By the 1830s, the market revolution and westward expansion had produced a society that amazed European visitors: energetic, materialistic, and seemingly in constant motion. Arriving in Chicago in 1835, the British writer Harriet Martineau found the streets “crowded with land speculators, hurrying from one sale to another.... As the gentlemen of our party walked the streets, store-keepers hailed them from their doors, with offers of farms, and all manner of land-lots, advising them to speculate before the price of land rose higher.” Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by Americans’ restless energy and apparent lack of attachment to place. “No sooner do you set foot on American soil,” he observed, “than you find yourself in a sort of tumult. All around you, everything is on the move.” Westward migration and urban development created a large mobile population no longer tied to local communities who sought to seize the opportunities offered by economic change. “In the United States,” wrote Tocqueville, “a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and [rents] it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops.”
Westward expansion and the market revolution profoundly affected the lives of all Americans. They reinforced some older ideas of freedom and helped to create new ones. American freedom, for example, had long been linked with the availability of land in the West. A New York journalist, John L. O’Sullivan, first employed the phrase “manifest destiny,” meaning that the United States had a divinely appointed mission, so obvious as to be beyond dispute, to occupy all of North America. Americans, he proclaimed, had a far better title to western lands than could be provided by any international treaty, right of discovery, or long-term settlement. Their right to the continent was provided by the nation’s mission to extend the area of freedom. Other peoples’ claims, O’Sullivan wrote, must give way to “our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment in liberty.” Those who stood in the way of expansion—European powers like Great Britain and Spain, Native Americans, Mexicans—were by definition obstacles to the progress of freedom.
O’Sullivan wrote these words in 1845, but the essential idea was familiar much earlier. As the population moved across the Appalachian Mountains, so did the linkage between westward expansion and freedom. “The Goddess of Liberty,” declared Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky, was not “governed by geographical limits.” A sense of spatial openness, of the constant opportunity to pick up and move when the pursuit of happiness seemed to demand it, became more and more a central component of American freedom. Like its predecessors, this generation of Americans believed that the United States had been selected by God for the greatest experiment in human history, the achievement of liberty, and that westward expansion was part and parcel of this destiny. Freedom in the United States, wrote the French historian Michel Chevalier, one of the many Europeans who visited the country in the 1830s, was a “practical idea” as much as a “mystical one”—it meant “a liberty of action and motion which the American uses to expand over the vast territory that Providence has given him and to subdue it to his uses.”
In national myth and ideology, the West would long remain, as the writer Wallace Stegner would later put it, “the last home of the freeborn American.” The settlement and economic exploitation of the West promised to prevent the United States from following down the path of Europe and becoming a society with fixed social classes and a large group of wage-earning poor. In the West, land was more readily available and oppressive factory labor far less common. With population and the price of land rising dramatically in the older states and young men’s prospects for acquiring a farm or setting up an independent artisan shop declining, the West still held out the chance to achieve economic independence, the social condition of freedom.
The daguerreotype, an early form of photography, required the sitter to remain perfectly still for twenty seconds or longer. The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, depicted here, did not like the result. He complained in his journal that in his “zeal not to blur the image,” every muscle had become “rigid” and his face was fixed in a frown as “in madness, or in death.”