North America

26.4: North America

26.4.1: The Rising Power of the United States

After decades of western expansion and industrial development, by 1890 American production and per capita income exceeded that of all other world nations. The U.S. also emerged as a major military power after the Spanish-American War, exerting its influence throughout the continent and beyond.

Learning Objective

Detail the increasing influence of the United States in the New World

Key Points

  • The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power.
  • The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, which proclaimed in a long preamble that humanity is created equal in their unalienable rights and that those rights were not being protected by Great Britain. It declared, in the words of the resolution, that the Thirteen Colonies were independent states and had no allegiance to the British crown in the United States.
  • Britain recognized the independence of the United States following their defeat at Yorktown in 1781.
  • Americans’ eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.
  • The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation’s area.
  • A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.
  • After the American Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade, and increased conflict with Native Americans.
  • Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. The American economy boomed, becoming the world’s largest, and the United States achieved great status.

Key Terms

Gilded Age
A term that Mark Twain used to describe the period of the late 19th century with a dramatic expansion of American wealth and prosperity, in which the rapid expansion of industrialization led to real wage growth of 60% between 1860 and 1890, spread across the ever-increasing labor force.
Spanish–American War
A conflict between Spain and the United States in 1898. Hostilities began in the aftermath of the internal explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in Cuba, leading to United States intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. American acquisition of Spain’s Pacific possessions led to its involvement in the Philippine Revolution and ultimately in the Philippine-American War.
Manifest Destiny
A widely held belief in the United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny: the special virtues of the American people and their institutions; the mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America; and an irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty.

Brief History of the U.S. Through the 19th Century

In 1776, the Second Continental Congress declared the United States a new, independent nation, no longer just a collection of disparate colonies. With large-scale military and financial support from France and military leadership by General George Washington, the American Patriots won the Revolutionary War against the British, confirming the new nation.

A peace treaty of 1783 gave the U.S. the land east of the Mississippi River (except Florida and Canada). The central government established by the Articles of Confederation proved ineffectual at providing stability, as it had no authority to collect taxes and no executive officer. Congress called a convention to meet secretly in Philadelphia in 1787 and wrote a new Constitution, which was adopted in 1789. In 1791, a Bill of Rights was added to guarantee inalienable rights to all Americans. With Washington as the first president and Alexander Hamilton his chief political and financial adviser, a strong central government was created. When Thomas Jefferson became president he purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, doubling the size of the United States. A second and final war with Britain was fought in 1812.

Encouraged by the notion of Manifest Destiny, federal territory expanded all the way to the Pacific. The U.S. always was large in terms of area, but its population was small: only 4 million in 1790. Population growth was rapid, reaching 7.2 million in 1810, 32 million in 1860, 76 million in 1900, 132 million in 1940, and 321 million in 2015. Economic growth in terms of overall gross domestic product (GDP) was even faster. The expansion was driven by a quest for inexpensive land for yeoman farmers and slave owners. The expansion of slavery was increasingly controversial and fueled political and constitutional battles that were resolved by compromises. Slavery was abolished in all states north of the Mason–Dixon line by 1804, but the South continued to profit off the institution, producing high-value cotton exports to feed increasingly high demand in Europe. The 1860 presidential election of Republican Abraham Lincoln was on a platform of ending the expansion of slavery and putting it on a path to extinction.

Seven cotton-based deep South slave states seceded and founded the Confederacy months before Lincoln’s inauguration. No nation ever recognized the Confederacy, but it opened the war by attacking Fort Sumter in 1861. A surge of nationalist outrage in the North fueled a long, intense American Civil War (1861–1865). It was fought largely in the South as the overwhelming material and manpower advantages of the North proved decisive in a long war. The results were restoration of the Union, the impoverishment of the South, and the abolition of slavery. In the Reconstruction era (1863–1877), legal and voting rights were extended to the freed slave. The national government emerged much stronger, and because of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, it gained the explicit duty to protect individual rights. However, when white Democrats regained their power in the South during the 1870s, often by paramilitary suppression of voting, they passed Jim Crow laws to maintain white supremacy and new disfranchising constitutions that prevented most African Americans and many poor whites from voting. This situation that continued for decades until gains of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and passage of federal legislation to enforce constitutional rights.

 

Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny

Through wars and treaties; establishment of law and order; building farms, ranches, and towns; marking trails and digging mines; and pulling in great migrations of foreigners, the United States expanded from coast to coast, fulfilling the dreams of Manifest Destiny.

From the early 1830s to 1869, the Oregon Trail and its many offshoots were used by over 300,000 settlers. ’49ers (in the California Gold Rush), ranchers, farmers, and entrepreneurs and their families headed to California, Oregon, and other points in the far west. Wagon trains took five or six months on foot; after 1869, the trip took sixdays by rail.

Manifest Destiny was the belief that the United States was preordained to expand from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast. The concept was expressed during Colonial times, but the term was coined in the 1840s by a popular magazine which editorialized, “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny…to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” As the nation grew, manifest destiny became a rallying cry for expansionists in the Democratic Party. In the 1840s the Tyler and Polk administrations (1841–49) successfully promoted this nationalistic doctrine. However, the Whig Party, which represented business and financial interests, was opposed. Whig leaders such as Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln called for deepening society through modernization and urbanization instead of simple horizontal expansion. Starting with the annexation of Texas, the expansionists had the upper hand. John Quincy Adams, an anti-slavery Whig, felt the Texas annexation in 1845 to be “the heaviest calamity that ever befell myself and my country.”

Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821 and took over Spain’s northern possessions from Texas to California. The Spanish and Mexican governments attracted American settlers to Texas with generous terms. Tensions rose, however, after an abortive attempt to establish the independent nation of Fredonia in 1826. William Travis, leading the “war party,” advocated for independence from Mexico, while the “peace party” led by Austin attempted to get more autonomy within the current relationship. Immigration continued and 30,000 Anglos with 3,000 slaves were settled in Texas by 1835. In 1836, the Texas Revolution erupted. Following losses at the Alamo and Goliad, the Texans won the decisive Battle of San Jacinto to secure independence. The U.S. Congress declined to annex Texas, stalemated by contentious arguments over slavery and regional power. Thus, the Republic of Texas remained an independent power for nearly a decade before it was annexed as the 28th state in 1845. The government of Mexico, however, viewed Texas as a runaway province and asserted its ownership.

The latter half of the 19th century was marked by the rapid development and settlement of the far West, first by wagon trains and riverboats and then aided by the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Large numbers of European immigrants (especially from Germany and Scandinavia) took up low-cost or free farms in the Prairie States. Mining for silver and copper opened up the Mountain West. The United States Army fought frequent small-scale wars with Native Americans as settlers encroached on their traditional lands. Gradually the U.S. purchased the Native American tribal lands and extinguished their claims, forcing most tribes onto subsidized reservations.

A map depicting U.S. territorial acquisitions throughout U.S. history.

Manifest Destiny U.S. territorial acquisitions throughout U.S. history. The new nation grew rapidly in population and area, as pioneers pushed the frontier of settlement west.

A Rising Power: American Industrialism and Imperialism

The “Gilded Age” was a term that Mark Twain used to describe the period of the late 19th century with a dramatic expansion of American wealth and prosperity. The Gilded Age was an era of rapid economic growth, especially in the North and West. As American wages were much higher than those in Europe, especially for skilled workers, the period saw an influx of millions of European immigrants. The rapid expansion of industrialization led to real wage growth of 60% between 1860 and 1890, spread across the ever-increasing labor force. The average annual wage per industrial worker (including men, women and children) rose from $380 in 1880 to $564 in 1890, a gain of 48%. By 1890 American industrial production and per capita income exceeded those of all other world nations. However, the Gilded Age was also an era of abject poverty and inequality as millions of immigrants—many from impoverished European nations—poured into the United States, and the high concentration of wealth became more visible and contentious.

Railroads were the major growth industry, with the factory system, mining, and finance increasing in importance. Immigration from Europe and the eastern states led to the rapid growth of the West, based on farming, ranching and mining. Labor unions became important in the rapidly growing industrial cities.

The United States emerged as a world economic and military power after 1890. The main episode was the Spanish-American War, which began when Spain refused American demands to reform its oppressive policies in Cuba. The “splendid little war,” as one official called it, involved a series of quick American victories on land and at sea. At the Treaty of Paris peace conference the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

Cuba became an independent country under close American tutelage. Although the war itself was widely popular, the peace terms proved controversial. William Jennings Bryan led his Democratic Party in opposition to control of the Philippines, which he denounced as imperialism unbecoming to American democracy. President William McKinley defended the acquisition and was riding high as the nation had returned to prosperity and felt triumphant in the war. McKinley easily defeated Bryan in a rematch in the 1900 presidential election.

After defeating an insurrection by Filipino nationalists, the United States engaged in a large-scale program to modernize the economy of the Philippines and dramatically upgrade the public health facilities. By 1908, however, Americans lost interest in an empire and turned their international attention to the Caribbean, especially the building of the Panama Canal. In 1912 when Arizona became the final mainland state, the American Frontier came to an end. The canal opened in 1914 and increased trade with Japan and the rest of the Far East. A key innovation was the Open Door Policy, in which the imperial powers were given equal access to Chinese business, with not one of them allowed to take control of China.

Attributions