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Westward Movement Research Paper

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Sanghee Song Professor Jessie History 11 21 April 2015 Westward Movement For now, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every discussion about the frontier. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had tried to settle this question: It had let in Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, conserving the breakable balance in Congress. It had specified that in the future, slavery would be banned north of the southern boundary of Missouri in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. However, the Missouri Compromise did not apply to new territories that were not part of the Louisiana Purchase, and so the issue of slavery continued to suppurate as the nation expanded. The Southern economy got larger increasingly conditional on “King Cotton” and the system of forced labor …show more content…

In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors and won independence from Mexico. They appealed to join the United States as a slave state. This promised to distress the careful stability that the Missouri Compromise had attained, and the seizure of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political prime concern until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James K. Polk was voted for the presidency in 1844. As a result of the steering of Polk and his associated, Texas participated in the union as a slave state in February 1846; in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state. That same month, Polk declared war against Mexico, asserting that the Mexican army had “invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil.” The war showed to be comparatively unpopular, in part because many Northerners objected to what they saw as a war to expand the “slaveocracy.” In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot fastened a condition to a war-appropriations bill proclaimed that slavery should not

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Another reason was The Wilmot Proviso,In August 1846, Representative David Wilmot, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, proposed an expansion to a war appropriations bill. His revision, known as the Wilmot Proviso, recommended that in any region the United States picked up from Mexico “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist.” It was progressively understood that the Mexican individuals were against servitude and that the area was unsatisfactory for its spread, and in this manner the domain taken from it would be a free region upon its alliance into the Union. The annexation however contributed another conflict that sparked a division between who are with or against the annexation of northern mexico, because the extra land acquired from the northern mexico will be added to the union as a free state rather than a slave state which will consequently increase the number and power of free states over the slave states. Driven by Senator John C. Calhoun, the position of the anti-annexation powers was established in two primary convictions: that extension would aggravate sectionalism to at the expense of the Union, and that the force of the South would be extraordinarily decreased by the addition of

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pg. 315 ) Slavery still lingered into the northern parts of the boundary, but no move had been made to move the line across the Mississippi River and into the Louisiana territory. At the time, the Missouri territory was the Louisiana territory except the Louisiana state and the Arkansas territory, and southerners were vastly moving to the west with their slaves. (Txt. pg.

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Although in the Missouri Compromise, Missouri became a slave state and Maine became a free state, it was an example of disunity. All new states north of the Mason-Dixon Line would be free and new states southward would be slave states. As a result, there was also an unbalanced sectional population between the North and South. (Doc. E & F).

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After the Civil War, the United States began to expand Westward. Much of this expansion was due to the transportation revolution. Railroads were spreading; roads, canals, and steamboats were improving. Allowing for more ways to travel West. As the country entered the Industrial Revolution, not only were people migrating within the country but immigrants began to emigrate to America.

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Due to the fact that the South had more of an agricultural economy, the Southerners thought that the states should have the right to decide whether residents could own slaves, rather than the federal government. In 1846 a congressman from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot introduced a bill to the House of Representatives called the Wilmot Proviso. This said slavery would not be allowed in any western territory acquired from Mexico. Of course most of the politicians from the North loved the idea, while the politicians from the South did not. The Missouri Compromise on March 3, 1820 (also called the Compromise of 1820) was the first major legislative compromise that was passed to draw a line between slave and free territory.

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