Paths to Texas and Oregon
While the Whig Party generally opposed aggressive expansionism, their opponents, the Democrats, embraced it. The Democratic Party was born in the 1820s. Closely aligned with urban working men in the North and yeoman farmers of the South, it proved the perfect vehicle to promote an expansionist agenda.
Democrats looked back to Thomas Jefferson for inspiration and asserted that the future of the republic was tied to physical growth. They believed the widespread distribution of land and a weak central government would best preserve American democracy and ensure individual prosperity.[2349]Andrew Jackson, the first president from the trans-Appalachian West, garnered fame fighting the Creek and Seminole in the 1810s. He won election in 1828 in part by promising to remove Indian people from valuable lands east of the Mississippi River. Jackson used all available resources, from bribes to the brute force of the US Army, to remove the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole to what is now Oklahoma in the 1830s. Thousands died on the brutal journey, which became known as the “Trail of Tears.” Indian Removal opened up extensive lands to white settlement in what is now the Southeast. It also set the important precedent of a president employing the US Army in the explicit service of territorial expansion.[2350]
Ironically, while Manifest Destiny displaced Indian people by removing them to the Southwest, it advanced along Native American trade routes. Although Mexico became independent from Spain in 1821, Mexican federal control over the northern half of its territory was at best sporadic. Long after the period when the nomadic peoples of the Central Asian Steppe Lands had fallen under the control of sedentary states, the vast Comanche tribe—20,000 members strong in 1840—dominated what is today the American Southwest, controlling trade and demanding payment from Indian people and European settlers in the region, and inhibiting Spanish settlement.
Southern slave holders poured into Mexican Texas in the 1820s and 1830s, enticed by cheap land prices. By 1828 it was apparent to Mexican officials that these American settlers were a problem. By 1830 there were 35,000 Anglos in Texas, and only 8,000 Tejanos (Spanish-speaking Texans). In 1836 the American settlers rebelled against Mexico, and with the help of hundreds of recruits from the American South, fought a brief war for independence. Although Texas's independence seemed to provide evidence to US residents that “Anglo-Saxon” hegemony was inevitable, in reality, as Pekka Hamalainen demonstrates in Chapter 38 in this volume, the Comanche and other tribes continued to exert significant control over the region even after Texas independence.[2351]As Southerners were revolutionizing Texas, thousands of Northerners trekked by covered wagon to the Oregon Country, jointly controlled since 1818 by England and the United States. Starting in the late 1830s, Americans increasingly made the six-month trek to Oregon, despite the brutal terrain and weather conditions. By 1843, 1,000 emigrants a year were departing Missouri along on the Overland Trail. The magnificently fertile soil they found in Oregon more than made up for the difficulties of the journey, most believed. Soon Americans outnumbered the British in the region, while increasing numbers of wagons headed south from the trail to Mexico's Alta California.
A separate movement of 12,000 members of a new religious sect set out by covered wagon in 1846 from Illinois, seeking a land where they could escape persecution for their controversial doctrine of polygamy. Brigham Young and his church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) settled at the Great Salt Lake, on Mexican land that would soon be transferred to the United States at the close of the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848). In 1850 the settlement that the Mormons called “Deseret” became part of the incorporated territory of Utah.
Travel writers extolled the virtues of Oregon and California, convinced that America would soon control those regions, and ordinary travelers expressed that the United States, seemingly more capable than other nations, would eventually claim the entirety of the Pacific Coast. A group of avid expansionists in the Democratic Party who called themselves Young America (in opposition to “old” England) made Manifest Destiny their rallying cry. They called for the “reannexation” of both Oregon and Texas, lands they claimed had wrongfully been signed away from the United States by treaties with England in 1818 and 1819. Some also demanded the immediate annexation of Canada, Cuba, and Mexico's territories of California, Sonora, and New Mexico on the grounds of Manifest Destiny. Soon they had war on their hands.[2352]