Selling federal lands, mostly taken from Native Americans through treaties or conflict, was a major source of revenue for the government and officials were eager to survey and sell large parcels to new settlers. After the War of 1812, Americans settled the Great Lakes region rapidly thanks in part to aggressive land sales by the federal government. Some reasoned that westward expansion would counterbalance the increasingly industrialized and urbanized northeast, assuring that the republic of the United States would continue to be rooted in the ideals and values of Jefferson’s yeoman farmer (non-slaveholding, small landowning, family farmers). Politically, many feared that if the United States did not occupy the West, then the British would. On many of the overworked farms of the East, soil fertility was declining, making the cheap land of the West more and more attractive. Americans were increasingly land-hungry as populations in cities and towns grew. The population of the United States grew rapidly in the period from 1800-1850, rocketing from about five million to over twenty million in a fifty-year period. The rapid western expansion of the 1840s was largely a result of demographic, economic, and political pressures on the east coast. Rapid GrowthĪt the turn of the century, the overwhelming majority of American citizens lived east of the Appalachian Mountains just fifty years later, about half of all Americans lived west of the mountains, a tremendous demographic shift. At the same time, the treaty frustrated those Americans who considered Texas a part of the Louisiana Purchase.
In the South, the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 legally secured Florida for the United States, though it did nothing to end the resistance of the Seminole tribe against American pioneers and settlers. President Thomas Jefferson set the stage for expansionism with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the movement grew in the 1830s with President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, which “freed” land east of the Mississippi for the expanding population. The Louisiana Purchase and the journey of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery captured the imagination of many Americans, who dedicated themselves to the economic exploitation of the western lands and the expansion of American influence and power. Americans had been pushing boundaries since the colonial era, most notably across the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ohio River Valley. The American expansionist movement did not begin with Manifest Destiny and the push westward in the 1840s. Describe how Manifest Destiny influenced Westward Expansion.Describe how 19th century American culture led to the idea of Manifest Destiny.
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