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“Historically, people move west more than east. People go east only when invited. When opportunity knocks.
People go west when all bets are off: a reputation in ruins, a love gone wrong. When they need to save their sorry souls, folks head for the frontier.”
― Karen Hines
In 1776 most Americans lived along the Atlantic coast. A few hardy souls had crossed the Appalachians and established communities in what was then called the “Unorganized Territory.” Of the eighteen significant towns founded west of the Appalachians before the American Revolution, all but two (Harrodsburg and Lexington Kentucky) were established by the French or the Spanish. The map below shows the legal boundaries of the North American continent in at the onset of the American Revolution.
In the years after the Revolution, American settlers moved West, followed in short measure, by legal acquisition of the Western territories by the United States. Some of these acquisitions represented voluntary commercial agreements among nations, while others were the result of war and imperialism.
- In 1803, Jefferson, in what we know as the Louisiana Purchase, bought 23.3% of the territory of the United States from France.
- In 1818, the United States acquired the Red River Valley (part of Minnesota and Michigan) from Great Britain as part of the 1818 London Convention which rationalized the border between Canada and the United States along the 49th parallel.
- In 1819, the U.S. purchased Florida from Spain
- In 1845, the U.S. annexed Texas, which had broken away from Mexico. This represented 12% of the continental United States.
- In 1846, the Oregon Treaty with Great Britain ceded 286,000 square miles (or 9% of the continental United States) of the Pacific Northwest to the United States.
- In 1848, the Mexican Cession (following the American victory in the Mexican American war), transferred half of the national territory of Mexico to the United States, including all of the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, as well as the portions of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
- In 1853, the Gadson Purchase transferred land from Mexico in Southern Arizona and New Mexico to the United States for $10 million.
- In 1867, The U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million (Seward’s Folly)
- In 1898, the United States annexed Hawaii despite the opposition of most native Hawaiians.
All of this is shown in the map below.
The movement of Americans West both encouraged these territorial acquisitions and was spurred by them. But even by the Civil War, most of the West was empty of American settlers. The map below shows that most of the Great Plains were sparsely settled. In fact, the entire state of Oklahoma was set aside as Indian Territory.
Land and Government Policy. Clearly, the enormous availability of free land was the main driver of Westward migration. In the 19th century the federal government transferred 871.2 million acres (or 44% of the continental United States) to private individuals, businesses and state governments. According to Gary T. Anderson and Dolores T. Martin, under terms of the Land Act of 1786, tracts of 640 acres were sold for $2.00 an acre. The purpose of Federal land sales was to create a major revenue source for the Federal Government, but these criteria led to much lower revenue than hoped for. Accordingly, the Act was revised in 1800 to reduce the minimum tract to 340 acres and to make credit available to land purchasers.
In 1820, Congress passed the Homestead Act which 1) reduced the minimum parcel to 80 acres, 2) reduced the price to $1.25 per acre and 3) eliminated the credit provision. Between 1820 and 1862, the Government sold an average of 3.3 million acres per year. Thus, during those forty years, approximately over 1.6 million farm families were given these land packages, 80 acres representing the amount of land that could be farmed by one farmer given the technology of the time.
As can be seen from the map above new settlements grew in three areas: 1) the upper Midwest, 2) the South and 3) California. Almost all of the great prairie states: the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and what we now think of as the “West” were still sparsely settled by the beginning of the Civil War.
Congress passed another major land bill in 1862, the Homestead Act, which granted vast areas of the West to individuals, to the railroads and to the states. About 214 million acres were transferred to households (any individual who could demonstrate that they occupied a parcel of 160 acres for five years was granted the land outright). One hundred twenty-nine million acres were given to the railroads as an incentive to build the trans-continental railroad ahead of the demand (the amount of graft here is a story for another time). Finally, 73.2 million acres were given to states for educational purposes. These grants led directly to the development of land grant colleges, the great system of state colleges built by the United States to further public education.
In the mid-and late-nineteenth centuries, Germans, Irish and Scandinavians made up the bulk of new immigrants to the United States, and many, if not most, migrated away from the Eastern seaboard to the newly opened lands of the Midwest. Many novels have been written about their experience. I recommend My Antonia by Willa Cather and Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rolvaag.
Conclusions. The Westward expansion of the United States was a unique experience in the history of the world. It was born of the marriage of a restless population seeking to make its destiny on a frontier where land was cheap and personal histories unimportant, and a government seeking to enlarge both itself and its people. The push West was part of a culture which saw indigenous peoples as an obstacle to be removed from the path of expansion. Indeed, Theodore Roosevelt infamously said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are.”
In 1872 artist John Gast painted a popular scene of people moving west that captured the view of Americans at the time. Called “Spirit of the Frontier” and widely distributed as an engraving, it portrayed settlers moving west, guided and protected by Columbia (who embodies America and is dressed in a Roman toga to represent classical republicanism) and aided by technology (railways, telegraph), driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity. The technology shown in the picture is used to represent the outburst of innovation and invention of modern technology. It is also important to note that Columbia is bringing the “light” as witnessed on the eastern side of the painting as she travels towards the “darkened” west.
This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.09855.
“Manifest Destiny” (the belief that the United States should expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean) was part of the ideological underpinnings of Western expansion. It should be noted that the idea of “Manifest Destiny” had as many detractors as proponents. According to Wikipedia, “Democrats endorsed the idea but many prominent Americans (such as Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and most Whigs) rejected it. Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes, ‘American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity … Whigs saw America’s moral mission as one of democratic example rather than one of conquest.’ Historian Frederick Merk likewise concluded: ‘From the outset Manifest Destiny—vast in program, in its sense of continentalism—was slight in support. It lacked national, sectional, or party following commensurate with its magnitude. The reason was it did not reflect the national spirit. The thesis that it embodied nationalism, found in much historical writing, is backed by little real supporting evidence.’”
The next post will explore the implications of the frontier and Western expansion on American character, and thus on American exceptionalism.