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The American Yawp, Volume 1, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 12 · pp. 378–417
Between about 1815 and 1860, the United States changed quickly. A market revolution, new transportation and communication, and the growth of cities remade the economy, and reform movements, religious revivals, and debates over women's roles remade society. At the same time, westward expansion, the war with Mexico, and the fight over slavery pushed the country toward a split. This part covers the economic base of that story: how farms, cities, transport, and money tied the nation together, including North and South.
Before the market revolution, many farmers grew food mainly for their own households. They made many goods themselves, traded with neighbors, or went without. As roads, canals, and railroads improved, farmers began selling crops for cash and buying goods they used to make or swap. (p. 378)
This shift brought credit. Banks in the East lent money to market-oriented farmers so they could enlarge their farms. That was an opportunity, but also a risk. A farmer who owed money now depended on prices and events far away, and a sudden drop in demand could ruin him. Example: a wheat farmer who borrowed to buy more land might be unable to repay if the price of wheat fell in a city he had never seen. (p. 378)
In the Northeast and Midwest, workers were scarce. Farmers who wanted to grow more with few hands bought new machines, and patents on farm technology multiplied from 1815 to 1850. Two famous examples are:
The reasoning is simple: if you cannot hire more people, you make each worker more productive. (p. 378)
Cities grew fast. In 1820 only New York had more than 100,000 residents. By 1850 six cities did, and one of them, Chicago, had been founded less than twenty years earlier. (p. 378)
Growth was not random. The cities that won were the ones that gained key transportation links:
The nation's geographic center moved west. Steam power and the coalfields of Pennsylvania also shifted where manufacturing happened, and by the 1830s New England was losing its advantage to the West. (p. 378)
By 1860 Americans had built more than 30,000 miles of railroad. Together with roads and canals, rail helped Northeastern and Midwestern farmers reach city markets. Southern railroads developed more slowly and mostly just connected plantation fields to ports. Even so, rail plus navigable rivers meant cotton planters could easily send their crop to textile mills in the Northeast and in Europe. (p. 379)
Information moved faster too. Rail cut travel times from weeks to days and from days to hours, so places felt closer together. The telegraph did the same for messages. Samuel Morse convinced Congress to pay for a forty-mile line from Washington, DC, to Baltimore, finished by 1843. Within a few years, telegraph lines brought news of battles in the Mexican-American War to Eastern newspapers in just days. (p. 379)
The cash economy gradually replaced informal barter, first in cities and then in the countryside. Earning steady income became the measure of a person's economic worth and social standing. Young workers increasingly expected a wage. In the older apprenticeship system, a young person received room, board, and training instead. (pp. 379–380)
A new type of organization also appeared: the business corporation. It treated workers as one part of a larger, connected system of production, aimed at profit and directed from the top. In the urban North this created a ladder of wage-earners, foremen, managers, and executives, and it was described in terms of democracy and free choice. (p. 380)
Southern slavery was also capitalist and profit-driven, but it worked differently. It rested on force and on race, not on the idea that workers voluntarily accepted jobs. The two systems looked very different, yet, as the next section shows, their money was closely tied together. (p. 380)
New tools such as steel plows, steam-powered cotton gins, and mechanical reapers raised crop output in the 1830s and 1840s. They cost more but lasted longer, and they made tilling, planting, harvesting, and removing seeds faster, especially on large plantations. Higher profits led to more reinvestment. (p. 380)
Global demand for cotton kept climbing, so many enslavers borrowed against the profits they expected. They used the loans to buy more enslaved people. Many of those people were mortgaged to banks. A newspaper ad in 1840 in the Louisiana Courier warned that buyers were wary of purchasing people from Mississippi or Alabama because they might already be mortgaged. (p. 380)
Much of the lending money came from Northern as well as Southern banks. Northern cities focused on making, moving, and selling finished goods, but their financial sector depended heavily on the Southern slave economy. Northern lenders saw loans to planters as a way to support raw-material production, which in theory fed Northern industry, without the moral weight of owning plantations or enslaved people themselves. They provided mortgages and loans instead, which let planters expand and buy more enslaved workers. (pp. 380–381)
By the 1850s cotton drove much of the national economy. Enslaved Black workers picked it, and investors, banks, factories, and corporations in the North, South, and West financed, processed, and shipped it. Rail, steamships, canals, and rivers carried it, making a once-disconnected nation feel much smaller. (p. 381)
The cult of domesticity. Historians use the phrase "cult of domesticity" (also "true womanhood") for the idea that a woman's proper place was the home. Ideal women were pious, pure, submissive, and devoted to family. The idea grew up alongside industrialization, the market revolution, and the Second Great Awakening. Work and politics were increasingly seen as a public world, while the home was seen as a place of leisure and morality. Women were cast as guardians of virtue and spiritual leaders of the household. Their main duty was to pass good morals to their children. In practice the ideal fit mostly upper- and middle-class families. Working-class women had to earn wages, so they could not stay in a protected domestic sphere (p. 381).
Using domestic virtue to gain a public role. The same ideology also opened doors. If women were the moral guardians of society, then they could argue that social problems were their business too. They applied this reasoning to labor laws, prison reform, and antislavery (p. 384). Better schooling for girls and the energy of the Second Great Awakening pushed many white middle-class Northern women out of their homes. They joined or founded societies for causes ranging from literary clubs to antislavery. Working-class women entered public life another way. Young mill workers organized strikes, including one at the Lowell textile mill in Massachusetts. They later formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, which brought them into politics (pp. 381–382).
Southern women's duties. Southern women were more often told to calm and morally guide their husbands and children and to run the household (p. 382). That work was hard. On large plantations it meant controlling enslaved people who resisted their bondage. On smaller farms it meant constantly cleaning, feeding, and disciplining the family, and often helping in the fields. Some women earned extra money by selling eggs and butter or by taking in laundry (p. 383).
Female virtue as sexual purity. In the South, "virtue" came to mean mostly sexual purity. This happened in a society full of sexual exploitation of Black women. Even so, white men became obsessed with protecting white women from imagined dangers and portrayed Black men as a sexual threat. That image was used to defend violence and domination over Black people (p. 383).
The code of honor. Southern manhood centered on honor, which meant public recognition of a white man's reputation and authority. A code of rituals shaped how men spoke and acted. Its goal was to prevent conflict, and when conflict happened, to limit the violence. If friends could not settle a quarrel by arbitration, the men might fight a formal duel to show they had equal honor. They met in a private spot, chose weapons such as swords or pistols, and risked death. Duelists were trying to prove their honor, not necessarily to kill. Andrew Jackson, Aaron Burr, Henry Clay, and Thomas Hart Benton all dueled. Except for Burr, dueling helped boost their careers (p. 383).
Two kinds of fighting, two ways to win. Poorer men in the backcountry fought in rough-and-tumble brawls with fists, and sometimes with sharpened nails and filed teeth. They used these to gouge eyes and bite off ears or noses. The rules of victory differed. A gentleman in a duel earned respect by facing death, while a brawler won by maiming his opponent (p. 383).
Unequal enforcement. Laws against murder and dueling existed, but upper-class Southerners were rarely prosecuted, and juries often let them go. Hundreds of duels were fought and only one duelist, Timothy Bennett of Belleville, Illinois, was executed. Lower-class Southerners were routinely prosecuted and were convicted more often (p. 384).
Coverture. Praise for women's moral role did not give them legal power. Under coverture, a woman's legal identity and property came under her husband's control when she married. He gained control of her property. Mothers had no legal rights over their children. Wives could not start a divorce, write a will, sign a contract, or vote. These limits show how narrow women's influence really was (p. 384).
The Second Great Awakening. By the 1830s this wave of revivals had spread an open, flexible evangelical religion into the West. Reformers used its energy to start movements and churches aimed at perfecting the American character. Middle-class values of self-reliance, discipline, and moral righteousness took hold in the towns linking Northeastern cities like New York and Boston to cities such as St. Louis and Chicago (p. 384).
Mormons. Joseph Smith built a haven at Nauvoo, Illinois. He kept announcing new revelations and introduced rites held only in Mormon temples, going beyond the Christian orthodoxy of the 1840s. He also challenged marriage norms by taking additional wives, called "plural marriage." He married at least thirty women in three or four years. Rumors about this helped motivate the mob that killed him in 1844. Brigham Young then led the church westward starting in 1846. Mormons did not openly admit to polygamy until 1852, after settling near the Great Salt Lake (pp. 384–385).
Shakers and Oneida. Other groups tested sexual norms too. The Shakers lived in communes in New England and the upper Midwest and required celibacy. John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida community in upstate New York rejected ordinary marriage and practiced free love, which he called "complex marriage" (p. 385).
Spiritual egalitarianism. This was the revivalist idea that people of different sexes, races, and classes were equal before God. Revivals admitted both men and women. Some preachers, especially Methodists and Baptists, gave women chances to speak and take part, though many of these chances faded by the mid-1800s as the churches became more respectable. Some preachers urged enslavers and enslaved people to attend the same meetings. The loud, physical style of conversion also let worshippers ignore upper-class rules of self-control. Revivals often fell short of their ideals, especially in the conservative South. Still, the idea changed how Protestants saw themselves, God, and each other (pp. 385–386).
In the early 1800s not every American Christian welcomed the emotional revivals of the era. Some ministers and their followers rejected key points of "orthodox" Protestant belief, including the idea that Christ was divine. This movement was called Unitarianism. The argument between Unitarians and Trinitarians was sharpest in New England. Harvard University became a battleground because whoever controlled it held great cultural authority (p. 386).
Unitarianism mattered for reform in an indirect way. In 1836, a group of Unitarian ministers started the Transcendental Club. It met for about four years. Its early members included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker. At first the club was meant for ministers and former ministers. It soon opened to writers and thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller (a literary critic and early feminist), and Elizabeth Peabody (an educational reformer) (p. 386).
Transcendentalism had no fixed creed, and that was on purpose. What joined its members was a shared faith that every person holds a higher spiritual principle inside. They called it Soul, Spirit, Mind, or Reason. They believed it could uncover truth, guide moral choices, and inspire art. Compare this with a church that tells believers what to think: Transcendentalists said the answer was to look inward (p. 386).
Two outside influences shaped the movement: British Romanticism and German idealism. Both prized individual creativity, personal spiritual experience, and parts of human life that logic cannot fully explain. From these roots Americans built their own set of themes: individualism, optimism, closeness to nature, and a focus on the future rather than the past. These ideas fit a country where political democracy and plentiful land set it apart from Europe (p. 386).
Emerson held that God, which he called "the eternal ONE," shows itself through harmony between the individual soul and nature. In "The American Scholar" (1837) and "Self-Reliance" (1841), he argued that the individual soul is fully reliable and enough on its own. He urged Americans to end their long "apprenticeship" to European learning. In other words, he called for intellectual independence from Europe (p. 386).
Thoreau shared Emerson's love of simple living, nature, and self-sufficiency. His individualism was perhaps the strongest in the group. It led him to write "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), which applied the idea of trusting one's own conscience to the question of how a person should relate to government (pp. 386–387).
Some Transcendentalists tried to live their ideals together. Brook Farm was a utopian community where, in the mid-1840s, George Ripley and other members took up Fourierism. This was a plan for society built on cooperation, offered as an alternative to the conditions created by capitalism. Brook Farm shows that Transcendentalist individualism could also lead toward experiments in communal life (p. 387).
The religious debates of the time often ended in the same place: joining voluntary associations and doing reform work. Industrialization and urbanization alarmed many Protestants. Problems such as drunkenness, vice, and crime grew to a scale that older tools, like almshouses, could not handle. Reformers also worried about the crowds of city residents who did not go to church. Poverty or illiteracy meant many of them could not even read scripture (p. 387).
The answer was a huge increase in voluntary benevolent societies. Ministers led them, but middle-class women dominated their membership. They printed and handed out Protestant tracts, ran Sunday schools, gave out relief, and preached in frontier towns and urban slums. The societies also gave moral support and volunteers to larger causes: temperance (cutting alcohol use), abolition, and women's rights. Together, these efforts combined with missionary zeal to form what people called the "benevolent empire," a pillar of life before the Civil War (pp. 387–388).
By the 1830s, women's roles were reaching beyond the home. Industrial and urban growth spread a belief in public outreach and social uplift. One result was the first state-run public school systems, led by Horace Mann. The new economy had its factory workers, managers, and bankers, and the household that raised them needed rethinking too. Schools became extensions of the republican household. Women were hired partly because they would work for lower pay and partly because people believed they were naturally suited to children. Teaching let a woman, whether or not she was a mother, take on the "virtuous burden" of educating the public while earning a salary (p. 388).
Women had worked in factories since the early 1800s and led some of the earliest strikes over conditions in textile mills. In 1844, Sarah Bagley led the creation of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. It was the first union of working women in US history. As an auxiliary of the New England Workingmen's Association, it ran political pressure campaigns and petition drives that gathered thousands of signatures from mill workers (p. 388).
Bagley argued from the value of mental improvement. In an 1847 editorial she asked who could think deeply after thirteen hours of dull, repetitive work. The point was that exhausting hours robbed workers of the chance to develop their minds (p. 389).
The ten-hour movement won only partial success:
Child labor had long been normal, but by 1842 it became a major labor issue. Factory work was replacing some less dangerous kinds of work, and the middle class increasingly backed protection for children. Parents in Fall River, Massachusetts, a mill town with many child workers, petitioned the legislature for a law. Massachusetts then barred children under twelve from working more than ten hours a day. By the mid-1800s every New England state had followed. Officials believed that children aged nine to twelve should avoid dangerous jobs, and that those aged twelve to fifteen should balance work with school and leisure. These laws reflected a rising value placed on education and the middle-class idea of taking the home's protective role into public life (p. 389).
Male workers also sought better pay and conditions, but their gains were limited. Northern labor activists spent less energy fixing industry and more on contrasting free wage labor with Southern slavery, which they called the "peculiar institution." They claimed moral superiority over it. This helped make the labor movement a force behind the free-soil movement, which opposed spreading slavery west. In the 1840s the idea grew, and in the 1850s it forced the issue into national politics. As a result, Northern industry, flaws and all, came to look more moral and workable than slavery to many Americans (p. 389).
By the late 1830s, abolitionists faced strong opposition from enslavers and from much of the Northern public. The movement was the most contested part of the wider reform world, and the strain began to break it apart.
The 1839 split over the Constitution. The first split was about what the US Constitution meant and how to end slavery. Two camps formed (p. 390):
The key difference is the Constitution. One side saw it as a barrier, the other as a tool.
The 1840 split over women's leadership. A second split came when Abby Kelly was elected to the business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840. Some conservative members objected to women holding full leadership roles and to the society's support for women's suffrage. They believed the society was drifting from its main goal. Under Arthur Tappan, they left and formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The quarrel was so bitter that former friends stopped speaking and traded public insults (p. 390).
From reform to resistance. Because the 1830s brought disappointment, abolitionists in the 1840s moved from reform toward resistance. Moral suasionists kept appealing to hearts and minds, and political abolitionists kept campaigning for votes. Others looked for new ways to fight slave power, such as helping people escape slavery and building international antislavery networks to pressure the United States (p. 390).
Frederick Douglass showed both trends at once. After escaping slavery, he became a leading abolitionist as a gifted speaker and a powerful storyteller of his own experience. His 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave sold so well that it went through nine editions and was translated into several languages. That same year he toured Great Britain and won moral and financial support from British and Irish antislavery societies. His success abroad also lifted the spirits of tired abolitionists at home (pp. 390–391).
Douglass also backed women's rights. In his newspaper, the North Star, he wrote that women are rightly entitled to all that men claim for themselves (p. 391).
Abolition as a school for women. Many early women's rights leaders began in antislavery work, including Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony (p. 391). In the 1830s, women in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia formed antislavery societies. At first these were much like other prayer-and-fundraising groups. Over time, women used the right to petition, since they could not vote, and some took up lecture tours (p. 393).
The Grimké sisters grew up in a wealthy slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina. Disgusted by how enslaved people were treated, they spoke in the North about what they had seen. They first addressed women, but soon drew "promiscuous" audiences of both men and women, which was very unusual. When they met harassment, they concluded that to defend the enslaved they also had to defend women's right to speak. Other female abolitionists then compared the position of free women with that of the enslaved, tying the two causes together (p. 393).
The road to Seneca Falls. At the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, organizers refused to seat female delegates or let them vote. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose husband was a delegate, were angered and came home determined to work for women's rights. In 1848 they organized the Seneca Falls Convention, a two-day meeting in New York (p. 393).
The Declaration of Sentiments. Stanton wrote this document to cover the many issues the early movement cared about. She modeled it on the Declaration of Independence to link women's freedom to the nation's founding language. It listed fifteen grievances and eleven resolutions. These called for property rights, access to professions such as medicine and law, and, most controversially, the vote. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed it (pp. 393–394).
Women of this era also protested other unfair treatment, such as being barred from college and paid less as teachers. They argued that men and women should be held to the same moral standards (pp. 394–395).
Slow progress. Seneca Falls began a series of conventions held almost entirely in the North. Yet the movement grew slowly and won little before the Civil War. Few states changed their laws on married women's property, and none allowed women to vote. When the war began, advocates put most of their effort into abolition, so racial equality temporarily came before gender equality. Still, the words of Seneca Falls inspired later activists (p. 395).
Education was an area of real progress. Reformers argued that women who would educate their children needed a good education themselves. This movement did not at first ask for political or social equality, but it did claim that women are intellectually equal to men, an idea with large later effects (p. 395).
Three educators led the way: Emma Willard (Troy Female Seminary), Catharine Beecher (Hartford Female Seminary), and Mary Lyon (Mount Holyoke Seminary). They used the same demanding curriculum as boys' schools, and many of their schools trained women as teachers. Graduates opened their own schools across the country, spreading both education and the idea that women could take part in public life (p. 395).
By 1861, revivals and reforms had changed the country. The Second Great Awakening linked evangelical Christians in national networks, and reform pushed the middle class to promote public morality. Results varied. Temperance largely succeeded and cut drinking in half. Abolition was so divisive that it helped open the way to a sectional crisis (p. 395).
Reform also changed how people saw their own roles. Black activists became strong voices in antislavery societies and built connections at home and abroad. Middle-class women, who dominated the benevolent empire, were encouraged to build a full women's movement (pp. 395–396).
While reformers debated morality, Americans kept moving west. The newspaper editor John L. O'Sullivan popularized "manifest destiny" in 1845 while arguing that Texas should be annexed. The idea expressed an old belief that the United States had a God-given mission to lead the world toward democracy (p. 396).
The term was new, but the belief was vague and went back to the nation's founding. It rested on three ideas (p. 396):
Combined with economic ambition, these beliefs drove a huge wave of westward movement. It was often disastrous for Indigenous people and others in the way (pp. 396–397).
The Young America movement turned these ideas into a push for democratic expansion. It was strongest among Democrats but reached across parties. It played down divisions over slavery and ethnicity by stressing national unity, American exceptionalism, territorial growth, democratic participation, and economic integration (p. 398).
Many Americans, including Emerson, opposed aggressive expansion. They saw Young America's lofty language as a form of imperialism, which the Revolution was supposed to have rejected. Many Whigs, and later Republicans, said the nation should lead by example, not by conquest. In 1859 Abraham Lincoln mocked the "Young American" as someone who claims the world by right of wanting it. Even so, critics struggled to win public opinion, and the nation kept moving west, fighting Indigenous peoples and foreign nations as it claimed land to the edge of the continent (p. 398).
The "Young America" movement was a nationalist push for democratic expansion. It was strongest among Democrats, but people from many parties joined. It played down quarrels over slavery and ethnicity. Instead it stressed national unity, American exceptionalism (the idea that the US was special and meant to lead), territorial growth, democratic participation, and economic integration. Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1844 lecture "The Young American" captured its mood by asking which nation should lead the world if not the United States. (p. 398)
Not everyone agreed. Many critics, including Emerson himself, disliked aggressive expansion. They said the grand language was really imperialism, the very thing the American Revolution had rejected. Many Whigs, and later Republicans, argued that the US should lead by example, not by conquest. In 1859 Abraham Lincoln mocked the "Young American" as someone who claims the world by wanting it. Even so, the critics could not turn public opinion, and the nation kept moving west. (p. 398)
Before the Mexican War, "the West" mostly meant the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. Settlers usually moved as families and built towns along rivers. Worn-out soil and crowded land in the East pushed them out. They hoped for self-sufficiency through small farms. Shared traditions, especially religion, brought from the East helped them cooperate and form communities. (p. 399)
Women carried a double burden: the hardships of travel plus the expectation to follow the "cult of true womanhood" (piety, purity, domesticity, submissiveness) and "separate spheres." Yet frontier life loosened roles a little. Farms needed partners, and wives were scarce, so some women bargained for more power at home and on the Overland Trails. Charlotte Pengra drove a wagon and made bullets while men sometimes minded children. In Texas, women like Lucinda Walker owned cattle and headed households. This was easier in thinly settled areas. (p. 399)
Americans also argued over internal improvements, meaning roads, canals, and rails. Some wanted only private investment and risk. Others wanted federal help to link migrants to the national economy. Full federal support never came, but state, local, and federal efforts still grew transport networks. Expansion became tied to economic development. Early railroads like the Baltimore and Ohio sought western trade and let towns grow away from waterways. Technical limits, repairs, conflicts with Native Americans, and politics slowed them, so canals and steamboats stayed important. (pp. 399–400)
The West was not empty. Expansion relied on the belief that white Americans would use the land best, and Indian Removal continued beyond the Mississippi. But some groups were too strong to remove. (p. 400)
The Comanche built a powerful empire called Comanchería on the Southern Plains, peaking in the 1840s. They adopted the horse culture the Spanish introduced and shifted from foraging to hunting and herding. Mexico claimed the area after 1821 but had little control. The Comanche raided northern Mexico, traded with Anglo-Americans in Texas, and controlled goods such as livestock and captives. Their captive system was fluid: captives worked for the Comanche but were often adopted into kin networks. (pp. 400–402)
The Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, and Diné fought thousands of clashes with northern Mexicans in the 1830s and 1840s. This weakened Mexico and shaped politics in both countries, so the US-Mexican War was partly a result of Indigenous-driven conflict. In the Great Basin, traders, settlers, and Mormons, helped by US officials and soldiers, used violence against the Paiute and Western Shoshone. This prepared the way for dispossession. (pp. 402–403)
The Whigs won in 1840 with William Henry Harrison, a hero of Tippecanoe, who ran as the "log cabin and hard cider" candidate. Virginia slaveholder John Tyler balanced the ticket. Harrison died after thirty-one days. Tyler, who acted more like a Jacksonian, twice vetoed a national bank charter. His cabinet resigned and the Whigs expelled him. The party stayed divided. (p. 404)
In Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the Supreme Court held that the federal Fugitive Slave Act overrode state personal liberty laws. Antislavery Northerners felt the federal government served enslavers and ignored Northern states' rights. Several states passed new personal liberty laws in 1843. Black activists such as Harriet Tubman helped many people escape. (pp. 405–406)
The Liberty Party, formed in 1839, was the first true antislavery party. It demanded an end to slavery in Washington, DC, an end to the interstate slave trade, and a ban on slavery's westward spread. But it shut out women and avoided real racial equality, and few people voted for it. (p. 406)
Anglo-Texans forced Santa Anna to accept independence in 1836, and Jackson recognized Texas in 1837. Annexation was risky because it could cause war and upset the free/slave balance. Tyler opened the question to debate, and Polk won in 1844 promising expansion. Tyler offered annexation on March 3, 1845, and Texas accepted on July 4, becoming the twenty-eighth state. (pp. 406–407)
Mexico called annexation unjust aggression and claimed the border was the Nueces River. Texas claimed the Rio Grande, about 150 miles farther west. The Nueces Strip between them was really controlled by Native Americans. (p. 407)
Polk then escalated. In November 1845 he sent John Slidell to offer to buy the Nueces Strip, New Mexico, and California, but Mexico refused to receive him. Polk had already sent Zachary Taylor's army to Corpus Christi, and in January 1846 he ordered it into the disputed land. On April 24, Mexican cavalry killed eleven US soldiers, and Congress declared war on May 13. (p. 408)
Critics called it "Mr. Polk's War," a land grab for enslavers, though few in Congress voted no. The army invaded on several fronts, and Winfield Scott took Mexico City. Disease killed about seven times as many US soldiers as combat, and many deserted. (pp. 408–409)
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) gave the US California, Utah, Nevada, most of Arizona, and parts of other states. Mexico accepted the Rio Grande border and received $15 million. The 1854 Gadsden Purchase firmed up the southern border. (pp. 409–410)
Antislavery leaders saw the new land as a way to spread slavery. Neither major party nominated an antislavery candidate in 1848, and the Liberty Party seemed too narrow. So Conscience Whigs, Liberty remnants, and antislavery Democrats met at Buffalo in August 1848 and formed the Free Soil Party. It called for ending slavery in DC and halting its western expansion. (p. 410)
Zachary Taylor beat Lewis Cass, but Free Soil won about 10 percent of the vote, more than four times the Liberty Party's earlier share. It won over a dozen House seats and one Senate seat (Salmon P. Chase of Ohio), enough to swing power between the two big parties. (pp. 410–411)
The war made the US stronger. Mexico lost about half its territory, Taylor became president, and future Civil War commanders gained experience. Emerson warned that conquering Mexico would poison the US, and the fight over slavery in the new lands pushed the nation toward disunion. (pp. 411–412)
