liberty." On the contrary, equally one historian writes, in the six decades subsequently the Louisiana Buy, westward expansion "very nearly destroy[ed] the republic."

Manifest Destiny

Past 1840, well-nigh vii 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 Eastward in search of economic opportunity. Similar Thomas Jefferson, many of these pioneers associated due west migration, country ownership and farming with liberty. In Europe, large numbers of factory workers formed a dependent and seemingly permanent working course; by contrast, in the United States, the western borderland offered the possibility of independence and upwardly mobility for all. In 1843, one 1000 pioneers took to the Oregon Trail as part of the "Swell Emigration."

In 1845, a journalist named John O'Sullivan put a proper name to the idea that helped pull many pioneers toward the western frontier. Westward migration was an essential part of the republican project, he argued, and it was Americans' "manifest destiny" to conduct the "great experiment of liberty" to the border of the continent: to "overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given usa," O'Sullivan wrote. The survival of American freedom depended on it.

W Expansion and Slavery

Meanwhile, the question of whether or non slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every chat about the frontier. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had attempted to resolve this question: Information technology had admitted Missouri to the wedlock as a slave land and Maine as a free state, preserving the frail balance in Congress. More than important, it had stipulated that in the time to come, slavery would be prohibited north of the southern boundary of Missouri (the 36º30' parallel) in the residuum of the Louisiana Buy.

However, the Missouri Compromise did not apply to new territories that were not office of the Louisiana Buy, so the event of slavery connected to fester every bit the nation expanded. The Southern economy grew increasingly dependent on "King Cotton" and the system of forced labor that sustained it. Meanwhile, more than and more Northerners came to believed that the expansion of slavery impinged upon their own liberty, both as citizens–the pro-slavery majority in Congress did non seem to represent their interests–and as yeoman farmers. They did not necessarily object to slavery itself, but they resented the way its expansion seemed to interfere with their own economical opportunity.

Whorl to Proceed

Westward Expansion and the Mexican State of war

Despite this sectional disharmonize, Americans kept on migrating West in the years afterward the Missouri Compromise was adopted. Thousands of people crossed the Rockies to the Oregon Territory, which belonged to Swell United kingdom, and thousands more than 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. They petitioned to bring together the United States every bit a slave country.

This promised to upset the careful residue that the Missouri Compromise had achieved, and the looting of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political priority until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James One thousand. Polk was elected to the presidency in 1844. Cheers to the maneuvering of Polk and his allies, Texas joined the union as a slave state in February 1846; in June, later on negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state.

That same month, Polk declared war confronting Mexico, challenge (falsely) that the Mexican army had "invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil." The Mexican-American War proved to exist relatively unpopular, in part considering many Northerners objected to what they saw every bit a war to expand the "slaveocracy." In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot attached a proviso to a war-appropriations nib declaring that slavery should not be permitted in any part of the Mexican territory that the U.S. might acquire. Wilmot'due south measure failed to pass, but it fabricated explicit once again the sectional disharmonize that haunted the process of westward expansion.

Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than one million foursquare miles, an surface area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States. The acquisition of this land re-opened the question that the Missouri Compromise had ostensibly settled: What would exist the status of slavery in new American territories? After two years of increasingly volatile debate over the issue, Kentucky Senator Henry Dirt proposed another compromise. Information technology had 4 parts: starting time, California would enter the Spousal relationship equally a costless state; second, the status of slavery in the remainder of the Mexican territory would be decided by the people who lived at that place; third, the slave merchandise (but not slavery) would be abolished in Washington, D.C.; and fourth, a new Fugitive Slave Act would enable Southerners to reclaim runaway slaves who had escaped to Northern states where slavery was not allowed.

Bleeding Kansas

But the larger question remained unanswered. In 1854, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed that two new states, Kansas and Nebraska, exist established in the Louisiana Purchase west of Iowa and Missouri. According to the terms of the Missouri Compromise, both new states would prohibit slavery because both were north of the 36º30' parallel. However, since no Southern legislator would approve a plan that would give more ability to "free-soil" Northerners, Douglas came up with a middle ground that he called "pop sovereignty": letting the settlers of the territories determine for themselves whether their states would exist slave or gratuitous.

Northerners were outraged: Douglas, in their view, had caved to the demands of the "slaveocracy" at their expense. The battle for Kansas and Nebraska became a battle for the soul of the nation. Emigrants from Northern and Southern states tried to influence the vote. For example, thousands of Missourians flooded into Kansas in 1854 and 1855 to vote (fraudulently) in favor of slavery. "Free-soil" settlers established a rival government, and presently Kansas spiraled into civil war. Hundreds of people died in the fighting that ensued, known as "Bleeding Kansas."

A decade later, the civil war in Kansas over the expansion of slavery was followed by a national civil war over the same upshot. Equally Thomas Jefferson had predicted, it was the question of slavery in the Due west–a place that seemed to be the emblem of American freedom–that proved to be "the knell of the union."

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Source: https://www.history.com/topics/westward-expansion/westward-expansion

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