Chapter 14

Manifest destiny gave a new strength to racial superiority Anglo-Saxon

Race was the key to the history of nations. Blacks, Indians, Hispanics and
Catholics were looked at as enemies to this movement

The bronze Statue of Freedom by Thomas

Crawford is the crowning feature of the Dome of
the United States Capitol. The statue is a
classical female figure with long, flowing hair
wearing a helmet with a crest composed of an
eagles head and feathers. The helmet is
encircled by nine stars.

The plaster model of the statue, which had been in storage for 25 years, was
reassembled and restored in the basement rotunda of the Russell Senate Office
Building, where it was returned to public display in January 1993. In late 2008 the
model was relocated to the new Capitol Visitor Center, where it is now a focal
point of Emancipation Hall.

The original and final designs for Thomas Crawfords

Statue of Freedom

Exploring
the West

The speed and success of

this expansion were a
source of deep national
pride that created
appetites for further
expansion. Many
Americans looked eagerly
westward to the vast
unsettled reaches of the
Louisiana Purchase to
Texas, Sant Fe to trade
with Mexico and two the
far east

Not until the 1820s were

American companies able to
challenge British dominance of
the trans-Mississippi fir trade. In
1824 William Henry Ashley of
the Rocky Mountain Fur
Company

Fur Trading Forts

1800s

Government
Sponsored
Exploration

Major Stephen Long mapped the Great

Plains in the years 1819-1820 was pat of a
show of force meant to frighten British fur
trappers out of the West

The federal government sold the western public lands at

expense of Indian removal by making long term
commitment to commentate the Indian people.

Expansion and
Indian Policy

Encroachment on Indian Territory was not long in coming.

The territory was crossed by the Santa Fe Trail
established in 1821, in the 1840, the northern part was
crossed by the heavily traveled Overland's to California,
Oregon and the Mormon community in Utah.

The Politics
of Expansion

What a prodigious growth this English race, especially the

American branch of it, is having! How soon will it subdue and
occupy al l the wild parts of this continent and of the islands
adjacent. No prophecy, however seemingly extravagant, as
to future achievements in this way [is] likely to equal the
reality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=UlszTacqsSc
American Progress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=4xlzJ6q3iIs

The Trans-Mississippi West, 1830s 1840s

The Whigs celebrated Clay's vision of the "American System" that promoted rapid
economic and industrial growth in the United States. Whigs demanded
government support for a more modern, market-oriented economy, in which skill,
expertise and bank credit would count for more than physical strength or land
ownership. Whigs sought to promote faster industrialization through high tariffs, a
business-oriented money supply based on a national bank and a vigorous
program of government funded "internal improvements," especially expansion of
the road and canal systems. To modernize the inner America, the Whigs helped
create public schools, private colleges, charities, and cultural institutions. Many
were pietistic Protestant reformers who called for public schools to teach moral
values and proposed prohibition to end the liquor problem.
The Democrats harkened to the Jeffersonian ideal of an egalitarian agricultural
society, advising that traditional farm life bred republican simplicity, while
modernization threatened to create a politically powerful caste of rich aristocrats
who threatened to subvert democracy. In general the Democrats enacted their
policies at the national level, while the Whigs succeeded in passing modernization
projects in most states.

The Overland Trail

The Midwest who had been hard hit by the Panic of

1837 and was a reason for moving but economic
motives do not tell the whole story. Many men were
motivated by as sense of adventure by a desire to
experience the unknown or using a common nineteenth.

By 1860 nearly 300,000 men, women and children

had braved disease, starvation, the Rocky
Mountains and Indian attacks to travel overland to
Oregon and California.

Oregon
Territory

Land based groups

scoured the region for
beaver skins as well. In
this first frontier of
inclusion there were
frequent contacts, many of
them integrated both
Indians and Europeans.

The Midwest farmers who would make up the majority of

Oregon's permanent settlers, carried on the wave of enthusiasm
known as Oregon fever and Oregon fever and lured by free
land and patriotism. By 1845, Oregon boasted 5,000 American
settlers, most of them living in the Willamette Valley and laying
claim to lands to which they had as yet no legal right, because
neither Britain not the United states had concluded land treaties
with Oregons Indian peoples.

President James K. Polk coined the slogan fifty-four of fight.

Suggesting that the United States would go to war if it didn't get
control of all the territory south of 5450 or fight. In June 1846,
Britain and the United States concluded a treaty but leaving the
island of Vancouver in British hands. The British then quietly
wound up their declining fur trade in the region. In 1849 the
Hudson Bay Company closed Fort Vancouver and moved its
operation to Victoria.

Hudson Bay Companys director Dr. John McLoughlin had

been ordered by the British government to recruit new
settlers to the Oregon from America. McLoughlin disobeyed
and recruited Americans into Oregon.

Pierre-Jean De Smet (30 January 1801 23 May 1873), also

known as Pieter-Jan De Smet, was a Belgian Roman
Catholic priest and member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits),
active in missionary work among the Native Americans of the
Midwestern United States in the mid-19th century.
His extensive travels as a missionary were said to total
180,000 miles. He was known as the "Friend of Sitting Bull",
because he persuaded the Sioux war chief to participate in
negotiations with the United States government for the 1868
Treaty of Fort Laramie

The Whitman massacre (also known as the Walla Walla

massacre and the Whitman Incident) was the murder of
Oregon missionaries Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife
Narcissa, along with eleven others, on November 29, 1847.
They were killed by Cayuse and Umatilla Native Americans
who accused him of having poisoned 200 Cayuse in his
medical care.[1] The incident began the Cayuse War. It took
place in present-day southeastern Washington state, near the
town of Walla Walla, and was one of the most notorious
episodes in the U.S. settlement of the Pacific Northwest. The
event was the climax of several years of complex interaction
between the Whitmans, who had led the first wagon train
along the Oregon Trail, and the local Native Americans

The Santa Fe
Trade

Bent Fort on the Arkansas River in what is now eastern

Colorado, which did a brisk trade in beaver skills and buffalo
robes.

Mexican
Texas

The most colorful figures were mestizo vaqueros which were

known for horsemanship. Americanization of the cowboy.

Americans
in Texas

Connecticut born former

went out to colonize the
Mexican region. In 1820
Moses Austin received a
large land grant. He died
and his son Steven Austin
continued the plan. Led by
Stephen Austin American
settlers demanded greater
autonomy in Mexico. The
Tejano the Mexican elite
joined them.

1. known as the Father of Texas, led the second and ultimately successful
colonization of the region by bringing 300 families from the United States.
2.Also, Austin organized small, informal armed groups to protect the colonists,
which evolved into the Texas Rangers.
3.When Austin was eleven years old, his family sent him to be educated at
Bacon Academy in Colchester, Connecticut and then at Transylvania University
in Lexington, Kentucky, from which he graduated in 1810. After graduating,
Austin began studying to be a lawyer; at age twenty-one he served in the
legislature of the Missouri Territory. As a member of the territorial legislature, he
was "influential in obtaining a charter for the struggling Bank of St. Louis."
4. Austin was the first Secretary of State of the new Republic of Texas
5.Austin is remembered in Texas history for his many efforts on behalf of Texas
before, during, and immediately after Texas' Revolution with Mexico. His
contributions to Texas included: long and perilous pilgrimages to Mexico on
behalf of Texas; his unwillingness to counsel his people to take up arms against
the Mexican government as long as any hope for peace remained; his firm and
decided voice, speaking words of encouragement and hope during the darkest
days of the revolution; and his laborious travels in the United States to obtain
needed support for his struggling countrymen.

The Austin settlement of 1821 was

followed by 26 additional settlements
along the Sabine and Colorado Rivers.
These large settlements were highly
organized farming enterprises whose
principal crop was cotton grown by
African American salve labor. By the
early 1830s Americans in Texas
ignoring the border between Mexican
Texas and the United States were
sending an estimated $500,000 worth
of goods mostly cotton yearly to New
Orleans.

Stephan Austin promised Mexico before he made the Texas

colonies that he would 1) tune settlements into being catholic
2) no slavery 3) settlers would be Mexican: All three he
ignored.

As the Mexican government restricted American immigration

outlawed slavery, levied customs duties and taxes and planned
other measures Americans seethed and talked of rebellion.
Bolster their causes were as many as 20,000 additional
Americans many of them openly expansionist who flooded into
Teas after 1830. These most recent settlers did not intend to
become Mexican citizens. Instead they planned to take over
Texas

Mexico had abolished

slavery yet American
settlers brought in
slaves. Mexicos ruler
General Antonio Lopez
de Santa Anna sent an
army in 1835 to
impose central control,
to give liberty to our
slaves and make
slaves of ourselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=2UHtbbbNzZU

http://www.youtube.com/wat
ch?v=vAMZQlAQAyQ

Several months previously, Texians had driven all Mexican troops out of Mexican Texas.
About 100 Texians were then garrisoned at the Alamo. The Texian force grew slightly with
the arrival of reinforcements led by eventual Alamo co-commanders James Bowie and
William B. Travis. On February 23, approximately 1,500 Mexicans marched into San Antonio
de Bxar as the first step in a campaign to retake Texas. For the next 10 days the two
armies engaged in several skirmishes with minimal casualties. Aware that his garrison could
not withstand an attack by such a large force, Travis wrote multiple letters pleading for more
men and supplies, but fewer than 100 reinforcements arrived there. In the early morning
hours of March 6, the Mexican Army advanced on the Alamo. After repulsing two attacks,
the Texians were unable to fend off a third attack. As Mexican soldiers scaled the walls,
most of the Texian soldiers withdrew into interior buildings. Defenders unable to reach these
points were slain by the Mexican cavalry as they attempted to escape. Between five and
seven Texians may have surrendered; if so, they were quickly executed. Most eyewitness
accounts reported between 182 and 257 Texians dead, while most historians of the Alamo
agree that around 600 Mexicans were killed or wounded. Several noncombatants were sent
to Gonzales to spread word of the Texian defeat. The news sparked both a strong rush to
join the Texian army and a panic, known as "The Runaway Scrape", in which the Texian
army, most settlers, and the new Republic of Texas government fled from the advancing
Mexican Army.
Within Mexico, the battle has often been overshadowed by events from the Mexican
American War of 184648. In 19th-century Texas, the Alamo complex gradually became
known as a battle site rather than a former mission. The Texas Legislature purchased the
land and buildings in the early part of the 20th century and designated the Alamo chapel as
an official Texas State Shrine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU-Rj7k3U8U

On March 13, 1836 Santa

Annas army stormed the
Alamo a mission compound in
San Antonio killing its 187
American and Tejano
defenders. Remember the
Alamo became the Texans
rallying cry. In April forces
under Sam Houston a former
governor of Tennessee routed
Santa army at the Battle of
San Jancito.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=JpIHk7myFE4

A flag carried at the

Battle of San Jacinto

Remember the Alamo Battle of San Jacinto River: On April 21,

1836 at the San Jacinto River in eastern Texas, Santa Anna
though he has Sam Houston trapped. Against the judgment of
Houston his men suggested to attack Santa Anna. The Texans
completely surprised their opponents and won an overwhelming
victory. On May 14, 1836 Santa Anna signed a treaty granted
the independence of the Republic of Texas.

http://www.youtube.com/wat
ch?v=fC3NS-bk8sU

The Republic
of Texas

1844 Election:
James Polk vs.
Henry Clay both
From Tennessee

In April 1844 a letter by John Calhoun whom Tyler had

appointed secretary state was leaked to the press. It
linked the idea of absorbing Texas directly to the goal of
strengthening slavery in the United Sates. Some
southern leaders hoped that Texas could by divided into
several states thus further enhancing the south power.
Henry Clay and John Tyler met at Clays Kentucky
plantation. They agreed to issue letters rejecting
immediate annexation on the ground that I might
provoke war with Mexico. Clay and Van Buren were
reacting to the slavery issue in the traditional manner by
tying to keep it out of national politics

Whig Party lead by Henry Clay took the noncommittal

position of annexing Texas. The Democrats nominated
their first dark horse candidate James K Polk of
Tennessee. Polk called for the occupation of Oregon
ad the re annexation of Teas at the earliest practicable
period. 54 40 or fight..

A rare
photograph of
wagons on their
way to Oregon
during the 1840s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=jXjsZc1my1o

MexicanAmerican War

James Polk was going to create a war like atmosphere with is

war like stance with 54 40 or fight and the annexation of
Texas. Polk wins the election through manifest destiny. He
created a not strong deck of cards picture with his campaign

http://youtu.be/-RUqBVKgXZw

In April American soldiers under Zachary Taylor moved into

the region between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande
land claimed by both countries on the disputed border
between Texas and Mexico. Conflicts and pressure was
constant. News papers provoked war.
Shots were fired but unclear who provoked the initial
attacks. Lincoln question whether the Mexicans had
actually inflicted causalities on American soil as Polk
claimed. He introduced a resolution asking the president to
specify the precise spots. Polk never did. Lincoln question
now can Polk also invade Canada.
Henry David Thoreau was jailed in Massachusetts in1846
for refusing to pay taxes. Civil Disobediance was written.

Causes of the
MexicanAmerican War

More than 60,000 volunteers

enlisted and did most of the
fighting. In June 1846 a
band of American
insurrectionist proclaimed
California freed from
Mexican control and named
Captain John C. Fremont
head of a small scientific
expedition in the Wests. A
month later the US Navy
sailed into Monterey and San
Francisco harbors to raise
the American flag.

In the spring of 1846 there was a controversy over Oregon and

tensions with Mexico grew more serious. America supported
Texas claim of the land North of the Rio Grande. Polk sent
General Zachary Taylor to Texas and by October force of 3,500
American were on the Nueces with order to defend Texas in the
event of a Mexican invasion. If Mexico declared war Polk stated
that his admirals would take over California ports. Thomas
Larkin was the California counsel

While the immediate cause of the war was the U.S. annexation of Texas (Dec., 1845),
other factors had disturbed peaceful relations between the two republics. In the United
States there was agitation for the settlement of long-standing claims arising from
injuries and property losses sustained by U.S. citizens in the various Mexican
revolutions.
Another major factor was the American ambition, publicly stated by President Polk, of
acquiring California, upon which it was believed France and Great Britain were casting
covetous eyes. Despite the rupture of diplomatic relations between Mexico and the
United States that followed congressional consent to the admission of Texas into the
Union, President Polk sent John Slidell to Mexico to negotiate a settlement. Slidell was
authorized to purchase California and New Mexico, part of which was claimed by
Texas, and to offer the U.S. government's assumption of liability for the claims of U.S.
citizens in return for boundary adjustments.
When Mexico declined to negotiate, the United States prepared to take by force what it
could not achieve by diplomacy. The war was heartily supported by the outright
imperialists and by those who wished slave-holding territory extended. The settlement
of the Oregon boundary dispute (June, 1846), which took place shortly after the official
outbreak of hostilities, seemed to indicate British acquiescence, for it granted the
United States a free hand.

Thomas Oliver Larkin (September 16, 1802 - October 27, 1858)

was an early American businessman in Alta California, and was
appointed to be the United States' first and only consul to
Mexican Alta California. After the Mexican-American War ended
in 1848, Larkin moved to San Francisco, and was a signer of
the original California Constitution

Mr. Polks War

Map 13.2 The Mexican War, 1846 - 1848

The plaza in San Antonio not long

after the
United States annexed Texas in
1845.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=4k3Q5qwkTQk

Mexico ceded Texas,

California, New Mexico,
Arizona, Nevada, Utah
to the United States/ In
exchange the United
States Paid Mexico $15
Million in exchange. The
Gadsden Purchas was
bought from Mexico in
1853 and Alaska was
acquired from Russia in
1867

Treaty of
Guadalupe
Hidalgo

With the defeat of its army and the fall of the capital, Mexico
entered into negotiations to end the war. The treaty called for
the United States to pay $15 million to Mexico and pay off the
claims of American citizens against Mexico up to $3.25
million. It gave the United States the Rio Grande boundary for
Texas, and gave the U.S. ownership of California, and a large
area comprising New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and
parts of Wyoming and Colorado. Mexicans in those annexed
areas had the choice of relocating to within Mexico's new
boundaries or of receiving American citizenship with full civil
rights. Over 90% chose the latter.
The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 3814. The
opponents of this treaty were led by the Whigs, who had
opposed the war and rejected Manifest Destiny in general,
and rejected this expansion in particular

A map of the United States from 1848

The Press
and Popular
War
Enthusiasm

War News from Mexico

The Penny Press around 10 years old now followed wars as

a major source of news. The Penny Press made heroes of
Generals Taylor and Scott which further their political
careers.

Shows the increase in American newspapers from

1775-1835

Over 400,000 New Yorkers celebrate

Americas victorys over Mexico at
Veracruz and Buena Vista

California
Exploration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDkqvqqjMAA

a Spanish-speaking, mostly
Roman Catholic people, or of
Latin American descent,
regardless of race, born in
California from the first Spanish
colonies established by the
Portol expedition in 1769 to the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in
1848, in which Mexico ceded
California to the United States.
Descendants of Californios are
also sometimes referred to as
Californios. The much larger
population of indigenous peoples
of California were not Californios
because they were not native
Spanish-speakers. Neither were
the significant numbers of nonSpanish-speaking California-born
children of resident foreigners

Sutter's Mill

Although there were many gold rushes in world history, the California gold rush was a unique event. Unlike
other places, the gold in California was both plentiful and easy to get--at least at first. The result would be
profound changes in California, America, and the entire world.
Gold was first discovered in California by James Marshall in early 1848. Later that year, gold seekers from
the west coast converged on the American River--50 miles or so from Sacramento--where Marshall first saw
the shiny metal. Within a matter of months, word spread eastward and by 1849 thousands were en route to
California. Some traveled overland on the already established Oregon-California Trail. Others traveled by
ship around the tip of South America. Still others took shortcuts across Panama and Mexico. Regardless of
the route, it was an intensely difficult journey.
The gold-seekers were dubbed "49ers" because most left home in 1849. Importantly, 49ers were not
uniquely American. Quite the contrary, the California gold rush was a world event, attracting gold-seekers
from Mexico, China, Germany, France, Turkey--nearly every country in the world.
Although gold was easy to find at first, it quickly became an difficult enterprise that yielded less and less.
Those who did find gold often spent it all on the basic necessities of life. The biggest moneymakers were
entrepreneurs who supplied the gold miners with much-needed supplies and services.
The legacy of the gold rush is substantial. First, gold brought people from around the world--people who
stayed to form the multi-cultural nucleus of California that exists to this day. Secondly, the gold rush pulled
America westward, ensuring that California and the rest of the west would become a part of the United
States. Lastly, the gold rush awakened America to the idea of high risk entrepreneurialism, a concept that
our capitalistic society continues to nurture.

Gold in
California

In the early days of 1848 and 1849, it was not uncommon for a
miner to dig $2000 of gold a day. But the average miner might
have been lucky to find $10 per day.
As time went on the easy gold was all found. Although some
made it rich, most of the others were lucky if they made enough
to eat. After 1852 most of the surface gold was mined, panning
for gold was no longer profitable.
This picture shows a 49er with his mule and supplies.
Thousands of miners died on the journey or in the diggings.
Many died from disease, or from accidents such as drowning in
a river.

A watercolor of a scene on a ranch near

Monterey

http://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=GG_KO-UnXBU

To return home sooner, he was reassigned by the ship's owners to a

different ship, the Alert. Of the return trip around Cape Horn in the middle
of the Antarctic winter, Dana gives the classic account. He describes
terrifying storms and incredible beauty, giving vivid descriptions of
icebergs, which he calls incomparable. The most incredible part perhaps is
the weeks and weeks it took to negotiate passage against winds and
storms -- all the while having to race up and down the ice-covered rigging
to furl and unfurl sails. At one point he has an infected tooth, and his face
swells up so that he is unable to work for several days, despite the need
for all hands. After the Horn has been rounded he describes the scurvy
that afflicts members of the crew. In White-Jacket, Herman Melville wrote,
"But if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana's
unmatchable Two Years Before the Mast. But you can read, and so you
must have read it. His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been
written with an icicle."[7]
On September 22, 1836, Dana arrived back in Massachusetts.[8]
He thereupon enrolled at what is now Harvard Law School, then called the
Dane Law School. He graduated from there in 1837 and was admitted to
the bar in 1840.[9] He went on to specialize in maritime law. In the October
1839 issue of a magazine, he took a local judge, one of his own instructors
in law school, to task for letting off a ship's captain and mate with a slap on
the wrist for murdering the ship's cook, beating him to death for not "laying
hold" of a piece of equipment. The judge had sentenced the captain to
ninety days in jail and the mate to thirty days.[10][11]
In 1841 Dana published The Seaman's Friend, which became a standard
reference on the legal rights and responsibilities of sailors, He defended
many common seamen in court.
During his voyages he had kept a diary, and in 1840 (coinciding with his
admission to the bar) he published a memoir, Two Years Before the Mast.
The term, "before the mast" refers to sailors' quarters, which were located
in the forecastle (the ship's bow), officers' quarters being near the stern.
His writing evidences his later sympathy for the oppressed. With the
California Gold Rush later in the decade, Two Years Before the Mast would
become highly sought after as one of the few sources of information on
California.

A contemporary depiction of mining operations

Sacramento, California was a location for Gold Mining

Minorities in
Gold Rush

The Chinese miners were welcomed in California in the beginning. However, the white gold
miners began to resent the Chinese miners, feeling that they were discovering gold that the
white miners deserved. In 1852, a special foreign miner's tax aimed at the Chinese was
passed by the California legislature (see 1852 section on Foreign Miner's Tax from Asian
American Experience in the U.S. for more information). This tax required a payment of three
dollars each month at a time when Chinese miners were making approximately six dollars a
month. Tax collectors could legally take and sell the property of those miners who refused or
could not pay the tax. Fake tax collectors made money by taking advantage of people who
couldn't speak English well, and some tax collectors, both false and real, stabbed or shot
miners who couldn't or wouldn't pay the tax. During the 1860's, many Chinese were expelled
from the mine fields and were forced to find other types of jobs.

Californios referred
to themselves as
gente de razon
(people capable of
reason). For the
common good
Indians were
required to continue
to work for the new
landholders.

California
Mining
Camps

http://www.youtube.com/watc
h?v=4PmWp7Y3buU

Mining Cities,
Yreka, Shasta,
Sacramento,
Coloma, San
Francisco

Poker Flat, Angels Camp, Whiskey Bar,

Placerville and Mariposa were different
examples of Mining Camps

In San Francisco there were more reliable ways of making

money. Supply the miners with goods and services. Huntington
Bank, Stanford Family and Wells Fargo Companies made their
market in the early stages of San Francisco

The majority of women in the early mining caps were

prostitutes. Some grew rich or married respectably but
most died young from venereal disease, violence or
drugs.

Politics of Manifest
Destiny

http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=LQQJDR_rX30

Emerson stated that taking Mexicos

territories was like taking arsenic.

The Free
Soil
Movement

The Free Soil Party was a short-lived political party in the

United States active in the 1848 and 1852 presidential
elections, and in some state elections. Founded in Buffalo, New
York, it was a third party and a single-issue party that largely
appealed to and drew its greatest strength from New York State.
The party leadership consisted of former anti-slavery members
of the Whig Party and the Democratic Party. Its main purpose
was opposing the expansion of slavery into the western
territories, arguing that free men on free soil comprised a
morally and economically superior system to slavery. They
opposed slavery in the new territories (agreeing with the Wilmot
Proviso) and sometimes worked to remove existing laws that
discriminated against freed African Americans in states such as
Ohio.
The party membership was largely absorbed by the Republican
Party in 1854

Free-soilers were willing to allow slavery to continue in the

existing slave states because of the need for a Union not
because they did not approve of slavery/ They were unwilling
to allow he extension of slavery to new and unorganized
territory. If the South were successful in extending slavery
northern farmers who moved west would have a disadvantage
with large planters using slave labor. Free soiler insisted that
northern values of freedom and individualism would be
destroyed if the slave based southern labor system were
allowed to spread

Frederick Basiat was a firm believer of the free

market system

Senator Charles Sumner of South Carolina is

beating Massachusetts Senator Preston Brooks on
the Senate floor over slavery.

Election of
1848

The United States presidential election of 1848 was the 16th quadrennial presidential election, held on
Tuesday, November 7, 1848. It was won by Zachary Taylor of the Whig Party, who ran against former
President Martin Van Buren of the Free Soil Party and Lewis Cass of the Democratic Party. Incumbent
President James K. Polk, having achieved all of his major objectives in one term and suffering from
declining health, kept his promise not to seek re-election. The contest was the first presidential election
that took place on the same day in every state.[1]
The Whigs in 1846-47 had focused all their energies on condemning Polk's war policies. They had to
reverse course quickly. In February 1848 Polk surprised everyone with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
that ended the Mexican-American War and gave the United States vast new territories (including what are
now the states of California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico).
The Whigs in the Senate voted 2-1 to approve the treaty. Then, in the summer, the Whigs nominated the
hero of the war, Zachary Taylor.[2] While he did promise no more future wars, he did not condemn the
Mexican-American War or criticize Polk, and the Whigs had to follow his lead. They shifted their attention
to the new issue of whether slavery could be banned from the new territories.
The choice of Taylor was made almost out of desperation; he was not clearly committed to Whig principles,
but he was popular for leading the war effort. The Democrats had a record of victory, peace, prosperity,
and the acquisition of both Oregon and the Southwest. It appeared almost certain that they would win
unless the Whigs picked Taylor. His victory made him one of only two Whigs to be elected president before
the party ceased to exist in the 1850s; the other was William Henry Harrison, who had also been a general
and war hero, but died a month after assuming office

Threat of Secession
Drafting a constitution that prohibited slavery, California applied for admission as a free state in 1850. At that
time, there were thirty states in the Union, equally split between slave and free states. Hence, Taylor's proposed
solution of allowing the residents in the Mexican Cession to decide the issue of slavery in new state
constitutions would have added two or three free states to the Union, upsetting the delicate North-South
balance in the Senate.
With much at stake and tensions mounting, the stage was set for either a clash or a compromise. Many
southern Democrats responded to Taylor's position by calling for a secession convention. A firm believer in
national supremacy, Taylor told a group of southern leaders that he would hang anyone who tried to disrupt the
Union by force or by conspiracy. In this atmosphere, wiser heads worked feverishly to come up with some
compromise that would allow the controversy to pass. The debate that ensued over the proposed solutions was
one of the most prolonged, significant, and contentious episodes in American history. Political luminaries of the
time, such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and William H. Seward contributed weighty
arguments and opinions to the discussion that captivated the country from January to September of 1850.
Clay, Webster, and others hoped that a strong fugitive slave law and the organization of territorial, rather than
state, governments for New Mexico and Utah without any congressional prohibition of slavery would enable
Southerners to accept California's admission as a free state. The compromise idea appealed to some
southerners, especially those most offended by talk of secession in 1850, because it would put the federal
government on record as the legal protector of slavery in the South. Calhoun, up to his death on March 31,
1850, opposed Clay; Jefferson Davis took over Calhoun's southern leadership in opposition to Clay's
compromise proposals. Taylor also firmly opposed Clay's compromise. When Taylor died unexpectedly on July
9, the forces for compromise stepped up their efforts to push through the great Compromise of 1850 in
September. Taylor's successor, Millard Fillmore, signed the bill into law