Expansion, Slavery & Reform — Print · U.S. & New York History: Indigenous Nations to Reconstruction, Grade 7

Part 1 · Texas

Mexico, newly independent and wanting its northern province settled, invited American colonists in the 1820s on terms: become Mexican citizens, adopt Catholicism, and obey Mexican law — which from 1829 prohibited slavery. Thousands came, mostly from the southern states, and brought enslaved people anyway under long-term indenture contracts that fooled nobody.

By the mid-1830s there were far more Anglo settlers than Mexican residents in Texas, and when the government in Mexico City moved to centralise authority, they revolted. In 1836 a Mexican army under Santa Anna besieged a mission at San Antonio for thirteen days; the roughly two hundred defenders of the Alamo were killed to a man. Six weeks later Sam Houston surprised and destroyed the Mexican army at San Jacinto and captured Santa Anna himself.

The Alamo’s afterlife is as interesting as the siege. Remember the Alamo became a rallying cry within weeks and the mission became a shrine, with Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie turned into folk heroes. What the story usually leaves out is that the Texan cause included the right to hold people as property against Mexican law, and that among the defenders were men who had come to Texas precisely because land there was cheap and slavery was tolerated in practice. A monument can be accurate about courage and silent about purpose.

Texas existed as an independent republic for nine years, and the delay was about slavery. Annexing a vast slaveholding territory would upset the balance in the Senate, and northern politicians blocked it until 1845. Mexico had never recognised the independence and warned that annexation meant war. It did.

Part 2 · The war, and the people who objected to it

President Polk had campaigned on expansion and wanted California. He offered to buy it; Mexico refused to receive his envoy. He then ordered troops into disputed ground between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, where a Mexican patrol attacked them, and told Congress that American blood had been shed on American soil.

The claim was contested at the time by people who are not usually remembered as radicals. A freshman congressman named Abraham Lincoln introduced the Spot Resolutions, demanding Polk identify the exact spot where the attack occurred and whether it was American territory. Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay a tax supporting the war, and wrote *Civil Disobedience* about it. Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in the war as a young officer, called it in his memoirs one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 transferred California, Nevada, Utah and most of Arizona and New Mexico. The roughly 100,000 Mexican citizens living there were promised citizenship and protection of their property; in practice Californio landholders spent decades in American courts defending titles and mostly lost them.

Part 3 · Gold

On 24 January 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall found flakes of gold in a millrace at Sutter's Mill on the American River. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed nine days later. Mexico ceded California without knowing what had just been discovered in it.

The news took months to travel and then moved everything. Around 300,000 people reached California in the next few years, from the eastern states, from Mexico, Chile and Peru, from China, Ireland and Australia. San Francisco went from a settlement of a few hundred to a city of tens of thousands in two years. Ships were abandoned in the harbour by crews who had deserted for the diggings.

The diggings were also more diverse than the legend suggests, and the law followed quickly to make them less so. Chinese miners arrived in large numbers from 1849, as did Mexicans, Chileans and Peruvians with real mining expertise, and California responded with a Foreign Miners Tax in 1850 charging twenty dollars a month to anyone not a United States citizen — aimed first at Latin American miners and later enforced overwhelmingly against the Chinese. Most gold-seekers made little; the reliable fortunes were made selling shovels, flour and passage.

For California's Native peoples the Gold Rush was a catastrophe with few parallels. Miners drove them off land, destroyed the salmon runs and oak groves they lived on, and conducted organised killings that the new state government funded and the first governor openly described as a war of extermination. The Native population of California fell from something like 150,000 in 1848 to around 30,000 by 1870.

Part 4 · Every acre raised the same question

Almost as soon as the war began, a Pennsylvania congressman named David Wilmot proposed that slavery be barred from any territory acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso passed the House repeatedly and never the Senate, where the sections were evenly balanced. It settled nothing and it clarified everything: the real argument was no longer about slavery where it existed but about slavery where it did not yet.

California forced the issue almost immediately. The Gold Rush population was large enough to apply for statehood by 1850, skipping the territorial stage, and it applied as a free state — which would break the Senate balance of fifteen and fifteen. That application is what produced the Compromise of 1850, the first unit of the next chapter.

The Mormon migration belongs in the same decade and shows another face of expansion. Driven out of Missouri and then Illinois by mob violence, and with their leader Joseph Smith murdered in 1844, some fifteen thousand members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints crossed the plains under Brigham Young from 1846 and settled the Salt Lake valley — then Mexican territory, which became American two years later. People moved west to escape the United States and found it had followed them.

This is the pattern for the next decade, so it is worth fixing now. The country acquires land; the land must be organised; organising it requires deciding about slavery; neither section will accept the other's answer; a compromise is improvised; the next acquisition destroys it. Expansion did not cause the Civil War on its own, but it is what made the question impossible to postpone.

Part 1 · The Removal Act

Andrew Jackson came to the presidency committed to moving the eastern nations west of the Mississippi, and the Indian Removal Act passed Congress in 1830. It was close: the House approved it by 102 votes to 97, after weeks of debate in which opponents argued it violated treaties the United States had signed and ratified.

The Act did not, on its face, authorise force. It empowered the president to negotiate exchanges of land, with removal voluntary. In practice the federal government declined to protect nations from state laws designed to make staying unbearable, which left the choice a formality.

Jackson defended removal as humane, and it is worth reading his argument rather than assuming it. He told Congress that the nations could not survive surrounded by states, that previous removals had let others flourish, and that the government was offering land and protection in exchange. Set beside what the states were doing with federal acquiescence, and beside what happened on the road, the argument reads as a justification constructed after the decision rather than a reason for it.

Georgia had already extended its laws over Cherokee territory, declared Cherokee law void, forbidden Cherokee people from testifying against a white person in court, and begun distributing their land by lottery. Mississippi and Alabama did the same to the Choctaw and Creek. A nation that cannot testify in court and cannot enforce its own law has not been conquered; it has been made untenable.

Part 2 · Winning in court

The Cherokee fought in the American legal system, with American lawyers, on American terms. In 1831, in *Cherokee Nation v. Georgia*, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case on jurisdictional grounds, with Chief Justice Marshall describing the nations as “domestic dependent nations” whose relationship to the United States resembled that of a ward to a guardian.

They came back the next year through a different door. Samuel Worcester, a missionary jailed by Georgia for living in Cherokee territory without a state licence, appealed. In 1832, in *Worcester v. Georgia*, Marshall held plainly that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct community in which Georgia law had no force, and that relations with it belonged to the federal government alone.

It was a complete victory and it changed nothing. Georgia ignored the ruling and kept Worcester in prison. Jackson is supposed to have said that Marshall had made his decision and could now enforce it — the quotation is almost certainly apocryphal, but it describes what happened. A Supreme Court judgement with no executive willing to back it is a piece of paper.

Part 3 · A treaty signed by the wrong people

Unable to win by law, federal officials found a faction. A small group of Cherokee, perhaps a hundred, who believed removal was now inevitable and that terms should be got while they could, signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. They had no authority from the Cherokee National Council, and the Council rejected the treaty outright.

Principal Chief John Ross then collected a petition against it signed by over fifteen thousand Cherokee — the great majority of the nation — and carried it to Washington. The Senate ratified the treaty anyway, by a single vote.

The division inside the nation was agonising and is worth treating seriously. The Treaty Party argued that the United States would take the land whatever happened and that negotiating now meant better terms and fewer deaths; Ross and the National Party argued that signing would ratify theft and destroy the nation’s legal standing. Both were trying to save the same people. That the Treaty Party was proved partly right about the outcome does not make it right about authority, and the nation had a law on the point.

So the legal instrument under which the Cherokee were removed was a treaty their government had rejected, signed by people it had not authorised, opposed in writing by nearly everyone it bound. Several of the signers were later killed by their own people under a Cherokee law making unauthorised land cession a capital offence.

Part 4 · The march

In 1838, General Winfield Scott's troops rounded up Cherokee families, in many cases giving them minutes to leave, and held them in stockades through a summer of dysentery and measles before the detachments set out. Roughly sixteen thousand people walked or were carried about a thousand miles to what is now Oklahoma, through the following winter.

Some did not go. Several hundred Cherokee hid in the mountains of western North Carolina rather than be taken, aided by a white trader named William Holland Thomas who bought land in his own name on their behalf because they could not hold title. Their descendants are the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, on that ground today, and the nation now exists in two places as a direct result of 1838.

Estimates of the dead vary and about four thousand is the figure most often given — something like a quarter of the nation, mostly the old, the very young and the sick, from exposure, disease and hunger on the road. The Cherokee call it *Nunna daul Tsuny*, the trail where they cried.

Enslaved people were on the road too, and are usually left out. Wealthier Cherokee, Choctaw and Creek families took enslaved Black people with them on the removals, and several thousand made the journey under the same conditions as those who owned them, with none of the legal standing. The nations that arrived in Indian Territory brought slavery with them, which is why the Civil War reached Oklahoma and why the treaties of 1866 required the nations to emancipate and, in several cases, to admit freedpeople as citizens.

The Cherokee were not alone. The Choctaw went first from 1831, the Creek under military escort in 1836, the Chickasaw after. The Seminole in Florida fought instead, and the Second Seminole War from 1835 to 1842 became the longest and most expensive war the United States fought against a Native nation, costing more than the entire Louisiana Purchase.

Part 1 · The burned-over district

Upstate New York in these decades was one of the most religiously intense places in the world. Finney preached in Rochester through the winter of 1830–31, and the town's churches reportedly gained hundreds of members; the region produced the Latter-day Saints, the Millerites who expected the world to end in 1844, the Shakers and the Oneida community, as well as a disproportionate share of the country's abolitionists.

The canal explains some of this. A corridor with new towns, mobile populations, cash wages and no settled church establishment is open ground for anyone with something to say, and a preacher could reach a dozen towns in a week that would previously have taken a month.

Finney's methods were as significant as his message. He held protracted meetings night after night, allowed women to pray aloud in mixed congregations, and used an “anxious bench” at the front where those near conversion sat in full view. Older ministers were appalled. He was treating conversion as something that could be organised, and the reform societies that followed borrowed the whole toolkit: meetings, pledges, publicity, mailing lists.

It is worth naming what the revival did for people with no standing anywhere else. Women made up the majority of converts and of the societies that followed, and in a legal system that gave a married woman nothing, a church committee was one of the few places she could hold an office, keep accounts and be listened to. Black congregations founded in these decades, including the African Methodist Episcopal churches spreading through the North, became the institutional base of the abolition movement in the next unit.

Part 2 · Temperance

Americans in 1830 drank a great deal — estimates put consumption near seven gallons of pure alcohol per adult per year, roughly three times the modern figure. Whiskey was cheap, water was often unsafe, and employers commonly provided liquor during the working day.

The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, organised against it on the revival's model: public meetings, a signed pledge, and local societies reporting numbers upward. Within a decade it claimed over a million members. By the mid-1840s consumption had fallen by more than half, which is among the largest changes in national behaviour ever achieved without a law.

It mattered most to women, and the reason is legal rather than moral. A married woman under coverture owned nothing, could not sue, and had no claim on her husband's wages; a drinking husband could spend the household's income and she had no remedy at all. Temperance was, for many of its women organisers, the nearest available route to a problem the law would not let them address directly — and organising it taught them to run meetings, raise money and speak in public, which they did next in the movement of the following unit.

The movement also split over how far to go. Early societies asked members to give up distilled spirits only; later ones demanded total abstinence from beer and cider as well, and lost members over it. By the 1840s some campaigners had given up on persuasion and turned to law: Maine banned the sale of alcohol outright in 1851 and a dozen states copied it within five years, though most of those laws were repealed or struck down before the decade was out. The same argument comes back in the next century as Prohibition.

Part 3 · Schools and asylums

Horace Mann became secretary of the new Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837 and spent twelve years arguing for common schools: free, tax-supported, open to all children of the district, and taught by trained teachers. He founded the first state normal schools to produce those teachers, extended the school year, and campaigned against the one-room arrangement in which an untrained young man taught forty children of every age until he found better work.

His argument was political rather than sentimental, and it is worth knowing because it is still the argument. A republic, he said, depends on citizens who can read, reason and judge, so educating other people's children is not charity but self-defence; and a common school where rich and poor sat together was “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” Taxpayers without children objected, and lost.

Dorothea Dix did similar work on a harder subject. She spent years visiting jails and almshouses, documenting conditions in which mentally ill people were chained, caged and left in unheated rooms, and in 1843 presented a detailed report to the Massachusetts legislature based on what she had recorded herself. Her method — go, look, write down exactly what you saw, name the places — produced new state hospitals in more than a dozen states.

Both campaigns show the same pattern, and it is the useful thing to take from this lesson: a reformer who wins is almost always someone who collected the evidence first. Mann published twelve annual reports carrying attendance figures, school-building conditions and teacher salaries district by district; Dix listed towns and named what she had seen in each one. Opponents could dispute what ought to be done about the facts, but not the facts themselves, and that is why the legislatures moved.

Part 4 · What reform could and could not reach

The movements shared a method and a limit. The method was voluntary association: form a society, sign a pledge, publish a journal, petition the legislature. It worked remarkably well on behaviour and on institutions a state could be persuaded to build.

It failed where someone's property was at stake. Temperance societies could persuade a man to stop drinking; nothing in the method could persuade a planter to give up people worth, collectively, more than all the railroads and factories in the country. That is why abolition, which used exactly the same tools, ran into a wall the other reforms did not, and why the next unit ends somewhere the others do not — in a war.

There is also an awkward strand worth naming. Some reformers wanted to improve people and some wanted to control them; the same societies that built schools also produced campaigns against Catholic immigrants and arguments that poverty reflected a flaw in the poor. Reform is not one thing, and a movement that believes people can be improved contains both the impulse to help and the impulse to correct.

Part 1 · Immediate, and without compensation

The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, proposed freeing enslaved people and sending them to West Africa. It drew respectable support, including from slaveholders, which was the clue. Free Black communities in Philadelphia and New York rejected it almost unanimously; they had been born in the United States, built it, and were not going to accept that the price of freedom was leaving.

Garrison started The Liberator in 1831 and the American Anti-Slavery Society followed in 1833. Their method was the revival's: local societies, subscriptions, travelling speakers, and an enormous postal campaign that in 1835 mailed abolitionist tracts into the South by the hundred thousand.

The reaction tells you how seriously it was taken. A Charleston crowd burned the mailbags in the street and the Postmaster General declined to enforce delivery. Congress adopted a gag rule in 1836, automatically tabling every antislavery petition without reading it, and kept it until 1844. Mobs attacked speakers in northern cities, and in 1837 the printer Elijah Lovejoy was shot dead in Alton, Illinois, defending his press. Abolition was a minority position in the North as well as a crime in the South.

Garrison's own position narrowed as the fight went on. By the 1840s he was burning copies of the Constitution in public, calling it a covenant with death for the protections it gave slavery, and arguing that the free states should leave the Union rather than stay complicit in it. Douglass started in the same place and moved the other way, concluding that the Constitution could be read as an antislavery document and that the fight therefore belonged in politics and at the ballot box. The split between them is the argument the whole movement kept having: stand outside a corrupt system and denounce it, or get inside it and use it.

Part 2 · Harriet Tubman

She was born Araminta Ross around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, and carried a head injury all her life from an overseer's thrown weight. She escaped alone in 1849, walking north by night to Philadelphia, and then did the thing almost nobody did: she went back.

Over roughly ten years she returned to the Eastern Shore about thirteen times and brought out around seventy people, including her parents and several brothers, working in winter when nights were long, leaving on Saturday evenings so that advertisements could not be printed until Monday, and carrying a pistol. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made the free states unsafe, she extended the route to St Catharines in Canada.

She was not finished. In the Civil War she scouted for the Union Army, and in June 1863 she guided the raid up the Combahee River in South Carolina that destroyed plantation supplies and carried off some 750 enslaved people in a single night, the only such operation of the war planned with a woman's intelligence work at its centre. She spent her last decades in Auburn, New York, fighting the federal government for a pension it took thirty years to grant.

Part 3 · Sojourner Truth, and the speech everyone quotes

She was born Isabella Baumfree around 1797 in Ulster County, New York, and spoke Dutch before she spoke English. New York's gradual emancipation law freed her in 1827. The next year she did something remarkable: she went to court to recover her son Peter, who had been sold illegally out of state to Alabama, and she won, one of the first Black women in the country to win such a case against a white man. In 1843 she took the name Sojourner Truth and went out to preach.

In 1851 she spoke at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Two versions of that speech exist. Marius Robinson, who was present and knew her, printed a transcript weeks later in which she said plainly that she was a woman's rights, that she had as much muscle as any man and could do as much work, and that she had borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery.

Twelve years later, in 1863, Frances Gage published a different version from memory: shorter sentences, a southern dialect Truth never spoke, and the refrain "Ar'n't I a woman?" that made it famous. Gage's version is the one on the posters. It is also the one written down last, by someone else, in a dialect belonging to a region Truth never lived in, during a war in which a stirring version was useful. Both tell you something; only one is close to the room.

Part 4 · Seneca Falls and the split

In 1840 Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton travelled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London and were refused seats, made to sit behind a curtain and listen. Eight years later, in July 1848, they convened a meeting at Seneca Falls, New York.

The Declaration of Sentiments they produced copied the Declaration of Independence deliberately, clause by clause, substituting "all men and women are created equal" and then listing grievances the way Jefferson had listed the king's: no vote, no property rights in marriage, no legal standing, no access to the professions or to higher education. Around three hundred people attended and a hundred signed. The resolution demanding the vote was the only one that did not pass unanimously, and it carried in part because Frederick Douglass stood up and argued for it.

The alliance held for twenty years and broke on the Fifteenth Amendment. When Reconstruction offered the vote to Black men but not to women, some campaigners argued it was the Black man's hour and others refused to support any amendment that left women out; the split ran through friendships and lasted decades. It is worth knowing because the next course opens on exactly those amendments.

Seneca Falls is often taught as the beginning, which is a little misleading. Black women including Maria Stewart had been speaking publicly about rights since the early 1830s, and the Declaration of Sentiments said nothing at all about women who were enslaved. Truth's intervention at Akron three years later was aimed partly at that gap: a movement describing women as delicate and in need of protection was not describing anyone she knew. The convention matters because it put the demands in one document, not because nobody had made them before.

Part 1 · What the gin did

Before 1793 the profitable crop in the Lower South was long-staple cotton, which grew only on the sea islands, and rice and indigo elsewhere. Short-staple cotton grew inland but took a worker a full day to clean a pound of it. Whitney's gin, and the improved versions that spread within months because the patent was impossible to enforce, made that labour trivial.

The result was a land rush. Planters moved into the Black Belt of Alabama and the Mississippi Delta, land taken in the removals of the previous lesson, and planted cotton on it. Five new slave states entered the Union between 1812 and 1845.

The crop tied the whole economy together, which is why the politics were never regional in the way they looked. Cotton went to mills in Lowell and Manchester; northern banks financed the planting; northern ships carried it; insurers in New York and London wrote policies on cargoes and sometimes on people. When the war came, the South expected Britain to intervene because British mills ran on Confederate cotton, and the fact that Britain did not intervene surprised almost everyone.

One detail is worth holding on to, because students reasonably ask about it: if the machine was so profitable, why did the man who built it not get rich? Whitney made almost nothing from the gin, because it was simple enough to copy in any workshop and his patent proved unenforceable. The money went to the planters who grew the crop, the factors and banks who financed it and the mills that spun it. Nothing in the gin's economics returned anything at all to the people who planted, hoed and picked, which is a clean demonstration that a new technology distributes its gains to whoever already holds power.

Part 2 · The Second Middle Passage

Congress banned the importation of enslaved people from abroad on 1 January 1808, the earliest date the Constitution allowed. The trade inside the country was untouched, and it became an industry. Tobacco land in Virginia and Maryland was exhausted; cotton land in the Southwest was new and hungry; the difference in prices did the rest.

Firms such as Franklin and Armfield of Alexandria bought in the Upper South and sold in Natchez and New Orleans, moving people by ship down the coast or on foot in coffles chained together, a walk of several hundred miles. Historians estimate about a million people were moved this way between 1790 and 1860, most of them after 1820, and that the trade broke up roughly a third of marriages among enslaved people in the Upper South.

The sources for this are unusually direct. Traders kept ledgers and shipping manifests listing names, ages and prices, which survive. So do the advertisements placed in Black newspapers after 1865 by thousands of freed people searching for a mother, a husband, a child sold away decades earlier, often with the last known buyer's name and the year of the sale. Read a few of those and the scale stops being a statistic.

Part 3 · Resistance that did not look like revolt

Most resistance was daily, deniable and aimed at survival rather than overthrow. People worked at the slowest pace that would not be punished, broke tools that then took days to replace, feigned illness, misplaced things, and burned or spoiled what they could afford to have blamed on accident. Overseers' letters complain about all of it constantly, which is the evidence that it worked.

Some of it was flight without escape: leaving for the woods or a nearby swamp for days or weeks, often to avoid a punishment or to protest a sale, and returning on negotiated terms. Running all the way north was possible mainly from the border states; from Mississippi it almost never was, a distance of a thousand miles through territory where every white adult was effectively a patrol.

The deepest resistance was holding a life together. People married without legal recognition and treated the marriage as binding anyway; named children after parents and grandparents sold away, so that a family tree survived in names when it could not survive in households; learned to read in secret where teaching was a crime; and worshipped in hush harbours out of earshot, where the Exodus story meant something specific. None of this appears in a ledger, which is why the interviews recorded in the 1930s with people who had been enslaved as children matter so much, despite everything an interview seventy years later gets wrong.

Food and craft belonged to this too. Enslaved people kept gardens and poultry, hunted and fished, and in some places sold the surplus at market and held small amounts of cash, which bought better food, occasionally a relative's freedom, and a degree of independence the system never intended to allow. Skilled workers, among them blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers and midwives, had leverage others did not, because punishing them badly enough to stop them working cost the enslaver a scarce skill he could not quickly replace.

Part 4 · Open revolt and what it cost

Armed risings were rare, and they were rare for a reason. Gabriel's conspiracy near Richmond in 1800 was betrayed before it began; Denmark Vesey's plan in Charleston in 1822 was exposed and dozens were hanged. Nat Turner led the one that happened: in August 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia, about seventy followers killed some fifty-five white people over two days before the militia broke them. Turner hid for two months and was hanged in November.

The reprisals killed far more Black people than the rising had killed white ones, many with no connection to it at all. Virginia's legislature then held a genuine debate in the winter of 1832 about gradual emancipation, and voted it down. Having chosen to keep slavery, the South chose to tighten it: new laws across several states made teaching an enslaved person to read a crime, restricted independent Black preaching, limited travel and expanded the patrols.

That sequence is the argument for why the quiet forms were dominant. Revolt in a region where the enslaved were a minority of the armed population could not succeed, and each attempt made daily life measurably worse for everyone. Resistance that could not be proved carried a cost the risings could not. It is also why enslaved people's clearest route to freedom turned out to be a war someone else started, and why, once it did start, nearly 180,000 of them enlisted.