33 The expansion of the USA

When the American colonies declared their independence in 1776, the embryonic United States of America comprised just thirteen states strung along the eastern seaboard—a small fraction of the continent of North America. By 1900 the country extended from the Atlantic in the east to the Caribbean in the the south and the Pacific in the west.

By this date the USA had also established itself as the dominant power in the western hemisphere, and had acquired an overseas empire. It had also turned into the industrial giant that was to emerge as the leading superpower of the 20th century.

The territorial expansion of the USA was partly driven by massive immigration: between 1820 and 1900 the population increased eightfold, to 76 million, with wave after wave coming from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Italy and eastern Europe. There were also economic factors: the West contained rich resources, from land suitable for cattle or wheat or fruit, to gold and furs and timber. But there was also a powerful ideological element. This was the idea of US “exceptionalism,” the belief that God had inspired the early settlers—such as the Pilgrim Fathers—to come to America, that the USA was formed (in the words of the pledge of allegiance) as “one nation under God,” and that it was part of God’s plan that the USA should extend its sway “from sea to shining sea.” In 1845 the journalist and diplomat John L. O’Sullivan famously summarized the idea when he spoke of “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” As the torch-bearer of liberty, the USA had not so much a right as a divinely ordained duty to spread its light across the land.

Colonial encroachment When the Europeans first arrived in North America, the continent was inhabited by a great diversity of Native American peoples, with an array of different languages and different cultures. In the forests of the northeast were hunter-gatherers, in the Mississippi basin maize farmers, on the Great Plains nomadic buffalo hunters, in the semi-deserts of the southwest pueblo farmers, while in the Pacific northwest the people thrived on the abundance of the seas and rivers.

At first, the native peoples guardedly welcomed their contacts with the Europeans, from whom they could acquire such desirable items as guns and iron tools. But contact with the Europeans also brought diseases to which the Native Americans had no immunity. As the population of European settlers grew, there was an increasing hunger for land, leading to encroachments on traditional tribal territories, conflict, and dispossession. For many decades in the 18th century, the Iroquois Confederacy of the northeast successfully resisted the European advance, through a combination of war and diplomacy, exploiting the rivalries between the British and French, and then the enmity between the colonists and the mother country during the struggle for independence.

“Many, if not most, of our Indian wars have had their origin in broken promises and acts of injustice upon our part.”

President Rutherford B. Hayes, Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1877

“Westward the course of empire takes its way” This famous line by the Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, penned in 1752, proved to be prophetic. With the achievement of US nationhood, the much resented ban on settlement west of the Appalachians imposed by the British in 1763 was nullified. The British had rightly calculated that any such drift westward would lead to more wars with the indigenous peoples, and they did not wish to end up bearing the cost. With this barrier lifted, settlers surged over the Appalachians, laying claim to Native American lands, and by the end of the 18th century two new states had been admitted to the Union: Kentucky and Tennessee.

The Treaty of Paris of 1783, by which Britain recognized the independence of the USA, set the new country’s western boundary at the Mississippi, beyond which lay the French territory of Louisiana—a territory vastly larger than the present state of that name, stretching as it did from British Canada to the Caribbean. The treaty also set the USA’s southern boundary at the thirty-first parallel, the northern frontier of the Spanish territory of Florida. The USA doubled in size when in 1803 President Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from the French for $15 million; by a further treaty in 1819 the USA acquired Florida from Spain. Texas, which had largely been settled by Anglo-Americans, fought a war of independence from Mexico in 1836, and in 1845 was annexed by the USA as the twenty-eighth state. This sparked a war with Mexico. The American victory in that war in 1848 led to further annexations of Mexican territory—California, and all or part of the present states of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. The USA had a number of border disputes with British Canada, especially in the Pacific northwest, but these were finally resolved in 1846, when the USA acquired what are now the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867, and Hawaii—which became the fiftieth state of the Union in 1959—was annexed in 1898.

The federal government encouraged westward migration by selling off parcels of land at bargain-basement prices—or even, after the Homestead Act of 1862, for nothing. Settlement and commerce were supported by a network of canals linking the great rivers, and later by the railroads; the first transcontinental line was completed in 1869. Here too the government played a role, making substantial loans and land grants to the railroad companies. This westward expansion was not free from trauma, however. The question as to whether slavery should be allowed in these new territories was one of the contributory factors in the outbreak of the American Civil War (see The American Civil War). And the vicious and perfidious treatment meted out to the native inhabitants of these lands was one of the great tragedies of the 19th century.

The fate of the Native Americans

The relentless land hunger of the 19th century witnessed a rapid deterioration in the situation of the Native Americans. The “Five Civilized Nations” of the southeast—the Creek, the Cherokee, the Seminole, the Choctaw and the Chicasaw—had developed their own constitution based on that of the USA. Some even owned plantations, with black slaves to work them. But in the 1830s they were evicted from their lands by the US government, and forced to relocate to the west of the Mississippi. The advance of the white man was relentless, and conflict was inevitable—as was the outcome. By 1900 many Native Americans were confined to reservations, far from their ancestral lands, their rich cultural heritage a subject of contempt or touristic curiosity.

the condensed idea

The spectacular growth of the USA was often at the expense of its indigenous inhabitants