Page 236 - American Stories, A History of the United States

but the peace following the War of 1812 did open the way for a surge of nation building.
As new lands were acquired or opened up for settlement, hordes of pioneers often rushed in. 9.1
Improved transportation soon gave many of them access to distant markets, and advances in pro-
cessing raw materials led to the first stirrings of industrialization. Politicians looked for ways to
encourage growth and expansion, and an active judiciary promoted economic development and 9.2
asserted the priority of national over state and local interests. To guarantee the peace and security
essential for internal progress, statesmen proclaimed a foreign policy designed to insulate America
from external involvements. A new nation of great potential wealth and power was emerging.
9.3

Expansion and Migration

9.1 What key forces drove American expansion westward during this period?

P eace with Great Britain in 1815 allowed Americans to shift their attention from

Europe and the Atlantic to the vast interior of North America.
Between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, settlement had already
begun, especially in the new states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In the
lower Mississippi Valley, the former French colony of Louisiana had been admitted
as a state in 1812, and a thriving settlement existed around Natchez in the Mississippi
Territory. Elsewhere in the trans-Appalachian west, white settlement was sparse, and
much land remained in Indian hands. U.S. citizens, eager to expand into lands held by
Indian nations and Spain, used diplomacy, military action, force, and fraud to “open”
lands for settlement and westward migration.

Extending the boundaries
Postwar expansionists turned their attention first to Spanish holdings, which included
Florida and much of the present-day American West. The Spanish claimed possession
of land extending along the Gulf Coast from Florida to the Mississippi. Between 1810
and 1812, however, the United States had annexed the area between the Mississippi and
the Perdido River in what became Alabama, claiming that it was part of the Louisiana
Purchase. The remainder, known as East Florida, became a prime object of territorial
ambition for President James Monroe and his energetic secretary of state, John Quincy
Adams. Adams had a grand design for continental expansion that required nullify-
ing or reducing Spanish claims west and east of the Mississippi; he eagerly awaited an
opportunity to apply pressure for that purpose.
General Andrew Jackson provided that opportunity. In 1816, U.S. troops crossed into
East Florida in pursuit of hostile Seminole Indians. This raid touched off a wider conflict, and
after taking command in late 1817, Jackson went beyond his official orders and occupied East
Florida in April and May 1818. This operation became known as the First Seminole War.
In November 1818, Secretary Adams informed Spain that the United States had
acted in self-defense and that further conflict would be avoided only if it ceded East
Florida to the United States. The Madrid government, weakened by Latin American
revolutions and the breaking up of its empire, was in no position to resist American
bullying. As part of the Adams–Onís Treaty, signed on February 22, 1819, Spain relin- adams–onís treaty Signed by
quished Florida. In return, the United States assumed $5 million of the financial claims Secretary of State John Quincy
of American citizens against Spain. Adams and Spanish minister Luis
A strong believer that the United States had a continental destiny, Adams also de Onís in 1819, this treaty allowed
for U.S. annexation of Florida
made Spain give up its claim to the Pacific coast north of California, thus opening a
path for future American expansion. Taking advantage of Spain’s desire to keep its title
to Texas—part of which the United States had claimed as part of the Louisiana Pur-
chase—Adams induced the Spanish minister Luis de Onís to agree to a new boundary
between American and Spanish territory that ran north of Texas but extended to the
Pacific. Great Britain and Russia still had competing claims to the Pacific Northwest,
but the United States was now in a better position to acquire a Pacific coastline.
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