Chapter in Perspective

Americans traditionally linked the West with opportunity. The revolutions in markets and transportation greatly accelerated the process of white settlement beyond the Appalachian mountains. Similarly, the spread of cotton production and the quest for economic success had carried Southerners, white and black, free and slave, westward. Thus white southerners linked western expansion with the preservation of not only white opportunity but also slavery. As the lines of settlement spread across the Mississippi River into the Louisiana Purchase, Americans increasingly cast their eyes on neighboring lands to the West that seemed ripe for acquisition. They were also inspired by a long-standing sense of mission, with its vision of the United States as a beacon for the world, and the widespread belief in the impending millennium that fostered so many reform movements in this period. The market revolution (Chapter 10), the new democratic politics (Chapter 11), the energies unleashed by revivalism and reform (Chapter 12), and the expansion of the cotton kingdom (Chapter 13), all combined to produce a new expansionist surge in the 1840s. The process that brought Americans into contact with other cultures and peoples forced Americans to confront the slavery issue.