4

Geographic and Economic Expansion

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . . The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seeds according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit. . . . And God saw that it was good.” So reads Genesis 1:1, 12. Religious or not, Americans accepted and understood the sentiment: the land provided sustenance and security. Both objectives were fundamental for the millions of families who earned their keep by tilling the soil. Commercially minded residents of North America saw the value of the land in terms of investment and speculation—buying a choice piece of real estate and selling it for a profit when demand rose. Land was the lingua franca of the American economy in the early decades of the new republic.

Political leaders recognized the power of this fundamental element of preindustrial life. Yet some saw the land from a broader perspective. To Jefferson, the settlement of new lands promoted an “empire of liberty,” where property ownership formed the political bedrock of the republic. John Adams used the same phrase in 1786 when he envisioned a nation of “two or three hundred millions of freemen” living in a nation without noblemen or a king. In his first inaugural address in 1801 Jefferson saw “a rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land,” whose republican form of government was “the world’s best hope” to keep Americans free. Later that year he concurred with European onlookers that Americans would spread westward beyond the Mississippi River, observing that “it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms and by similar laws.”¹

The Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which doubled the size of the United States, planted the seeds of the idea that the country would eventually span the continent. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who negotiated the 1819 treaty with Spain that gave the United States a toehold on the Pacific, told the cabinet that the world “should be familiarized with the idea of considering our proper dominion to be the continent of North America.” Over the next quarter of a century the possibility that the United States would extend from sea to sea gained believers and advocates. The most famous to popularize this vision was John L. O’Sullivan, a magazine editor who wrote in 1845 that it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent.” If political and cultural factors were not enough to bring about “the inevitable fulfillment of the general law which is rolling our population westward,” Sullivan noted, “the projected railroad across the continent to the Pacific” and “the magnetic telegraph” provided additional inducements. A generation later President Abraham Lincoln predicted in 1862 that the “abundant room, our broad national homestead,” could support a population as large as that of Europe by the 1920s. The map confirmed, he observed, that the “great interior” of the country “is naturally one of the most important in the world.”²

The lure of the land was intimately linked to visions of a continental nation that extended America westward from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast. Some advocates looked north and south as well, eyeing Canada and Spanish territory from Mexico to the Isthmus of Panama. American leaders and writers frequently referred to territory that came under American control as an “empire.”³ Though they seldom clarified their use of the term, several assumptions about its meaning seem reasonable. Few Americans used the expression to refer to a dominion similar to the British Empire, which encompassed subservient colonies in distant lands, or the Roman Empire, which incorporated conquered peoples into the state. The term did connote an entity that occupied a huge area and was composed of distinct parts (states) of equal political standing. The root principle of these governing entities was republicanism, whereby the government derived authority from the consent of its citizens. This principle was apparent in 1845 when President James Polk used his inaugural address to praise the Americans who had trekked overland to Oregon, where they “engaged in establishing the blessings of self government in valleys of which the rivers flow to the Pacific.”⁴ Presidents echoed this theme repeatedly in the antebellum era: Americans were spreading “liberty” over the North American continent.⁵

What they failed to acknowledge was that American expansion brought numerous peoples under the jurisdiction of the United States without their consent. This incorporation, beginning with the territory gained from the 1783 treaty, included Native Americans, Africans, Mexicans, Spaniards, French, and others of mixed national backgrounds. The country’s cultural establishment insisted that eligible newcomers adopt the norms of a society fashioned largely by white Protestants of British and northern European ancestry. Most Africans remained slaves; Native Americans were relegated to the perimeters of their nation. Geographer D. W. Meinig regards this coerced incorporation and segmentation of status as imperialism, a condition that most Americans denied or failed to see.⁶ The contradiction between republican ideology and the imposition of American institutions on acquired territories and peoples—that is, the juxtaposition between an “empire of liberty” and imperialism—is a central paradox of American statebuilding.

Between 1803 and 1854 the United States added more than 200 million square miles of territory, which tripled its size and established a national domain that spanned the North American continent. This acquisition satisfied the territorial prerequisite for building an influential state. Even before the purchase of Alaska in 1867, the United States possessed the fourth largest land base among the countries of the world, and this land drew millions of migrants. Immigration and a high birthrate in the young nation swelled its population, so that by 1870 America counted more people than any European country. Between 1789 and 1860 Americans grew more prosperous, ranking behind only Great Britain and perhaps the Netherlands in per capita wealth. Within the span of a single lifetime, the United States had grown into a large and, by world standards, wealthy state.⁷

This extraordinary record raises the question of whether political leaders followed an explicit script for building the American state. The answer is no. There was no officially sanctioned master plan that set a clear course for assembling a continental state. The history of American statebuilding lies in the interplay of contingent events, contextual developments, and a set of widely shared assumptions about society and civic affairs. Europe offered contemporary examples of states whose viability rested on territorial sovereignty, tax authority, and established militaries. The American version of Old World political science was republicanism, whereby the government’s authority rested on the consent of its citizens. A second shared element was the importance of land to citizenship and community welfare. A third principle was the protection of the homeland from foreign threats, which, in the antebellum years, consisted of Great Britain, France, and, to a lesser degree, Spain, all of which retained imperial aspirations in North America. American politics generated crosswinds at each step of this history. Regional jealousies and slavery in particular played critical roles in these conflicts.⁸ American expansion was neither inevitable nor universally embraced. Territorial expansion was contested, divisive, and decidedly situational.⁹

LOUISIANA AND FLORIDA

The acquisition of territory west of the Mississippi River began with the famed Louisiana Purchase of 1803, a transaction that extended American lands into the broad middle section of the continent. Control of this geography had long interested eighteenth-century leaders, including Thomas Jefferson. The context of the acquisition was a steady procession of settlers into the trans-Appalachian West. George Washington noted this westerly migration, writing in 1784 that “the spirit of emigration is great.”¹⁰ In the next twenty years the upper Ohio region and the Tennessee River valley filled with thousands of inhabitants, enabling Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio to enter the union as new states by 1803 (see table 4.1). The Mississippi River was key to the livelihood of these transplants, who sent agricultural commodities down the tributaries of the mighty Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.

Table 4.1. Statehood, 1776–1861

Original	North	South	Trans-Midwest	Mississippi	Far West
CT	VT (1791)	TN (1796)	OH (1803)	KY (1792)	CA (1850)
DE	ME (1820)	MS (1817)	IN (1816)	LA (1821)	OR (1859)
GA		AL (1819)	IL (1818)	AR (1836)	KS (1861)
MA		FL (1845)	MI (1837)	TX (1845)
MD			WI (1848)	IA (1846)
NC (1789)				MN (1858)
NH
NJ
NY
PA
RI (1790)
SC
VA

Spain controlled New Orleans, which it occasionally closed, despite a 1795 treaty that granted Americans access to it. Equally alarming, President Jefferson pondered the rumor that France, under the control of the ambitious military leader Napoleon Bonaparte, had secured control of New Orleans and the Louisiana territory in a secret deal with Spain. The prospect of France jeopardizing the livelihood of Americans in the trans-Appalachian region worried the president. He instructed American envoys Robert Livingston and James Monroe to attempt to purchase the “isle of New Orleans,” which lay on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. To the Americans’ surprise, the French offered to sell their entire domain, which extended to the Rocky Mountains. A slave revolution in Haiti had devastated the French army, persuading Napoleon to abandon plans to reestablish a colonial domain in North America. A fortuitous turn of events thus enabled the Americans to purchase a huge parcel of land for a mere $15 million (excluding later purchases from Native American inhabitants).¹¹

The Louisiana prize had immense importance to American statebuilding. As Napoleon mused, “This accession of territory consolidates the power of the United States forever.” Despite the hyperbole, the prediction was perceptive. Once the United States was in possession of the center of the continent, the projection of American control to the Pacific seemed feasible, if not likely. Some American interpretations of the Louisiana Purchase had it running all the way to the western coastline. Exactly what territory had been obtained was unclear in 1803, as no reliable maps existed. This informational void had long piqued Jefferson’s curiosity, certainly out of scientific interest but perhaps political motives as well. Even before signing the purchase agreement, the president had secretly secured funds for an exploration across the continent to the Pacific. The expedition was commanded by Meriwether Lewis, the president’s private secretary, and William Clark. They left St. Louis in the spring of 1804, journeyed up the Missouri River to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, crossed this barrier on foot, and followed the Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia Rivers to the Pacific coast, which they reached in November 1805. Lewis reported to Jefferson upon his return to St. Louis in September 1806 that no continuous water route to the Pacific existed but that overland trade was possible. Equally important for American statebuilding, the explorers had established an American claim to the Oregon country.¹²

The Louisiana Purchase eliminated the likelihood of a French return to North America. Spain was a weakening state and put up little resistance to American annexations of parts of eastern Florida (1810 and 1812), a strip that extended eastward along the Gulf coast to Pensacola. Americans claimed the region had been included in the Louisiana Purchase. These developments left Britain as the only European power that could block Americans’ territorial advances. Britain’s chief foreign concern in the first decade of the nineteenth century, however, was not the United States but France, led by the aggressive Napoleon, who had conquered much of Europe. The two European powerhouses became locked in a maritime conflict, each seeking to block trade with its rival. The United States, which had a thriving commerce with Europe, was caught in the middle, as both regimes seized and impounded ships of neutral countries. The Americans’ grievance against Britain was accentuated by the practice of impressment, whereby American ships were raided on the pretext that they harbored British deserters (sometimes true), who were then forced into the Royal Navy. Americans denounced the practice as akin to slavery. This anger was exacerbated by the British failure to relinquish forts along the Canadian border, from which the Crown purportedly prodded Native Americans to resist the incursion of settlers into the upper Mississippi valley. Failure to resolve these disputes by diplomatic channels opened the way for Congress to declare war on Great Britain in June 1812.

The Americans escaped defeat in the War of 1812 by putting up enough resistance to hold off the British, who were preoccupied with their campaign against Napoleon. Lacking a navy capable of confronting the British fleet, Americans attacked the English at the most convenient location—in Canada, which some lawmakers hoped to pry away from Britain. Congress rejected the annexation of Canada, and the Americans failed to defeat British forces there. However, small-scale yet strategically important American naval victories on Lake Champlain and Lake Erie removed the British invasion threat from the north. The last major battle of the war, in which the Americans under Andrew Jackson repelled a British invasion force in New Orleans, took place after the two countries had drafted a peace settlement. News traveled slowly in the preindustrial age.

Although not a victory in a military sense, the War of 1812 had significant ramifications for American statebuilding. The war blunted British capacity to block American incursion into the Great Lakes region, in part by fracturing English ties with Native Americans. Jackson’s victory at New Orleans eliminated the possibility that Britain could parlay military success in the Gulf region into an opportunity to reclaim territory in the American heartland. New Englanders, many of whom opposed the war and contributed minimally to it, denounced aspirations to incorporate Canada into the union. The region suffered politically for its unpatriotic posture. Elsewhere in the nation, however, defiance against the world’s premier imperial power released a surge of nationalistic pride and allowed Americans to resume their quest for western land.

American pride in standing up to Britain probably mellowed the criticism of Andrew Jackson’s invasion of the Florida peninsula in 1818. The general’s justification was the pursuit of hostile Seminole Indians and fugitive slaves who used Spanish territory as a base for harassing American settlements. American officials denied giving Jackson the authority to attack, but the geopolitical effect of the raid on Spanish territory was clear. Spain was unable to prevent American encroachment; the territorial consequence of this weakness was the cession of Florida to the United States in 1819, with the Americans paying a small sum to sweeten the deal. Negotiated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the treaty also established a southern boundary to the Louisiana Purchase; the United States conceded the Texas region to Spain in exchange for a border that extended northwest to Wyoming and then west to the Pacific Ocean (see figures 4.1 and 4.2). This pact gave the United States clear title to acreage on the northwest coast. Thirty years after American independence, the United States could claim that it had become a continental state.

Figure 4.1. Map of expansion, 1820. Source: Randall D. Sale and Edwin D. Karn, American Expansion: A Book of Maps (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1962), 9.

Figure 4.2. Map of expansion, 1860. Source: Randall D. Sale and Edwin D. Karn, American Expansion: A Book of Maps (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1962), 17.

ROUTE TO THE PACIFIC

American understanding of the Pacific area had evolved since the 1780s and Captain Robert Gray’s penetration of the Columbia River, which he named. In the early 1800s Yankee traders plied the California coast, and John Jacob Astor briefly established a fur trading post at the mouth of the Columbia River. The 1819 treaty with Spain further piqued American interest in the region, especially in California, which possessed a small European population of mainly Spanish descent. The posting of an American consul in Hawaii and the stationing of a US naval presence in the Pacific in the 1820s signaled the emerging attraction of the Pacific basin. Its trade potential increased with the Treaty of Wangxia in 1844, which opened several Chinese ports to Americans.

Meanwhile, fur traders from St. Louis pushed up the Missouri River into the Dakotas and Montana, sponsoring trappers who roamed the streams and “holes” (valleys) of the Rocky Mountains in search of animal pelts. A by-product of their hunting was increased geographic knowledge of the “Stony Mountains,” including Jedidiah Smith’s discovery of South Pass in 1824, which offered a wagon route through the mountainous terrain. Cartographer John Melish projected early insights from these explorations onto his 1816 map, which was the first to show American territory reaching to the Pacific. Two years later the British and Americans negotiated a northern boundary for Canada along the forty-ninth parallel that reached from the Great Lakes to the Stony Mountains, and they agreed to jointly occupy the Oregon region in the Pacific Northwest.¹³

This boundary extension gave mapmakers another reason to update their gazetteers and geographies, which were popular in the antebellum era. New information about the West came from various sources, including explorers for the US Army, who mapped portions of the West and recorded observations about its topography and resources. The navy sent Lieutenant Charles Wilkes on a scientific reconnaissance of the Pacific, with stops in San Francisco, Oregon, and Puget Sound. In 1841 a trail was blazed from the Rockies to California. Two years later a “great migration” of settlers journeyed overland to the Willamette River valley in Oregon. Transportation innovations stimulated subsequent migrations. By the 1830s and 1840s steamboats were plying the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Wisconsin and up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh, as well as traveling into the western interior via the Missouri River and around the upper Great Lakes. At the end of the 1840s steamships rounded Cape Horn on coast-to-coast journeys.¹⁴

In the 1830s, when the first American railroads became operational, farsighted prognosticators predicted the construction of a transcontinental rail connection. Congress received a formal proposal for such a route in 1844, but the idea was too visionary for lawmakers at the time, partly because California was not yet officially part of the union. The idea of an east-west rail route had been planted, however, and it remained on the agenda for the next twenty years until the federal government helped fund the project in 1864. The telegraph, in contrast, achieved a cross-continental connection in 1861, just seventeen years after its successful demonstration. These technological developments, coupled with explorations by trappers, army surveyors, and naturalists and the schemes of those who advocated settlement on the Pacific coast, fed the notion that the United States was “destined” to spread over the entire continent. The presumption that the country’s “natural” boundaries stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific was accepted by many Americans—and foreign observers—by the mid-1840s.¹⁵

OREGON, TEXAS, AND CALIFORNIA

In 1821 residents of Mexico won their independence from Spain. This transition replaced a declining Old World power with an even weaker state on the southern border of the United States. Mexico possessed a huge territorial expanse that stretched from the Yucatan peninsula to western North America up to the forty-second parallel, but it had little capacity to manage this domain, most of which had scant or no fixed settlements. To develop its northern sector and create a buffer along its southern border, Mexico continued the Spanish policy of inviting settlers from the United States into its province of Texas. In exchange for generous land grants, immigrants agreed to become Mexican citizens, accept Catholicism, and relinquish their slaves. But when Mexico attempted to enforce these requirements, tensions escalated. Texans mounted an armed rebellion, defeated Mexican general and dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, declared their independence in 1836, and then requested annexation to the United States. President Andrew Jackson turned them down, wishing to sidestep a confrontation with Mexico, which did not recognize Texas sovereignty, and to avoid a conflict over adding another slave state to the union during a presidential election year. Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s successor and an antislavery northerner, followed suit. Texans then played a waiting game, talking to British agents who saw an independent Texas as a buffer against American expansion across the continent.¹⁶

The election of 1844 brought the impasse over Texas to a head. Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Whig Party’s candidate for president, needed to attract antislavery voters in the North and opposed the admission of Texas. Congressman James Polk from Tennessee, the Democrats’ presidential candidate, embraced his party’s advocacy of the “reoccupation of Oregon and the reannexation of Texas.” Polk won a razor-thin election, partly by capturing New York, where the antislavery Liberty Party siphoned votes from Clay.¹⁷ Between the election and Polk’s inauguration, President John Tyler supported a resolution in Congress to invite Texas to join the union. The resolution narrowly passed, and Texas became the twenty-eighth state in 1845, the last that legalized slavery.

With Texas in the union, Polk turned his attention to Oregon. Taking a confrontational position with Britain over the jointly held region, the president claimed that America had rights to territory well above the forty-ninth parallel. Unwilling to risk war over the dispute, he crafted an amicable settlement with the British that extended the forty-ninth parallel to the Pacific shore, a deal that attached a majority of the Oregon territory to the United States.¹⁸

Polk’s larger objective was Mexican territory that lay between Texas and the Pacific. In the mid-1840s expansionists pointed to California as the key to forming a genuine continental nation. The harbor at San Francisco, among the finest on the West Coast, had already attracted numerous Americans. Polk’s motivation for supporting western expansion remains obscure, but his willingness to ride the political wave of expansionism, which centered on Democrats, was probably a key factor in his decision.¹⁹ His public statements suggest that he agreed with the widely accepted conviction that establishing American institutions in new lands brought the gifts of self-government and liberty to local residents. Many Americans, perhaps the majority, had little regard for the Spanish speakers and Native Americans who inhabited this borderland region. Initially Polk tried to buy California and northern Mexico. When Mexico rejected the offer, the president asserted that territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande in Texas was American ground. He ordered General Zachary Taylor to move US troops into the contested zone and positioned the navy near Mexican cities along the Gulf and Pacific coasts. Viewing these maneuvers as acts of war, Mexico ordered its army to repel Americans who crossed the Nueces River. When several Americans were killed in the region, Polk claimed that Mexico had attacked the United States on American soil. His war resolution sailed through Congress in May 1846. Despite misgivings in the North about a war that could expand slavery, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, interpreted Congress’s decision “as a normal public response to an attack on the flag.”²⁰

The president expected a brief war that would end with the defeat of Mexican forces in northern Mexico and California. Marching from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Colonel Stephen Kearney and American troops occupied Santa Fe and then headed to California to link with the navy, which had already claimed San Francisco and Monterey for the United States. Lieutenant John C. Fremont, who trekked over the Rocky Mountains with a small band of army scouts ostensibly on an exploring mission, helped Americans in San Francisco renounce their fealty to Mexico. Then Fremont, Kearney, and Commodore Robert Stockton combined to pacify resistance in Los Angeles.

The daring resolve of Santa Anna, the exiled Mexican military leader with many political lives, surprised Polk. The Mexican general regrouped his army, prompting the president to order an American assault on Mexico City, located in the heart of the country. He gave the assignment to General Winfield Scott, who orchestrated an amphibious landing near Veracruz and then pushed overland on a six-month campaign to occupy Mexico City. The victory over Mexico was an extraordinary feat in view of the challenging logistics—thousands of miles of supply lines—the inexperienced troops, and the turnover of militia units in the midst of the campaign. A small force (barely 7,500 men at any one time) pulled off a stunning achievement, with immense consequences for American statebuilding.

Opposition to the war grew as Polk’s territorial ambitions became clear. Northern members of Congress proposed an amendment to a military bill that would have prohibited the creation of any pro-slavery state on land seized from Mexico. The measure failed in several sessions, as the American victory over Mexico generated nationalist sentiment.²¹ Confronting an American occupation of their capital city, and with the scope of Polk’s territorial quest unclear, Mexican negotiators made the best of a bad deal. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) confirmed US possession of Texas, with a border on the Rio Grande, as well as lands from Texas west to the Pacific and up to the Oregon border, including California. This Mexican cession expanded the United States by 30 percent (counting Texas) and included San Francisco, the “jewel” of the Pacific. The addition of the Oregon territory increased the size of the United States by nearly 10 percent. Polk had wanted to grab more of Mexico, but he nevertheless left an indelible mark on American expansion.

One wonders what would have happened if the Mexican War or negotiations over its settlement had dragged on for several more months, as gold was discovered in California in January 1848. News of the strike reached the East Coast in September, and by the end of the year the gold rush was on, bringing migrants to California from around the world. The territory’s non-Indian population catapulted from a few thousand in 1846 to 100,000 in 1850, a total sufficient for statehood.

Two additional pieces of territory rounded out the continental dimensions of the United States. The 1853 Gadsden Purchase involved Mexican land acquired for a railroad route south of the Rockies. The size of this acquisition paled in comparison with Alaska, purchased from the Russians in 1867. Russia saw little of value in Alaska, while Secretary of State William Seward worried that Britain might see Alaska as an opportunity to expand its empire. Few Americans went north to “Seward’s folly” in the nineteenth century, but millions were streaming into the West. Meinig called the rapidity and scale of this migration “unprecedented in world history.”²²

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

Territories added to the United States between 1783 and 1867 incorporated perhaps a million or more indigenous peoples.²³ More than a hundred native groupings (tribes or nations) existed, most with a distinct culture and language as well as traditional residential locales. Some groups were relatively sedentary, while others were migratory, but nearly all were folded into the American jurisdiction. Euro-Americans viewed these “savage” tribes as unfit for amalgamation into American society. But Americans coveted their lands, frequently occupying them prior to obtaining treaty concessions from the native inhabitants. These encroachments regularly sparked resistance, which produced an endless series of Indian wars with white settlers, frontier militia, and army regulars. Military pacification of the natives sometimes employed a scorched-earth policy, destroying homes and crops and sparing no tribal members, including women and children. Some Indians voluntarily moved out of the way of oncoming whites. Groups that suffered military defeat were forcefully moved to new locations on American territory but were denied citizenship. Wherever they were located, the Supreme Court designated them “domestic dependent nations” subject to the legal jurisdiction of the United States.

The innumerable battles with Indians and the hundreds of treaties between the US government and scores of tribes illustrate the piecemeal pattern of US relations with Native Americans. Most of the combat occurred among small groups on the frontier, with sketchy documentation existing about these engagements. But the broad picture of native-white relations can be summarized in three sequential processes: pacification of native belligerence, removal of Indians from the path of white settlement, and attempts to “civilize” Native Americans. Some scholars see this history as tantamount to ethnic cleansing.²⁴

Warfare between natives and whites began soon after European settlement in North America. The French and Indian War and the American Revolution included fighting against Indians allied with the French and the British. Following independence, attention turned to the Ohio River valley, where Americans defeated Indians at Fallen Timbers (1794) near Lake Erie and at Tippecanoe (1811) in northern Indiana. In the Black Hawk War (1832) the US Army and local militiamen chased the Sauk peoples from Illinois into Wisconsin, which removed the Indian threat from the upper Midwest. In the South Andrew Jackson first won fame for his devastation of the Creek nation (1813–1814), an encounter in which his men took no prisoners. Members of the Seminole nation fled to Florida, where they fought US Army regulars for nearly a decade (1835–1840s). By the end of the 1840s Indian resistance had ended east of the Mississippi River.

Indians were excellent fighters, adept at guerrilla tactics, and greatly feared by frontier settlers. But Native American resistance to white incursion was futile in the long run, for reasons that are central to the rise of powerful national states. First, Indians lacked organizational coordination on a scale equal to that of Euro-Americans. Some native confederations existed, but Indians did not formally codify their intergovernmental structures. Americans, in contrast, institutionalized their control over coercive force at all three levels of government. Militias existed in every colony, and American independence gave birth to a permanent national army that was small, to be sure, but controlled by a central administration. Revenue-raising laws were adopted at every level of government, and central authorities maintained arms manufacturing facilities. Historians are correct when they note the small scale of the American military in the antebellum period, but the US Army and state militias were not designed to confront large, well-organized opponents such as the major European states. The primary American military mission was to quell Indian belligerency.

Second, the Indians were outnumbered. Almost from the onset of European colonization, Indian populations were smaller than those of neighboring Europeans. This discrepancy grew greater over time. The population of the United States increased ninefold from 1783 to 1860, while the Indian population declined due to military defeats and disease. Indians lacked immunity to “European” diseases, and countless numbers died of diseases introduced by white settlers, such as the smallpox epidemic on the western frontier in 1837.

Last, Euro-Americans possessed superior technologies. Initially this advantage consisted chiefly of firearms. Indians eventually acquired guns, but virtually all of them came from trade with Europeans. By the early nineteenth century transportation and communication innovations such as steamboats, railroads, and the telegraph provided Americans with a logistical advantage. The invention of the Gatling gun in the 1860s, a weapon that could fire 200 rounds a minute, symbolized this widening technological gulf.

After the Revolution the sentiment that whites could not coexist with Indians crystallized. The solution was to force natives to relinquish their traditional habitats and relocate, usually farther west. The treaties “negotiated” with Indian “nations” designated where they could live and awarded natives economic assistance in exchange for their removal. Considering tribes to be foreign nations, the United States negotiated 377 treaties between 1784 and 1871, when the practice ceased. For example, the Treaty of Greenville (1795), formulated in the wake of the Battle of Fallen Timbers, stipulated that Indians had to vacate the upper Ohio River region. It is important to note that most Native Americans did not speak or read English, and few had a sound understanding of Anglo-American law.

All antebellum presidents faced political pressure to remove Indians from the path of white settlement. The question was: where to put them. The Louisiana Purchase provided an unexpected solution to this problem, as it offered space at a distance from white settlement at the time. Jefferson had envisioned this potential, and President James Monroe began the removal policy in piecemeal fashion. Congress enacted the Removal Act of 1830, which formulated the general policy. At the time the “civilized” tribes in Georgia were the most pressing administrative concern, and the state uprooted them relentlessly. In the 1830s federal troops herded thousands of these natives over a “Trail of Tears” to a region southwest of Arkansas that had been designated Indian “reservations.” Federal troops were stationed on the perimeter of these lands to keep the Indians in and whites out.

The rationale for removal was embedded in the Euro-American view of Native Americans as uncivilized, pagan savages. An American history textbook published in the 1870s sums up that assessment:

[The] Red Man built no cities, no ships, no churches, no schoolhouses. . . . His highest art was expended in a simple bow and arrow. . . . He knew nothing of books, paper, writing, or history. . . . In war, the Indian was brave and alert but cruel and revengeful. . . . At home, he was lazy, improvident, and an inveterate gambler. . . . If he had any ideas of a Supreme Being, they were vague and degraded. . . . Unless he can be induced to give up his roving habits and cultivate the soil, he is doomed to destruction.²⁵

The American solution to the Indian problem was to confine the natives in designated spaces until they became “civilized”—that is, until they were transformed into literate Christian farmers. Learning to master the plow was a critical part of this rehabilitation, given the Anglo-American insistence that only people who worked the soil had a right to possess it.²⁶ As the 1833 treaty with the Otoes and Missourias put it, they must “abandon the chase for agricultural life.” In 1815 the superintendent of Indian affairs established a system of schools for Indians run by Protestant missionaries. Four years later Congress added appropriations for a “civilization fund.”

DISTRIBUTING THE LAND

Removing Indians allowed officials to get on with what most white Americans considered the primary benefit of expansion: the transfer of property to private hands. Beginning with the agreement of 1781, when seven states ceded their claims to western lands to the national government, most territorial acquisitions became part of the country’s public domain.²⁷ Congress possessed the authority to dispose of and make rules for “the Territory and other Property belonging to the United States.” This prerogative focused attention on three key issues: surveys of acquired lands, rules governing the transfer of land, and the establishment of governments in new territories. In 1785 Congress enacted a land ordinance that required cadastral surveys for the systematic enumeration of acreage parcels. The act created townships composed of thirty-six-square-mile sections, each of which contained 640 acres. This linear mode of denoting boundaries, which frequently became private property lines, was first applied to southeastern Ohio and then widely reproduced. Lawmakers hoped that surveys would precede settlement and that the precise identification of specific parcels would establish clear titles to landownership. In reality, the order of these actions was frequently reversed. However, conceptualized broadly, cadastral surveys represented the central state’s imposition of order on land registrations, which facilitated the administration of property taxes.²⁸

The terms for distributing the public domain generated intense interest. The land law of 1785 set the minimum price at $1 an acre, with a minimum purchase of 640 acres (one section); total prices were to be determined by auction sales. Revision of the law in 1796 increased the minimum price to $2 an acre. Policymakers expected these terms to result in substantial federal revenue through sales primarily to wealthy investors. The plan was a disappointment, partly because the states had land for sale on better terms. The land law of 1800 began a trend of reducing the minimum price (cut to $1.25 per acre in 1820) and the minimum acreage offered (decreased to forty acres in 1832). In 1820 “preemption” laws were enacted; they initially targeted specific locations and gave individuals who had settled on public land prior to its formal opening the first right to purchase their plots. In 1830 preemption rights were made general, giving squatters the opportunity to purchase 160 acres for $200. This liberalization of land laws, pushed by western members of Congress, helped increase sales of the public domain, which peaked in the “land fever” of the 1830s. Some policymakers advocated “homesteads,” which would provide 160 acres of land at no charge if a citizen improved the plot and lived on it for five years. Opposition to that idea centered in the South, whose representatives blocked the legislation. Southerners’ withdrawal from Congress during the Civil War opened the way for the enactment of a homestead law in 1862.²⁹

Supporters of homesteading were disappointed by the limited redistribution of land to small farmers. Much of the best land had already been claimed by 1862, partly by speculators who hired land agents or bribed federal officials to locate prime properties. Many homestead claims were registered fraudulently. Moreover, the national government allowed other kinds of land transfers, including the continuation of land sales and grants for transportation projects, such as railroad construction. Army veterans from the Revolution through the Mexican War received warrants that entitled them to land in the public domain. Newly admitted states received parcels for education and other civic activities. Some public acreage became Indian reservations.

National officials clearly understood that managing the public domain was important to the viability of the United States, but their policies were riddled with flaws, including the perpetuation of racial and economic inequalities. Despite the many shortcomings, the transfer of land to private individuals allowed a large proportion of the free population to earn a living between 1790 and 1860. The country’s rural population, consisting mostly of farmers, increased sixfold during these years. The combination of territorial acquisition and public land policy was instrumental in underwriting the high rate of real estate ownership in the United States.

SETTLING THE LAND

Powerful inducements drove the acquisition of public acreage. Homesteaders and speculators sought land for their private interests; the federal government derived revenue from land sales. The conveyance of public land to private ownership allowed the taxation of real estate, which constituted the largest source of revenue for local and state governments. Encouragement of new settlement, coupled with the formation of new state and local governments, was an integral part of American statebuilding.

The volume of westward migrants after the Revolution surprised many observers. Settlers crossed the Appalachians into Kentucky and Tennessee, inhabited lands around New Orleans (first on the east side of the Mississippi River), and crossed the Ohio River into the upper Midwest. The state land cessions of 1781 led to thoughts about governing the new public domain. An early result was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (reenacted by Congress in 1791), which covered the region south of the Great Lakes. Most policymakers assumed that new territories would eventually be integrated into the union on an equal footing with existing states. Although many of the Revolutionary generation doubted that a republic occupying such a huge territory could survive, the principle of reproducing “little republics” in other regions of the “empire” was never seriously questioned. The Northwest Ordinance embodied the core of this principle. It provided for an appointed governor in a territory until its population reached 5,000, at which point it could elect a legislature. When a territory’s population reached 60,000, it could apply for statehood, so long as its application included a constitution that provided for a republican government and a bill of rights. Slavery was prohibited in states carved out of the Northwest Territory. The Southwest Territory (Tennessee), created in 1790, omitted the clause concerning slavery.

Tennessee was the first state admitted by Congress under the territorial process, and Ohio was the first state created in the Northwest Territory (see table 4.1). Two more midwestern states and three southern states (all allowing slavery) entered the union by 1819. Statehood was eagerly sought by territorial residents because it afforded control over their local governments and granted them representation in Congress and a vote in presidential elections. In the nation’s capital, however, statemaking led to discord. New Englanders worried that new states would diminish their region’s influence. Southerners saw expansion westward as a threat to slavery. This issue flared into conflict in 1820 over a proposal to admit Missouri as a state. Southerners blocked the legislation until a compromise allowed slavery in Missouri, admitted Maine as a free state, and ruled that Congress could not bar slavery in territories below a line west of Missouri’s southern border. The sectional protocol embodied in the Missouri Compromise (1821) lasted thirty-seven years.

Westward migration and statemaking moved in rough synchronization in the antebellum era. In the 1820s and 1830s settlers flowed into the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys and the Gulf coast. Texas, which controlled its own land, also attracted newcomers. Cross-country treks to Oregon and California began in the late 1840s, but most western migrants eschewed this long, arduous trip and took up residence in the central part of the country. By 1848 all American territories east of the Mississippi River had become states, half of them allowing slavery. Eight years later a tier of states along the western bank of the Mississippi River from Minnesota to Louisiana had become part of the United States. With California entering the union in 1850 and Oregon in 1859, the United States achieved an institutional presence on the Pacific coast. The admission of Kansas in 1861 pushed statehood onto the Great Plains.

The significance of this great migration is hard to exaggerate. In little more than half a century, the population of the United States had overspread an area twice its size in 1790. In 1860 half the country’s inhabitants lived west of the Appalachians, creating new regions in the Midwest, the Gulf coast, and the Pacific coast, with a sprinkling of settlements on the Great Plains. Historian Malcom Rohrbough called this westward shift “one of the great migrations in the history of the western world.”³⁰

Besides its geographic and demographic implications, the western movement had enormous political consequences. At the national level, the redistribution of population and the admission of new states altered sectional representation in Congress.³¹ New England lost seats, while the Midwest and the Gulf coast region emerged as powerful legislative blocs. The number of states increased by a factor of two and a half between 1790 and 1860, which changed the regional allocation of Senate seats. Locally, the number of counties multiplied sixteenfold in the antebellum era. Counties were the backbone of local government in many regions; in others, especially in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest, towns and cities oversaw civic functions. And territorial expansion and population growth stimulated another fulcrum of statebuilding: economic development.

POPULATION, RESOURCES, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Population growth constituted a powerful stimulus to the antebellum economy. The country’s population increased eightfold between the first national census in 1790 and the enumeration just prior to the Civil War (see table 4.2). Most of this growth was due to natural increase, and 20 percent was attributed to international immigration, which remained relatively modest until the 1840s. Americans maintained a high birthrate in the late colonial and antebellum periods, with large families the rule. This fecundity offset the high mortality rate common in the preindustrial era. Americans were healthy by worldwide standards, however, partly because most people lived in rural surroundings and in climatic zones that tended to mitigate epidemic disease and were favorable for agriculture. Starvation was not a major problem for Euro-Americans.

Table 4.2. Territory, Governments, and Population, 1790–1870

		Governmental Entities			Population
Year	Land (Square Miles)	States	Counties	Cities		Total (Million)	Foreign Born (%)	Black (%)
1790	866	13	283	24		3.9	—	19
1820	1,749	23	762	61		5.2	—	18
1840	1,749	26	1,279	131		17.1	9.7 (1850)	17
1860	2,970	33	2,074	392		31.5	13.2	14
1870	2,970	37	2,295	663		39.9	14.0	13

Sources: Susan Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), tables Aa1, 7, 27, 33; William Anderson, The Units of Government in the United States: An Enumeration and Analysis (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1934), fig. 1.

Although the United States was predominantly a rural nation dotted with thousands of towns, townships, and villages, the number of cities also increased. Twenty-four urban locales existed in 1790; this had multiplied to 392 by 1860. That year, one of every five people lived in an urban setting, eight of which topped 100,000 residents. New York City contained more than a million people (counting Brooklyn, which was then a separate city); its population exceeded that of twenty of the thirty-three states. More than half of Massachusetts residents lived in urban locations, including Boston, the nation’s fourth largest city in 1860. Urban growth resulted from economic development and migratory inflow from rural America and from Europe. The big and medium-sized cities in the mid-Atlantic states and along the coast between Boston and Baltimore were dynamic centers of economic change.³² A second tier of cities—New Orleans, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago—anchored economic hubs situated near the periphery of settlement; San Francisco played a similar role on the West Coast.

The growth of cities marks the evolution of a diversified economy fueled by agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial functions.³³ Big cities nurtured entrepreneurial networks where skilled craftsmen, factory hands, operators of retail and wholesale businesses, manufacturers, financiers, and investors circulated. The larger cities, all of which had access to navigable water, functioned as regional hubs for transportation networks, with New York emerging as the largest of these multipurpose centers. Growing urban populations enlarged consumer markets for both America products and foreign imports. Whereas Europe had erected numerous trade barriers between countries, goods flowed freely throughout the United States, an openness that facilitated the expansion of commerce.

Natural resources played a key role in the nation’s economic growth. Land provided the basis for farms, extractive activities, and investment in an era before most adults sought nonagricultural jobs. Appraising this natural bounty, economic historian Harold Faulkner notes that “no nation in history has been endowed with natural resources as great as those existing in the United States.”³⁴ The scope of this storehouse defies a brief inventory. Faulkner’s review concentrates on topography and terrain, soil types, climate and weather zones, minerals, forests and natural plants, fisheries, and waterways. Most of the lower forty-eight states lay in climate belts favorable to numerous agricultural commodities, which varied by region partially because of differences in the length of the growing season.³⁵

This topography included numerous navigable rivers, as well as streams suitable for turning water mills. The Mississippi-Ohio River complex offered 5,000 miles of navigable water, beginning at the Gulf coast (New Orleans) and reaching into Montana via the Missouri River and past Pittsburgh on the Ohio River and its tributaries. Complementing the river arteries were many fine ocean harbors. The 1,500-mile coastline from Portland, Maine, to Miami, Florida, contained a dozen major ports and numerous smaller harbors; others lay along the Gulf of Mexico. The Pacific coast developed five major ocean depots. Russia, by comparison, had a territory larger than the United States yet no conveniently located, year-round ocean port. The Great Lakes supported commercial sites from Buffalo, New York, to Duluth, Minnesota. Water links within America’s huge interior facilitated a widening radius of domestic and foreign commerce.³⁶

Access to transportation, good land, and hospitable climates created the foundation for a diversified agriculture. Wheat and corn cultivation moved over the Appalachian Mountains in the early 1800s and spread westward into the upper Mississippi River valley. The flat, fertile Midwest lured farmers from New England and the mid-Atlantic region. These migrants settled first in western New York and Pennsylvania and in parts of Ohio and Kentucky; many later pulled up stakes and headed to Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. By 1860 the United States had two million farms, with the largest number in the Midwest. The westward movement of the wheat, corn, and meat belts enabled Cincinnati’s emergence as the hog-marketing and whiskey-distilling capital of the country at midcentury, a position later held by food-processing enterprises in Chicago, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. As the nineteenth century unfolded, there was great foreign demand for northeastern and midwestern agricultural products, which supplemented local consumption.³⁷

Cotton, the great American agricultural export, was cultivated in the South, as it requires a long growing season. Cotton production migrated toward the Gulf coast in a region that stretched from South Carolina to eastern Texas. Tobacco, rice, sugar, and indigo had been the South’s chief exports when America won its independence. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793, foreign purchases, and the rise of the cotton manufacturing industry after the War of 1812 changed this equation. Cotton production accelerated, increasing from 200,000 bales in 1815 to 500,000 bales in 1825 and then rising to 4 million bales by the late 1850s. Its cultivation was dominated by large farms (plantations), often run by managers who oversaw slave labor while their wealthy owners resided in one of the South’s fashionable cities.³⁸

Cotton production was a highly capitalized operation whose commercial success depended on the cost of slave labor, the cultivation of a mixture of crops (some for consumption on the plantation), access to transportation facilities, and international commodity prices. Most American-grown cotton was exported to Britain, but domestic consumption increased as the domestic textile industry grew and consumers developed a preference for cotton over more traditional woolen and flax fabrics. The rising demand for factory-made fabrics in place of those spun and woven at home was a major contributor to making cotton “king” in the economy of the Deep South.

The antebellum economy included other resource-based activities. The largest “manufacturing” industries in 1860 produced cotton goods, lumber, flour, iron, woolen goods, and leather (from cattle hides). All these commodities were created by processing raw materials. Among the top ten industries, only boots and shoes, men’s clothing, machinery, and carriages and wagons represented more extensive manufacturing processes. The 1860 census counted 140,000 manufacturing establishments; more than 20,000 of them were lumber mills, most of which were small businesses that catered to the local community (see table 4.3). As the timber industry moved into the upper Midwest and then to the Far West, some lumbering operations grew, such as the Weyerhauser firm in the upper Mississippi basin.

Table 4.3. Economic Activity, 1800–1860

	1800	1820	1850	1860
Patents issued annually
(thousands)	0.04	0.15	1.0	4.6
Post offices:
Number (thousands)	0.90	4.5	18.0	28.0
Revenue (million $)	0.30	1.1	5.5	8.5
Banks (thousands)	—	0.3	0.8	1.5
Manufacturing establishments
(thousands)	—	—	123	140
Prime movers—percentage of horsepower produced by:
Animals	—	—	70	63
Factories	—	—	13	12
Railroads and ships	—	—	11	19

Source: US Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1975), series W99, R163, 164, X661, 580, P1, S4, 5, 8–10.

The second largest manufacturing industry in 1860 consisted of 14,000 flour and meal producers, most of which were local millers with an average of two employees. As grain production gravitated westward into the upper Ohio River valley, so did supportive entrepreneurs such as Cyrus McCormick, who devised a workable wheat-cutting machine (reaper). McCormick moved this manufacturing business from Virginia to Chicago in 1848, selling his machines to prairie farmers.

Raising animals produced food, a power source (horses and oxen), and leather. Tanneries purchased much of the hide output, which they processed and sold as leather to more than 12,000 boot and shoe manufacturers in 1860.

Valuable resources were taken from the sea, on which New Englanders were heavily dependent. Oysters were harvested off New England and Long Island, fishing craft plied the shallows off Georges Bank, and whaling was a major occupation for seamen from Nantucket and New Bedford. The numerous harbors and dense forests encouraged New Englanders to build vessels of many sizes and to pilot them to coastal and foreign destinations.

The United States held a variety of minerals such as copper, nickel, lead, zinc, and clay, as well as stone such as granite. Iron was used in 2,252 iron-making operations in 1860. The western migration shifted the center of the iron industry from the mid-Atlantic states, especially Pennsylvania, to the Ohio valley and the upper Midwest. Coal emerged as an important commercial commodity in the 1820s, when transportation innovations linked mines in eastern Pennsylvania and Ohio to consumers in northeastern cities. The growth in urban populations and the advent of the cast-iron stove increased the demand for coal for heating and cooking. Improved transportation was instrumental in the evolving commercialization of the country’s natural resources.

THE TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION

Robert Fulton’s successful navigation of a steamboat up the Hudson River to Albany, New York, in 1807 launched a new era in transportation. Steamboats proliferated rapidly because of their utility—they were not dependent on wind or favorable river currents. By 1816 a steamboat made the upstream journey on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from New Orleans to Pittsburgh. By 1830 several hundred steamboats were operating on western waters, principally out of cities on the Ohio River; other vessels plied the Great Lakes. At sea, steamboats initially hugged the coasts, but by the late 1840s they were making regular transatlantic voyages. Steam-powered ships reduced the sailing time from Liverpool to New York from forty to fifty days in 1815 to ten days in 1860. Soon thereafter craft with iron hulls driven by screw propellers reduced the crossing time by several more days.

The steamboat boom overlapped with a canal craze inaugurated by the opening of the Erie Canal between Albany on the Hudson River and Buffalo on Lake Erie in 1825. Shorter American canals had been built earlier, but the Erie was a moneymaker from the start, encouraging other states to emulate New York. In 1816, as New York lawmakers were considering the construction of a water route across the state, Virginia allowed state investment in private transportation companies. In 1826, cognizant of the competition from New York’s Erie Canal, Pennsylvania began its main-line canal and railroad system between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Whereas steamboats were private ventures, these major canals were public infrastructure projects, requiring substantial capital outlays. State governments took up the task of financing these endeavors, borrowing in domestic and foreign markets or purchasing stock in canal projects.³⁹ Canals and steamboats initiated closer commercial ties between regions, such as linking New York’s port with the Great Lakes and the Ohio-Mississippi River systems.

By the 1840s farsighted investors saw railroads as the transportation of the future. First appearing in the 1830s, railroads picked up steam by the mid-1840s as promoters in East Coast cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, aided by state and local governmental subsidies, invested in rail ventures. By the 1850s the laying of 20,000 miles of track had established a relatively dense pattern of rail lines in the Northeast and breached the Midwest; several lines had reached Chicago and crossed the Mississippi into Missouri (see figure 4.3). The rapidity of rail expansion testifies to its commercial utility and, for some, profitability. Europeans saw America’s “iron horse” as a particularly attractive investment.

Fig 4.3. Map of railroads, 1860. Source: George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 87.

As railroads overcame early obstacles, such as varying track widths (gauges), unbridged rivers, and underpowered locomotives, rail improvements reduced transportation costs. The combination of water and train transportation linked East Coast markets with western products, encouraging the shipment of midwestern wheat to New Orleans and New York. Interregional connections spurred regional specialization: the Midwest became a grain and meat center, the South concentrated on cotton, and the Northeast, especially the urban core between New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, emphasized commerce and manufacturing. No region depended solely on these commodities, but their economic specialization emphasized their regional advantages.

The transportation revolution, especially railroads, stimulated technological and entrepreneurial developments. Engineers and inventors designed more powerful locomotives, stronger metals, and devices such as the screw propeller for ships. Competitive rivalry for transportation connections, as occurred among cities in the Northeast, spurred new business ventures. Railroads, the telegraph, and mail routes (a service of the US government) moved information further and faster. Envisioning the future, nation boosters predicted that railroads would make the country a more integrated community.⁴⁰

THE BIRTH OF INDUSTRIALIZATION

The transportation revolution, territorial expansion, and population growth were catalysts for American economic development. These factors interacted with a societal culture that encouraged business enterprise and welcomed immigrant labor. Nurtured by this open environment, entrepreneurs melded new technologies with organizational innovations to initiate factory manufacturing. Making things was not new to Americans, who produced a wide variety of products ranging from clocks and bells of casted metal to jewelry and mousetraps in the 1790s.⁴¹ Two hundred master shoemakers in Lynn, Massachusetts, turned out 400,000 pairs of footwear in 1800. Know-how attained at the workbench as apprentices (Benjamin Franklin had been one) and jack-of-all-trades experience gained on the farm produced artisans with a variety of skills throughout rural America. Technology also flowed from abroad. Samuel Slater, for instance, emigrated from England to Rhode Island with the blueprint for a water-powered loom committed to memory. Slater’s mills along the Blackstone River introduced mechanized cotton manufacturing in the United States, an event generally recognized as the dawn of American industrialization.

Government was a partner in this transition, with its principal contribution being a relaxation of rules that impeded enterprise and investment in certain ventures, such as canals and ocean port facilities. Federal courts promulgated rules that removed local barriers to commercial transactions. The federal system, which contained numerous semisovereign states and autonomous cities, introduced a competitive factor into the American political economy. Political leaders promoted their home economies, especially where commercial rivalries between urban centers, such as New York and Philadelphia, flourished. Besides subsidizing infrastructure projects, states aided capital formation by permitting the creation of manufacturing and banking corporations. The extension of credit, however, depended heavily on private transactions. Historian Thomas Cochran contends that the rise of corporations after 1815 was a key trigger for economic growth in subsequent decades. Numerous historians have emphasized the “get-ahead” attitude in America, where personal enterprise and a propensity for speculation and risk-taking were part of the culture’s DNA.⁴²

Many Americans eagerly took advantage of new technologies. The cotton gin, steam engine, cast-iron stove, and McCormick’s improved wheat reaper were widely adopted. The assembly of products from interchangeable parts owes much to Eli Whitney (inventor of the cotton gin and later a gun manufacturer) and the rise of the firearms industry, which the federal government promoted through its own armories. The 1840s saw the birth of the sewing machine, the rotary printing press, and the safety pin, inventions of lasting importance. Inventions tell only one side of the technological story, however. The gradual adaptation and refinement of existing devices and the rational organization of the manufacturing process were equally important. The development of the machine tool industry, for example, allowed for greater tolerance in crafting interchangeable parts. Improvements to steam engines after 1787 raised their horsepower and lowered their fuel consumption, thereby reducing operating costs. Dams on waterways, however, remained the major power source for stationary machinery such as grain mills and sawmills and for the textile industry through much of the nineteenth century.

The War of 1812 between Britain and the United States marks the birth of American factory manufacturing. The Lowell cotton mill in Waltham, Massachusetts, is usually cited as the first large factory in the United States. The Lowell operation thrived, encouraging replication. For the next two generations, water-powered spinning machines and looms to make thread and weave cotton and woolen fabrics were used throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic states. The Lowell factory relied on rural New England women to tend the mills, working under male foremen. Eventually, Irish immigrants and French Canadians dominated New England’s textile workforce. Railroad equipment created another entrepreneurial opportunity. The manufacture of locomotive engines attracted craftsmen with traditional skills such as iron making and metal mechanics to specialized manufacturing centers such as Philadelphia; Paterson, New Jersey; Lowell and Taunton, Massachusetts; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Schenectady, New York.

Every large industrial sector spawned a host of smaller satellite enterprises, a development that broadened manufacturing. The antebellum era recorded an increasing number of products made with interchangeable parts, including firearms, clocks, and cast-iron stoves. Grants of patents on new devices and manufacturing techniques accelerated as the nineteenth century proceeded, suggesting a growth in entrepreneurial innovation (see table 4.3). Merchants (e.g., wholesalers), financial institutions (e.g., banks and insurance companies), and information industries (e.g., publishing) became increasingly important adjuncts to the success of the manufacturing establishment. The combination of commerce and manufacturing enlarged the urban workforce, which drew on migrants from the countryside and from abroad. The densest concentration of industrialism was situated in lower New England and the mid-Atlantic states, usually near water transportation. Other nodes of manufacturing existed further afield, such as in cities along the Ohio River, the port and rail center of Chicago, and a few areas of the upper South.⁴³

Factory production was a transformative development in economic history. Yet the United States was not an industrialized society on the eve of the Civil War. In 1860 only 20 percent of the population lived in cities; the vast majority of the workforce still toiled on the land; horses continued to supply more horsepower than steam engines; agriculture accounted for a larger portion of national income than manufacturing; and American exports were predominantly agricultural in nature. Although legal changes made it easier to incorporate businesses, most firms were still family owned and managed. The antebellum era saw the dawning of an industrialized economy, not its maturation.⁴⁴ Nor did the economy grow in a steady, linear fashion. Severe commercial depressions followed financial panics in 1819, 1837, and 1857. Despite these setbacks for businesses and workers, the economy became larger and Americans generally became richer between 1790 and 1860.⁴⁵

European leaders had scoffed at the idea that a federal republic could survive as a unified state. In America some doubted that such a large republic could withstand the centrifugal forces trying to tear it apart. Yet the republic not only survived assorted stresses but also grew larger and more affluent in its first seventy years. During these decades the United States became the fourth largest territorial state in the world, establishing a domain that spanned the continent. Some of its constituent parts contained as much space as states elsewhere in the world: Texas is larger than France, and California is bigger than Japan. Territorial expansion opened a pathway for population growth. The United States counted more residents in 1860 than lived in Great Britain, and among European states, only France had a larger population. Territorial expansion and population growth constitute formidable pillars of statebuilding. America’s expanding economy added a third leg to this foundation. National states begin with territory and people, but they require a robust economy to satisfy private needs and fund public endeavors. The pre–Civil War decades witnessed the expansion of conditions conducive to economic development. At the end of the period, America ranked third globally in wealth on a per person basis, despite its skewed distribution caused by slavery. Within a single lifetime the United States had acquired the critical ingredients for statebuilding.