essay on westward expansion

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Westward Expansion

By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 30, 2019 | Original: December 15, 2009

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States. To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation’s health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms. (“Those who labor in the earth,” he wrote, “are the chosen people of God.”) In order to provide enough land to sustain this ideal population of virtuous yeomen, the United States would have to continue to expand. The westward expansion of the United States is one of the defining themes of 19th-century American history, but it is not just the story of Jefferson’s expanding “empire of liberty.” On the contrary, as one historian writes, in the six decades after the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion “very nearly destroy[ed] the republic.”

Manifest Destiny

By 1840, nearly 7 million Americans–40 percent of the nation’s population–lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Following a trail blazed by Lewis and Clark , most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity. Like Thomas Jefferson , many of these pioneers associated westward migration, land ownership and farming with freedom. In Europe, large numbers of factory workers formed a dependent and seemingly permanent working class; by contrast, in the United States, the western frontier offered the possibility of independence and upward mobility for all. In 1843, one thousand pioneers took to the Oregon Trail as part of the “ Great Emigration .”

Did you know? In 1853, the Gadsden Purchase added about 30,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States and fixed the boundaries of the “lower 48” where they are today.

In 1845, a journalist named John O’Sullivan put a name to the idea that helped pull many pioneers toward the western frontier. Westward migration was an essential part of the republican project, he argued, and it was Americans’ “ manifest destiny ” to carry the “great experiment of liberty” to the edge of the continent: to “overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us,” O’Sullivan wrote. The survival of American freedom depended on it.

Westward Expansion and Slavery

Meanwhile, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every conversation about the frontier. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had attempted to resolve this question: It had admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the fragile balance in Congress. More important, it had stipulated that in the future, slavery would be prohibited north of the southern boundary of Missouri (the 36º30’ parallel) 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 fester as the nation expanded. The Southern economy grew increasingly dependent on “King Cotton” and the system of forced labor that sustained it. Meanwhile, more and more Northerners came to believed that the expansion of slavery impinged upon their own liberty, both as citizens–the pro-slavery majority in Congress did not seem to represent their interests–and as yeoman farmers. They did not necessarily object to slavery itself, but they resented the way its expansion seemed to interfere with their own economic opportunity.

Westward Expansion and the Mexican War

Despite this sectional conflict, Americans kept on migrating West in the years after the Missouri Compromise was adopted. Thousands of people crossed the Rockies to the Oregon Territory, which belonged to Great Britain, and thousands more moved into the Mexican territories of California , New Mexico and Texas . In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors (Texans of Spanish origin) and won independence from Mexico. They petitioned to join the United States as a slave state.

This promised to upset the careful balance that the Missouri Compromise had achieved, and the annexation of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political priority until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James K. Polk was elected to the presidency in 1844. Thanks to the maneuvering of Polk and his allies, Texas joined 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 , claiming (falsely) that the Mexican army had “invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil.” The Mexican-American War proved to be relatively unpopular, in part because many Northerners objected to what they saw as a war to expand the “slaveocracy.” In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot attached a proviso to a war-appropriations bill declaring that slavery should not be permitted in any part of the Mexican territory that the U.S. might acquire. Wilmot’s measure failed to pass, but it made explicit once again the sectional conflict that haunted the process of westward expansion.

Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States. The acquisition of this land re-opened the question that the Missouri Compromise had ostensibly settled: What would be the status of slavery in new American territories? After two years of increasingly volatile debate over the issue, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay proposed another compromise. It had four parts: first, California would enter the Union as a free state; second, the status of slavery in the rest of the Mexican territory would be decided by the people who lived there; third, the slave trade (but not slavery) would be abolished in Washington , D.C.; and fourth, a new Fugitive Slave Act would enable Southerners to reclaim runaway slaves who had escaped to Northern states where slavery was not allowed.

Bleeding Kansas

But the larger question remained unanswered. In 1854, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed that two new states, Kansas and Nebraska , be established in the Louisiana Purchase west of Iowa and Missouri. According to the terms of the Missouri Compromise, both new states would prohibit slavery because both were north of the 36º30’ parallel. However, since no Southern legislator would approve a plan that would give more power to “free-soil” Northerners, Douglas came up with a middle ground that he called “popular sovereignty”: letting the settlers of the territories decide for themselves whether their states would be slave or free.

Northerners were outraged: Douglas, in their view, had caved to the demands of the “slaveocracy” at their expense. The battle for Kansas and Nebraska became a battle for the soul of the nation. Emigrants from Northern and Southern states tried to influence the vote. For example, thousands of Missourians flooded into Kansas in 1854 and 1855 to vote (fraudulently) in favor of slavery. “Free-soil” settlers established a rival government, and soon Kansas spiraled into civil war. Hundreds of people died in the fighting that ensued, known as “ Bleeding Kansas .”

A decade later, the civil war in Kansas over the expansion of slavery was followed by a national civil war over the same issue. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted, it was the question of slavery in the West–a place that seemed to be the emblem of American freedom–that proved to be “the knell of the union.”

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History of Westward Expansion Essay

Introduction, unfair idea of the manifest destiny, were there other options, works cited.

Westward expansion was one of the key periods in the history of the United States of America. It meant significant economic and agricultural growth for white people but it was not the only reason for the expansion; the United States was experiencing certain increase in population and it was getting harder for people to find a job with a decent salary. Thus, moving to the West became a dream for the most ambitious Americans and their desire to achieve it was stronger than any difficulties that frontiersmen were facing. Due to that ambitiousness, the westward expansion was hard to be called a slow process. What is more, not all Americans saw expansion as an advancement. “As Americans poured West, expansion became a source of national political controversy” (Oakes et al. 370).

Manifest destiny was a very popular belief in the 19 th century; according to that, it was an essential destiny of the people from the United States to settle both developed and undeveloped areas of North America. The idea could not be called fair or at least fact-based; according to the manifest destiny, the westward expansion was seen as a naturally determined process conforming both state and moral law. Manifest destiny involved the idea of special virtues and mission of the colonists and it definitely was a powerful weapon of the government.

With help of this idea, it was able to make people believe in a natural necessity of the United States to expand its boundaries. Supporters of the westward expansion believed it to be able to “strengthen it [the country], providing unlimited economic opportunities for future generations” (Haynes par. 4). Moreover, expansionists also used a religion as an instrument as the right to colonize other territories was believed to be given to Americans by God (Oakes et al. 362). When all is said and done, the manifest destiny does not seem to be reasonable as we know what it means to state a superiority of a particular nation over other ones.

Manifest destiny was proclaiming Americans to be God’s favored people who had to perform their mission by means of expansion. In spite of other opinions on the rights and mission of the United States, this idea was successfully incorporated into the vision of the common goal for all Americans. If the United States had not conducted its policy in accordance with the manifest destiny, it might have experienced a certain economic decline caused by a resource scarcity; a swell in population might have yielded to heavy mortality due to the increased fights for the limited resources and the spate of criminal activities caused by high unemployment.

The discussed historical period could be characterized by strong opposition of the colonialists, Mexicans and Native Americans. Thus, it would be interesting for many people to know if there was a way to prevent the conflict, or it was absolutely inevitable. As for the armed conflict between Mexico and the United States, it was caused by strong turf battle after the annexation of Texas that took place in 1845. The conflict was hard to prevent as both aggrieved parties believed to possess priority of territorial supremacy and they saw no solution of the conflict but war. As for the conflict between colonialists and Native Americans, it was likely to be inevitable as the policy of the US government was conducted in accordance with the manifest destiny that supposed invasion to be feasible for performing the mission of the United States.

To conclude, the idea of manifest destiny has played an important role in preparing the country for the westward expansion. As for the latter, it was the way to avoid possible economic decline of the United States and this is why the conflict was inevitable.

Haynes, Sam Walter. Manifest Destiny . PBS. 2006, Web.

Oakes, James, et al. Of the People : A History of the United States , Volume 1: To 1877 . Oxford University Press, 2012.

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• Westward Expansion (1801-1861)

Westward expansion began in earnest in 1803. Thomas Jefferson negotiated a treaty with France in which the United States paid France $15 million for the Louisiana Territory – 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River – effectively doubling the size of the young nation. The lands acquired stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. Jefferson later owned that he had “stretched the Constitution until it cracked” to acquire Louisiana. As soon as the treaty was signed, he sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark with their Corps of Discovery to find a route to the Pacific Ocean. They returned, with their mission completed, in 1806. American artists explored this new territory and chronicled the settlement of the frontier: landscapes extolling the nation's geographic wonders from Niagara Falls to the Grand Canyon drove and documented westward expansion.

The War of 1812

America’s Manifest Destiny

A Clash of Cultures

The Gold Rush

• Colonization, Revolution, and the New Nation (1754-1820s)
• Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
• Industrial United States (1870-1900)
• Modern America (1890-1930)
• The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945)
• Post War United States (1945-1970s)
• Contemporary United States (1968-present)
• Conflict and Adversity
• Heroes and Leaders
• Humans and the Environment
• Immigration and Migration
• Industry, Invention, and Progress
• Teaching Tools and Resources

Westward Expansion and the Quest to Conserve

Written by: mark thomas, university of virginia, by the end of this section, you will:.

• Compare attitudes toward the use of natural resources from 1890 to 1945

Suggested Sequencing

Use this Narrative after the Chapter 10 Introductory Essay: 1898-1919 to allow students to learn more about the American conservation movement and the steps its leaders took to preserve the natural environment.

The United States in the nineteenth century was characterized by abundance, notably of land and natural resources. Perhaps the most important resource for the expansion of the industrial sector of the American economy was timber. Trees not only covered much of the land and were ripe for harvesting, they also needed to be cut down if agriculture, the dominant sector of the economy, were to produce enough food to sustain the rapidly growing population. Timber was used to build houses and provide furniture and heating for residents; to erect factories and fuel machines; to construct ships to carry cotton (and, after 1870, wheat) across the Atlantic; to build canal barges for carrying produce from the Midwest to Atlantic seaports and imported goods from the seaports to the Midwest; to provide the sleepers on which the iron tracks for railroads rested; and to supply power for the locomotives that rode on the tracks. Gradually, as the cost of shipping goods around the country diminished because the limitations of distance were overcome, other natural resources became more important, most notably, coal, petroleum, and ores of iron, copper, and other minerals. Land was no longer simply being cleared of old-growth forests but was increasingly mined for materials needed by industry. However, sound environmental management was not always a concern, and eventually, there was a price to pay for scarring the land.

Throughout this period of continental expansion, the U.S. government pursued policies that promoted westward expansion and continental settlement. This was a matter not simply of negotiating the transfer of land from France (the Louisiana Purchase in 1803), Spain (the Florida/Adams-Onís Treaty in 1819), and Mexico (the Gadsden Treaty of 1853 for present-day Arizona and New Mexico). It also meant establishing a process by which these new territories should be settled. The governing authority to do so was established a century before by the Northwest Ordinances (1785, 1787), which provided for the systematic survey and sale of land west of the Appalachians.

As the spread of railroads accelerated the process of continental settlement and the potential for future economic opportunities, federal land policies became more generous. The turning point was the Homestead Act of 1862, which carved western lands into parcels of 640 acres and sold them to settlers for a token payment. Later, legislation followed, such as the Timber Culture Act (1873) and the Desert Land Act (1877), each designed to promote rapid transfer of federal land into private hands to boost economic expansion through the use of natural resources.

This map of the United States shows America’s expansion up to 1853.

But the tide was already turning, as attitudes toward the rapid and seemingly unstoppable consumption of natural resources began to change. The Transcontinental Railroad had been completed in 1869, permanently linking the East and West Coasts of the United States and allowing continuous movement of goods and people across the continent. Not only were the lines of communication and transportation complete but the settlement of the continental United States seemed close to completion as well. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave voice to this idea with his address on the significance of the frontier in American history, delivered to the American Historical Association in 1890. With the closing of the frontier came fears that the fundamental character of the American people would change, because it had been shaped by that frontier. Moreover, the belief that America was blessed with a near-infinite abundance of resources was under challenge.

A number of intellectual movements shaped the last decades of the nineteenth century and entered the mainstream of American intellectual and social thought in the first decades of the twentieth. The first was the idea of efficiency. Manufacturers hoping to drive down production costs embraced efficiency by reducing their consumption of resources, whose prices were rising as demand caught up with supply. Efficiency later also became the watchword of Progressivism, which sought to order an increasingly complex and chaotic world by using scientific measurement and the policy insights of experts. Scientific management and national efficiency were key elements of this movement; legislation to curb the perceived excesses of urban industrial life was among its products. Another intersection between Progressivism and the perceived closing of the frontier was the growing belief that not only was the innocence of American economic life being sullied by modernization, technology, urbanization, and the inexorable rise of big business but so was the innocence and purity of the American environment.

The settlement of the West had unleashed creative energies and an entrepreneurial spirit, and it contributed to economic, social, and geographic mobility. But as faith in abundance was increasingly replaced by an awareness of limits and fear of overuse, a budding environmental movement found itself split between those who believed in scientific management to conserve the environment for sustainable future use and those who wanted to preserve it untouched.

There were, in effect, two strands in the movement toward conserving the environment. One was represented by John Muir, a disciple of transcendentalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson and advocate for the preservation of wilderness areas before their wholesale destruction by human settlement and intensive logging. Muir was a pioneering environmentalist who became a highly influential figure through the publication of numerous books and articles on the flora, fauna, and beauty of wilderness areas, especially in the western states. He is perhaps best remembered for his roles in the creation of Yosemite National Park in 1890 and the establishment in 1892 of the Sierra Club, which remains a major force in the conservation movement today. Muir did not found the environmental movement in the United States; George Perkins Marsh, a diplomat deeply interested in conservation, had delivered a speech opposing deforestation as early as 1849 and published Man and Nature , considered the most significant early work in the conservation movement, in 1864. Nor did Muir begin the national park movement; the first national park, Yellowstone, was dedicated in 1872. But he did become the movement’s most famous advocate.

This 1906 photograph shows Theodore Roosevelt (left) and John Muir (right) on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park, with Yosemite Valley in the background.

The other strand of the environmental movement was personified by Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forestry Service, who argued for scientific conservation. This was the purposeful, structured harvesting of forest resources, designed simultaneously to minimize waste and damage to western forests from industrial demands and maximize the potential for future harvesting to support continued economic expansion. Pinchot recommended not the end of logging but rather the efficient use of resources. He wanted to reduce waste by private enterprise on government-owned land and ensure the availability of lumber for the needs of industry. Order, not chaos, was his prevailing philosophy.

Both these strands of thought were reflected in the actions of Theodore Roosevelt, an instinctual preservationist and a pragmatic conservationist who was the political embodiment of the conservation movement. With his friend, fellow hunter and outdoor enthusiast George Bird Grinnell, Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, which later became his brain trust on how to balance the interests of the natural environment with the demands of a modern American economy. Roosevelt was acutely aware of the combination of circumstances that made a solution so urgent. He also understood that the West represented the last frontier of American expansion, and that the tensions between nature and modernization would be fought on land that was under the federal government’s control. He saw it as a national problem that could be solved only by the national government.

Roosevelt was by no means the first U.S. president to take steps to protect the environment. In 1891, Congress had repealed the Timber Culture Act, replacing it with the Forest Reserve Act, which gave the federal government the power to create forest reserves on some 50 million acres of federal land that were set aside over the next decade. But it was Roosevelt, through a combination of publicity and policy, who became known as the conservation president. His actions added an additional 230 million acres to protected terrain in the form of forest reserves, national parks, and game and bird reserves. Much of this was done by presidential edict through executive order, but Congress added to the powers of the presidency by passing the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902, which laid down the basis for irrigation of arid western lands that has shaped the geography of the region over the past century.

Congress and the president joined forces in 1905 to create the U.S. Forest Service. Pinchot was appointed the first head of the agency, with extensive powers to shape conservation policy. But his proposal to extend the precepts of scientifically managed conservation to the national parks angered preservationists such as Muir, who sought protection of wilderness areas.

The rapid expansion of national forests (121 were established during Roosevelt’s presidency, mostly by executive order) created tensions between the president and Congress, especially among representatives from the western states who thought the policy had gone too far too quickly. In 1907, to restrain Roosevelt’s use of presidential power, Congress passed legislation that prevented the establishment of new national forests by executive order. In the same year, the Denver Public Lands Convention, set up by the governor of Colorado and attended mostly by representatives of western ranching and mining interests, called for a moratorium or halt on the setting aside of national forests and national parks, because they wanted to use the land’s natural resources.

Gifford Pinchot, pictured here in 1909, was the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service and an advocate for scientific conservation.

In the end, neither vision of environmentalism prevailed over the other. Congress continued to create national parks and national forests. Roosevelt left the presidency in 1909 and Pinchot was fired from the Forestry Service in 1910 after a political spat with the secretary of the Interior, but both men continued their advocacy of conservation policies as private individuals and both remained influential. (Pinchot became a two-term governor of Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 1930s, pursuing progressive policies including unemployment relief and public works programs.) But the Golden Era of conservation had passed, and the ideas that had fostered it were eclipsed by more the immediate issues of war, prosperity, and depression. It was not until the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 that a new wave of environmentalism began, stimulated by industrialism’s impact not just on the well-being of wilderness areas but on the health and welfare of the American people.

Review Questions

1. A systematic process for the survey and sale of western lands and the orderly admission of new states into the Union was established by the

• Northwest Ordinance
• Missouri Compromise
• Compromise of 1850
• Homestead Act of 1862

2. The goal of federal land policy before the late nineteenth century was

• protecting natural resources
• establishing a national park system
• nationalizing the timber and mining industries
• fostering economic expansion by increasing private ownership of land

3. The conservation movement of the early twentieth century echoed the progressive movement’s emphasis on

• increasing efficiency and scientific management
• expanding the American western frontier
• decreasing immigration to the United States
• increasing the power of the rural western states

4. Efficient use of the environment and its resources through government regulation is best represented by the ideas of

• logging and mining interests
• the Sierra Club
• Gifford Pinchot

5. Actions taken by the U.S. government to protect the environment before the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt included all the following except

• the establishment of federal forest reserves
• the creation of the U.S. Forest Service
• the establishment of Yosemite National Park in California
• the creation of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming

6. Theodore Roosevelt became known as the conservation president largely because

• he was the first president to support actions to protect the environment
• he undertook environmental policy initiatives that generated publicity
• he had unlimited congressional support for his environmental policies
• he united ranching and mining interests in support of federal environmental policies

Free Response Questions

• Explain why the environmental movement developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• Explain how Theodore Roosevelt’s actions reflected the environmental ideas of both John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.

AP Practice Questions

“Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. . . . Moreover, I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all our people, and not monopolized for the benefit of the few . . . Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part.”

Theodore Roosevelt, “New Nationalism Speech,” August 31, 1910 (A speech delivered at the dedication of the John Brown Memorial Park in Osawatomie, Kansas)

1. Which of the following developments represented a continuation of the sentiments in the excerpt?

• Support for laissez-faire economic policies
• Expansion of mechanized farming on the Great Plains during the 1920s and 1930s
• Development of post-World War II suburbs
• Restrictions on pesticide use after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

2. This excerpt most directly reflected a growing belief that

• the United States was transitioning to an urban, industrial economy
• greater government action was needed to counter problems with economic development
• presidential leadership was superior to congressional action
• the growth of popular culture led to uniformity of public opinion

3. This excerpt was most directly shaped by

• creation of the National Park System during the Progressive Era
• the popularity of the Populist Party
• the Great Migration
• tensions between preservationists and conservationists

Primary Sources

Muir, John. Our National Parks .

Muir, John. The Mountains of California .

Muir, John. Wilderness Essays .

Pinchot, Gifford. Breaking New Ground .

Pinchot, Gifford. The Fight for Conservation .

Roosevelt, Theodore. African Game Trails .

Roosevelt, Theodore. Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail .

Roosevelt, Theodore. The Winning of the West .

Suggested Resources

Brinkley, Douglas. The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America . New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

Hays, Samuel P. Conservation and The Gospel Of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 . Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

Worster, Donald. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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The Impact of Westward Expansion on American History

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Published: Mar 8, 2024

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Governmental impacts, social and cultural impacts, environmental impacts.

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