These Truths: A History of the United States

Democracy was celebrated at the start of the 19th century. The public generally agreed now that the majority had a right to govern, and that all white men should enjoy voting rights. By the 1830s, the United States had “the first large-scale popular democracy in the history of the world,” which Americans celebrated “in campaigns and parades, rallies and conventions” (191). The two parties had their own newspapers, and the electorate was educated “in a new system of publicly funded schools” (191).

In 1810, Francis Cabot Lowell, an American merchant, toured textile mills in England and sketched what he saw. Back in New England, he used those sketches as models when building his own machines. He also raised money to build his own factory. Lowell died seven years later, but his successors opened mills named after him on the Merrimack River in 1823. Lowell had intended for his system to provide an alternative to the harsh labor conditions in England. The owners of Lowell mills hired young women who worked 12-hour days and attended lectures in the evenings. By the 1830s, however, the mill owners departed from Lowell’s vision of using the mills for social reform. They cut wages, sped up production and, when the women protested against the unfair conditions, the managers replaced them with men.

To aid the acceleration of production in factories, canals were constructed to aid transportation. The Erie Canal was completed in 1825. It had taken eight years to dig and covered 360 miles. Wagon trips to transport goods took upward of 20 days, but on the canal, goods could be ferried over six days. As a result of this speed, the price of goods dropped, and the standard of living increased. The nature of work also changed. Before the 1820s, workers were often paid with liquor, not wages. They also operated according to task, not the clock. Later, men earned wages and worked by the clock. “Work” also referred not only to one’s responsibilities, but also where one went to perform tasks. “Home” was the place where women stayed and did what was not considered work—that is, wage labor.

Bosses no longer lived in their shops, but moved to new neighborhoods—forming a new middle class. This class expressed concern about drinking among their employees. They formed temperance unions and agreed to stop paying workers in alcohol. They also insisted that their workers join churches. Many of these men were encouraged in their efforts by their wives. It was women who led the temperance movement, largely because drunken husbands were often abusive and wasted their wages on liquor. Since married women could not own property, they had no legal recourse.

The United States, however, was not exactly founded as a Christian nation. The Bill of Rights forbids the establishment of religion and the Constitution forbids religious litmus tests for office holders. However, in 1775, there had been 1,800 Christian ministers in the US; by 1845, there were over 40,000. Due to the absence of an official religion, Americans founded a myriad of sects. The only thing that unified all of them was an apparent belief in the American creed and a kind of worship, which Thomas Jefferson warned against, of the men who had founded the nation.

Conversely, abolitionists did not venerate the Founding Fathers; they criticized them. Admiration for the values in the Declaration of Independence, combined with anger at the founders for their hypocrisies, were views most frequently expressed in Black churches. Aided by the introduction of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton production doubled in the South between 1810 and 1820, and again between 1820 and 1825. Cotton was “the most valuable commodity in the Atlantic world” (202). Though the Atlantic slave trade officially ended in 1808, there remained a booming domestic market in slaves—many of whom were sold from wealthy slaveholding states like South Carolina and Virginia to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Another million enslaved people were sold and sent west between 1820 and 1860. When the price of cotton went up in England, the price of slaves also increased. Slaves, like cotton, were sold according to their grades, based on how much cotton they could pick. A healthy man counted as “two hands,” while a woman was a “half-hand,” and a child was a “quarter-hand.”

In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a carpenter who lived in Charleston, South Carolina staged a rebellion with enslaved and free Black people. He was quickly caught and hanged. Slave owners blamed Black sailors who had spread word of “freedom in the North and of independence in Haiti” (202). Thus, the South Carolina legislature passed the Negro Seamen Acts, demanding that Black soldiers be held in prison for as long as their ships were at port.

Abolitionists argued for the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people. As they radicalized, Southern antislavery organizations closed. Before 1830, the number of abolitionist groups “in the South had outnumbered those in the North by more than four to one” (204). Southern antislavery activists were more likely to be supporters of colonization than emancipation, however.

In the summer of 1831, a 31-year-old preacher and slave named Nat Turner planned a slave rebellion to take place on Independence Day. Turner’s parents had been enslaved, but his mother had supposedly been born in West Africa, while his father had escaped to the North. The wife of Turner’s first owner had taught him to read when he was a boy. He later studied the Bible. By 1828, he claimed that he had had a religious vision: In it, God had called upon him to lead his people in an uprising. Using signs from nature to guide him, he decided to wait instead until August. In the end, he and his followers killed between 55 and 65 white people. The group was caught, and Turner was hanged.

The Virginia legislature began to consider the possibility of emancipating enslaved people, fearing future rebellions. Thomas Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, proposed a plan for gradual emancipation. Instead, the legislature decided to pass laws banning anyone from teaching enslaved people to read and write and from teaching them about the Bible. When Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political theorist visited earlier that year for a nine-month tour of the US, he declared that, if the nation ever underwent another great revolution, it would be caused by the presence of Black people in the nation and the inequality in which that race lived.

Meanwhile, one effect of Jacksonian democracy and the Second Great Awakening was “the participation of women in the reformation of American politics by way of American morals” (206). Having no access to public political or economic participation, women clung to their role as mothers, which they believed made them morally superior to men—“more loving, more caring, and more responsive to the cries of the weak” (206). They formed abolition societies, vegetarian societies, and temperance societies, among others. By 1837, 139 women-led antislavery societies were formed around the country, especially in Massachusetts and Ohio.

Women worked largely behind the scenes on social reform, while men protested in the streets. There was a great deal of struggle, starting in the 1810s, between business and labor. After the Panic of 1819, factories closed due to bank failures. Workers’ wages fell drastically. They soon began to exercise their political power, forming the Working Men’s Party in Philadelphia in 1828. Workers demanded shorter hours—10 instead of 11 or 12—and better conditions. They also expressed concern about the “excessive accumulation of wealth and power into the hands of a few” (207). Though Jacksonian democracy dispersed political power, industrialization consolidated power among a minority. Also, native-born workers were forced to compete with immigrants arriving from Europe in great numbers. In 1831, 20,000 people of European descent arrived in the US. In 1854, that number increased to over 400,000. The largest number of immigrants were from Ireland and Germany. Critics of President Jackson, who was of Irish descent, blamed him for “the rising population of poor, newly enfranchised Irishmen” (208). Many of the Irish and German immigrants who arrived were Catholic, which swelled hostility toward the sect, much of it fueled by evangelical Protestants. Samuel F. Morse, an inventor and painter, created a secret code of dots and dashes to be communicated via telegraph, as he believed that Catholics were plotting to take over the nation. Thus, the government would need a secret code to defeat such a scheme.

In Philadelphia in 1844, a riot broke out between Catholics and Protestants that left 20 people dead. Between 1845 and 1849—the years of the Irish Potato Famine—1.5 million Irish people left their homeland for the US and settled in cities along the Eastern Seaboard. They lived in ethnically homogenous neighborhoods and worked for very low wages. They also built Catholic churches, mutual aid societies, and parochial schools. Finally, they looked to the Democratic Party to defend their institutions. By 1850, one quarter of the population of Boston was Irish. Signs in shop windows excluded them from employment by reading “No Irish Need Apply.” Germans, on the other hand, endured less prejudice. They usually arrived with more personal funds, allowing them to move further inland, where they farmed. They, like the Irish, sent their children to their own schools and churches. The insularity of these communities gave rise to a movement “to establish tax-supported public elementary schools […] meant to provide a common education and civic education to all classes of Americans” (209). This American experiment, like that of universal suffrage for white men, made the US more modern than Europe.

Some hoped that common education would diminish partisanship, as common schools also helped nurture “a strong civic culture” (209). This was culture was encouraged, too, by rising nativism. Others argued that schools encouraged regimentation to prepare young people for the demands of industrialism. Worse, Black children were not allowed to attend common schools. Free Black people set up their own schools for their children, such as the African Free School in New York, which, by the 1820s, had over 600 students. In other cities, Black families fought to integrate their local common schools and won. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner led the charge for integration in his state, but other states responded by outlawing integration.

Education increased literacy, which led to a rise in the number of newspapers and a decrease in their prices. The “penny press” that emerged advocated facts over opinions. In 1833, the new Democratic Party was pitted against the Whig Party. People wanted to know not only how to vote for their preferred party but also what was true and what wasn’t.

President Jackson’s first major domestic campaign was his policy of removing indigenous peoples, but only in the Southeast. He focused on what came to be known as the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles. The tribes lived in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee. Jackson brought his military experience to the campaign. In 1814, he led a group of US and Cherokee forces in an effort to root out the Creeks. The Creeks ended up having to cede over 20 million acres of their land to the US. Two years later, Jackson forced the Cherokees “to sign treaties selling to the United States more than three million acres for about twenty cents an acre” (213). When the tribe protested, Jackson reminded them of what had happened to the Creeks.

In 1816, evangelical Christians attempted to convert the Cherokee, believing it was their mission “to make the whole tribe English in their language, civilized in their habits, and Christian in their religion” (213). The Cherokee responded by declaring both their independence and political equality as a nation. In 1823, they refused to cede any of their land to the US. Three years later, they established a national capital in Georgia. A year later, they wrote a constitution. Then, in 1828, “gold was discovered on Cherokee land” (214). Jackson, soon after he took office, declared “that the establishment of the Cherokee Nation violated Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution,” which prohibited the formation of a new state within the jurisdiction of another state without the original state’s approval (214). He got his Indian Removal Act passed in Congress, with most Southerners voting in favor and New Englanders largely against. Some began wondering if race impacted justice, in addition to facing a difficult reckoning over the cost of settling the Americas. The Cherokees, meanwhile, took their case to the Supreme Court. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), Chief Justice John Marshall defined the Cherokee Nation as “domestic dependent nations” (215). In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), he declared that the laws of Georgia had no jurisdiction over the Cherokee Nation. Marshall’s decision led other tribes in New England to seek their own independence.

In the end, Jackson ignored the Supreme Court and forced the resettlement of indigenous tribes, including Cherokees, west of the Mississippi. By the time they were all removed, Jackson’s two terms in office had ended. The election of 1832 rested on the question of retaining a federal bank. Between 1830 and 1837, 347 banks opened up around the nation, and each printed their own money, “producing more than twelve hundred different kinds of bills” (219). Counterfeiting and swindling became common problems.

In 1816, Congress had created the Second Bank of the United States to help the nation financially recover from the War of 1812. In 1819, the Supreme Court declared the bank constitutional. The bank handled all of the federal government’s debts and taxes. Jackson, however, hated banks. He believed that the national bank undermined the people’s sovereignty and allowed a handful of capitalists access to public revenue.

In January 1832, Nicholas Biddle, the bank’s president, requested that Congress renew the bank’s charter. Congress agreed, but Jackson vetoed the bill in July, claiming that “the president [had] the authority to decide on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress” (220). The consequence was the loss of the nation’s economic stability. Those who supported the bank insisted on the necessity of the federal government regulating the nation’s paper currency. Jackson would have preferred no paper currency at all, as he preferred a gold standard.

Americans, meanwhile, moved further west by wagons and steamboats. Slavery moved with them. In the South, some American settlers crossed into Mexico, which had won independence from Spain in 1821. Certain territories along the Gulf of Mexico, particularly Texas, were attractive to American settlers looking for new places to plant cotton. At the time, Texas also included much of what later became Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

In 1835, Americans who had settled in Texas, led by Sam Houston, rose up against Mexican rule. The following year, they declared their independence. Houston became president of the new nation. Mexican president, General Antonio López de Santa Anna warned that, if the US government was behind the Texas rebellion, he would march his army to Washington, DC, and plant his nation’s flag upon the Capitol Building.

President Jackson ignored Houston’s request for annexation of Texas, fearing reprisal from Mexico. Also, he viewed Texas as a foreign nation. Finally, if Texas were to be admitted to the Union, “it would enter as a slave state” (223). John Quincy Adams, aware of this prospect, spent three weeks filibustering Houston’s annexation proposal. The American Anti-Slavery Society sent tens of thousands of abolitionist petitions to Congress. Southern slave owners silenced Adams when he attempted to read the petitions on the floor—a triumph for opponents of free speech.

Southern slave owners made up only 1% of the population, but they relied greatly on the federal government to help them uphold slavery. They also worked hard to suppress dissent on the matter in Congress.

President Jackson, meanwhile, had decided not to run for a third term, but he was determined to choose his successor. He called for a Democratic nominating convention in 1835 “to assure the nomination of [his] handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren” (224). The Whigs, which had become a disorganized party, did not hold a nominating convention and could not choose a candidate. Four ran for the presidency, creating a wide path for Van Buren, who took office in March 1837. Five weeks later, the nation fell into a financial disaster. By the fall, “nine out of ten eastern factories had closed” in what came to be called the Panic of 1837 (225). It led to “a decade of despair” called “The Hungry Forties” (225). Whigs blamed Van Buren, though the depression was the result of Jackson’s policies—largely, his decision to leave the banking industry unregulated. However, the panic did democratize bankruptcy protection and abolished all debtors’ prisons. Americans came to see those who fell into debt as “victims of the business cycle” (226). Still, Van Buren, who had been nicknamed “Martin Van Ruin” stood no chance at reelection in 1840.

The Whigs nominated William Henry Harrison as their candidate and “ran him as a war hero” and “a frontiersman,” which was not true (227). Harrison had been governor of Indiana Territory and was sired by a Virginia plantation owner who had signed the Declaration of Independence. His campaign biographer, however, portrayed him as a humble farmer of modest origins. Harrison said little publicly, earning the moniker “General Mum.” Whigs called him the “Log Cabin Candidate” because he “campaigned in log cabins mounted on wheels” and “hand[ed] out mugs of hard cider along the road” (227).

Neither the Whigs nor the Democrats addressed the question of slavery. As a result, new parties were founded to do so. The Whigs, however, welcomed white women into their ranks, while the Democrats banned them. More men were now voting. Voter turnout was up to 80% in 1840. Harrison won in a landslide election. He then died of pneumonia soon after he was elected. His vice president, John Tyler, rose to the presidency.

That December, telegraph wires were “installed along lines cut by train tracks through woods and meadows and even mountains” (229). American began imagining a nation in which railroads and telegraph wires extended across the continent. The telegraph allowed news to spread immediately. Around this time, in Paris, a philosopher named Karl Marx began to imagine the consequences of capitalism. In the US, questions about people and products always led back to slavery and the commodification of people.

Lepore describes the start of the 19th century as an era in which Americans heralded the arrival of popular democracy. This was also an era in which slavery became more deeply entrenched into the national character, while the treaty rights of indigenous tribes were overridden by the ambitions of Manifest Destiny.

Lepore also examines the impact of early industrialism in forming the working and middle classes. In her depiction of the early employment of young, working-class women in Lowell textile mills, Lepore describes how the owners and managers of those factories exploited female labor, but she does not provide any accounts of the dangers that women faced in these factories. With little concern over workplace safety, young women often suffered serious injuries, such as having their hair caught in and ripped out by the machines. The practice among employers of supplying laborers with alcohol coincided with exploitation, as inebriated workers were less likely to be resistant.

Lepore briefly illustrates the division of labor in the 19th century—the Victorian Era—into domestic and non-domestic work. Domestic duties—particularly, cooking and childrearing—were unpaid tasks performed by women who, as a marker of their class status, did not work outside of the home or occupy the public sphere. The middle class, Lepore explains, became a cultural influence during this period, starting with the temperance movement, which would become a plank in the suffragists’ political platform.

Criticism of the Founding Fathers also emerged during this period, particularly among abolitionists who pointed out the hypocrisy of sanctioning slavery while claiming to found a nation based on democratic principles. This uproar coincided with the emergence of the African American church as a space in which to voice protest. Indeed, there were chinks in the new democracy’s armor: the increased oppression of enslaved peoples, particularly restrictions on their movement and access to printed material; the role of women in social reform, despite the unacceptability of women’s presence in the public sphere; classism and the reluctance to absorb immigrants from Germany and Ireland; and concern over the increased presence of Catholics in a Protestant nation. The last point reiterates the establishment of early America as a Protestant refuge from religious oppression in Europe and the religious wars that ensued after the Protestant Reformation. Ironically, Americans would then persecute those who did not follow the common religion.

Education became a key tool in trying to eliminate partisanship and sectionalism, in the interest of forming a common culture. However, the exclusion of African Americans from public schools reveals a concerted effort to marginalize them from the common culture. Generally, there was increased interest among Americans in knowing what was true in current events, as well as the stances of political parties. The populace was becoming increasingly astute about politics.

The eagerness to form a common culture also influenced attempts to assimilate some indigenous tribes. The Cherokee Nation’s fight for political and cultural autonomy was overwhelmed by the predominance of white settlers, who exercised their demographic, political, and military power to drive the Cherokee and other tribes westward. Additionally, the introduction of the telegraph was also instrumental in forming a common culture. The telegraph both succeeded and surpassed the printing press as the key means of communication in the century, connecting Americans faster and across great distances.

The US Senate was preparing “to vote on a treaty to annex Texas” (232). Mexico, however, still regarded Texas as one of its provinces. Abel Upshur, John Tyler’s secretary of state, knew that if the Senate approved Sam Houston’s request for annexation, Mexico might declare war on the US.

Tyler had banked his presidency, which had been weak from the beginning, on annexation. He was a Southern aristocrat who disliked Jacksonian populism. He had no true party. He was nominated as William Henry Harrison’s running mate, as he had been a vociferous critic of both Jackson and Van Buren. No one questioned him on his politics, and no one knew much about them. The Whigs simply hoped that he could carry his critical home state of Virginia.

President Tyler, however, was a strong believer in states’ rights and disliked anything that was nationalized, particularly the federal bank. After Congress twice passed legislation to renew the national bank’s charter, Tyler twice vetoed it. By September, everyone in Tyler’s cabinet, except for his secretary of state, Daniel Webster, resigned in protest. Two days later, 50 Whigs gathered in front of the Capitol and banished Tyler from the party. Some protestors gathered in front of the White House. Concerned for his safety, Tyler set up a police force that later became the Secret Service. After Webster finally resigned in May 1843 to protest plans to annex Texas, Abel Upshur became secretary of state.

Upshur, like Tyler, was a Southern aristocrat. He also believed that slavery was useful in that it helped even the lowliest white man feel better about his circumstances. Tyler and Upshur both believed that the nation’s stability rested on its expansion. At the time, both Britain and the US claimed the Oregon Territory. Upshur worried that Britain would try to extend its borders to the south. The foreign nation had been selling Mexico steam-powered ships, and offered to purchase California. Upshur also believed that Britain offered loans to Texas, in exchange for its promise to abolish slavery. Tyler then decided to annex to Texas and have it join the Union as a slave state, while Oregon would be admitted as a free state. Tyler and Upshur avoided language related to slavery, however, and focused on notions of liberty. They reasoned that the acquisition of new territory would offer economic opportunities to the poor, as anyone could be employed to clear the land. More people also talked of the west as a “safety valve”—a place to relieve the pressures that existed in other places. One Democratic senator from South Carolina declared in 1844 that Texas would relieve the current slaveholding states from his overabundant slave population.

Abel Upshur died on February 28, 1844, during an accident aboard the USS Princeton. Tyler appointed John C. Calhoun to replace him. John Quincy Adams, now 76, warned that the North might secede if Texas were annexed. Calhoun, in a riposte, said that the South might have seceded if Texas were not annexed. The Senate ultimately failed to ratify the treaty to annex Texas “by a vote of 35 to 16” (236).

Tyler, unwanted by all parties, decided to run for reelection, wedding himself to the fate of Texas’s annexation. Still, he hoped to convince the Democrats to nominate him at their convention. Andrew Jackson, who still controlled the party, had changed his mind about annexing Texas. He endorsed James K. Polk, a loyalist from the Southwest. Formerly a Speaker of the House and governor of Tennessee, Polk was largely unknown. Tyler dropped out of the race, assured that the Democrats would push for annexation.

Meanwhile, Henry Clay fulfilled long-term presidential ambitions. He had already run three times when the Whigs chose him again. He opposed the annexation of Texas, but his opposition was not strong enough to hold on to Whigs who left the party in favor of the antislavery Liberty Party. The race between Clay and Polk was very close, but Polk won the popular vote.

On January 25, 1845, a majority of the House voted for a resolution in favor of annexation, “having devised a compromise under which the eastern portion of Texas would enter the Union as a slave state, but not the western portion” (238). The Senate narrowly passed it. Tyler signed it on March 1, three days before Polk was inaugurated.

In the 1840s and 1850s, westward expansion, more than abolition, was the question that pressed the public to determine the constitutionality of slavery. While antislavery activists condemned “the annexation of Texas as an extension of the slave power,” others, including former congressman and secretary of state Daniel Webster, “called it an act of imperialism, inconsistent with a republican form of government” (241). In the end, however, it was the expansion of the Union, which resulted in its splintering, that helped end slavery. Polk was more determined than any previous president in the nation’s expansion. He wanted to admit Florida as a slave state and, hopefully, Cuba. Spain angrily refused to cede Cuba. Polk focused his attention, instead, on Oregon Territory, which then included what would later become Oregon, Idaho, Washington, “and much of what later became Montana and Wyoming” (242). Other nations, including Britain and Mexico, had tried to claim the territory. Americans claimed it by settling there, moving steadily westward along the Oregon Trail. In 1843, around 800 Americans traveled the route, which was a series of old roads that cut through mountains and across valleys.

Polk next sent an envoy to Mexico with $25 million to buy New Mexico and parts of what would later become Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. He also sought to purchase the Nueces Strip—a disputed piece of land claimed by both Mexico and Texas. When Mexico refused to make an agreement with Polk’s envoys, he sent troops into the Nueces Strip. Zachary Taylor led the soldiers, who settled along the Rio Grande. Polk got the confrontation that he sought to provoke. During one skirmish on April 25, 1846, Mexican soldiers killed 11 US troops. Polk asked Congress to declare war on Mexico, claiming that they had invaded the nation and shed American blood on American soil. In Congress, Abraham Lincoln, then a representative from Illinois, introduced resolutions in which he demanded to know the exact spot where American blood had been shed. Congress sided with Polk and granted the president his declaration of war.

There were also battles within the halls of Congress between 1830 and 1860. Southern congressman traveled to work with bowie knives and pistols. Northerners arrived at the Capitol unarmed. Meanwhile, questions lingered around Mexico. If, for instance, the US were to acquire Mexican territory, would its inhabitants become American citizens? John C. Calhoun, now a senator, was vehemently opposed to this, insisting that theirs was a “government of the white man” (244). Also, would these former Mexican territories become slave states or free states? David Wilmot, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, lent his name to what became the Wilmot Proviso—an agreement that slavery would not exist in any territories acquired as a result of the Mexican-American War. The Wilmot Proviso passed in 1846.

Both Wilmot and Calhoun were interested in the rights of white men. Wilmot was trying to preserve the integrity of free white labor. The nation began to break apart over its war with Mexico, with some coming to believe that the Union’s preservation depended on machines. Railroads and, particularly, telegraphs were essential in connecting people in an expanding nation.

In February 1847, US troops defeated the Mexican army. By the summer, Mexico was ready to negotiate a peace. Polk, knowing that he had the upper hand, thought about trying to annex all of Mexico. In the end, Mexico gave up over half of its land. Mexican nationals faced the choice between either crossing back into Mexico and retaining their citizenship or becoming American citizens. Around 100,000 Mexicans chose to stay in what became the US, most of them in Texas and California, where they faced increasing racial hostility. Their economy, which was based in ranching and trading, was gradually replaced by commercial agriculture, industrial production, and prospecting. The war ended on February 2, 1848, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The US population swelled to 23.2 million. With the acquisition of Mexican territory, the nation’s size grew by 64%.

Polk, when he ran for president, promised to serve only one term. Democrats were unsure about whom to select as his replacement. They needed a candidate who would attract both Northern and Southern voters. They thought about James Buchanan, who had served as Polk’s secretary of state. Buchanan suggested extending the Missouri Compromise westward. Senator Lewis Cass, who had served as President Jackson’s secretary of war, believed that each state ought to decide whether it would permit or prohibit slavery. Cass prevailed and became the Democrats’ nominee.

The Whig Party chose Zachary Taylor, who only grudgingly joined the party. However, these candidates were unappealing to voters who opposed the extension of slavery into Western territories. In June 1848, some of these voters held a convention in Buffalo at which they formed the Free-Soil Party. They chose Martin Van Buren as their candidate. The Free-Soil movement was also tied to free speech, disputes over interpretations of the Constitution, and the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. The Free-Soilers, like the revolutionaries, were concerned with labor—in the US, this meant the difference between free labor and slave power, which had fostered a decadent Southern aristocracy. The Free-Soil movement got much of its support from working men in Eastern cities and farmers in the West, as well as free Black people. Much of the party’s rhetoric came from Transcendentalism.

The attacks from Free-Soilers led Southerners to work more strongly to preserve their way of life. They accused Northerners and their system of wage labor of being more exploitative than slavery. The latter, they argued, was “fundamental to American prosperity” (255). They also argued more vociferously for more stringent notions of racial difference. Many of their ideas came from the pseudoscientific field of ethnology.

The Free-Soil Party held its first convention in Buffalo in the summer of 1848. The party’s support among women helped lead to the Seneca Falls Convention, which also took place in Buffalo that summer. A Whig newspaper declared the convention a “shocking and unnatural incident” (257).

By the mid-19th century, the debate over slavery reached the Pacific coast. Then, in 1850, there was a gold rush in California. Migrants came from neighboring Oregon and as far away as Chile and China to prospect. A year before, a state constitutional convention declared that slavery would never exist in the state. In the fall of 1849, California sent Congress a request to enter the Union. It would be admitted as a free state. To appease proslavery factions, settlers of New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada were allowed to resolve for themselves whether or not they wanted slavery. In 1851, Free-Soiler Charles Sumner won the Massachusetts senate seat that Daniel Webster, who had devised the Compromise of 1850 that sought to diffuse tensions between slave states and free states, had long held. Sumner, an antislavery advocate, despised the Compromise, which further imperiled enslaved Black people who escaped to the North.

Meanwhile, conversations about a transcontinental railroad, which had been a matter of discussion since the 1830s, continued. Senator Stephen Douglas wanted the railroad to run through Chicago, but “so-called Permanent Indian Territory,” the land to which Jackson had displaced indigenous tribes, stood in the way (262). Douglas insisted that, in an expanding and modernizing nation, the maintenance of such a territory was absurd. He insisted that the territory should be removed. It was organized into what became Kansas and Nebraska. The people of those new states would decide whether or not they wanted slavery.

Left to decide the slavery issue for itself, Kansas broke out into war, earning the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” Southerners moved into Kansas to vote for it to become a slave state, while Northerners moved in to vote against it. Soon they began trying to kill each other. In May 1856, Charles Sumner, in a speech entitled “The Crime Against Kansas,” condemned slavery and warned of civil war. Two days later, Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of the South Carolina senator who had cowritten the Kansas-Nebraska Act with Stephen Douglas, beat Sumner with his cane. It took Sumner three years to recover from his head injuries. While he recovered, his Senate seat remained empty, as Massachusetts refused to elect a replacement. It became clear that the South could not tolerate free speech.

By then, the Whig Party was nearly dead. The Democrats nominated James Buchanan, a proslavery Northerner. He had served as ambassador to Great Britain, which made him seem distant from the violence that had broken out within the US. He campaigned against the explorer John C. Frémont and won by a landslide.

Buchanan’s presidential inauguration was the first to be photographed. He was sworn in on March 4, 1857, by Chief Justice Roger Taney. In his address, Buchanan trivialized slavery, claiming that there were more pressing and practical questions to resolve.

In this chapter, Lepore illustrates how American expansion into the West deepened the nation’s regional divisions, particularly divergent views about the future of slavery in the growing union. The expansion of the US into formerly Mexican territory was the fulfillment of the nation’s ambitions of Manifest Destiny. Many viewed the West as a “safety valve” that would relieve Eastern cities of their growing immigrant populations and the South of increasing slave populations. These demographic struggles revealed both the Union’s difficulty with absorbing new populations and how the South’s greed and dependence on slavery overwhelmed them politically and socially.

The acquisition of territory won from Mexico and the inevitable integration of Mexicans into the American populace led to stricter classifications regarding who would qualify as “white.” Since the Age of Exploration, the descendants of Spanish colonists had been regarded as lesser peoples by the English and their descendants, due to their embrace of intermarriage.

Meanwhile, controversy ensued over the nature of labor and the desire of some politicians to preserve what they believed was the natural integrity of white male labor—that is, they were averse to policies that would exploit white men of the working class in the ways enslaved Black people and even working-class white women were exploited. White manhood was the default standard for humanity—a view that was supported by the racial pseudoscience invented to justify both slavery and Europe’s developing interests in imperialism.

Despite the more intense, and often violent, sectarian strife that erupted in the US, President Buchanan denied that slavery was the root cause of the nation’s divisions. This pattern of denial, which helped lead to the Civil War, had existed since the nation’s founding (e.g., James Madison’s aversion to mentioning slavery in the Constitution) and has continued to impact contemporary conversations about the causes of the Civil War.