{"product_id":"manifest-destinies-isbn-9780307277701","title":"Manifest Destinies","description":"A sweeping history of the 1840s, \u003ci\u003eManifest Destinies\u003c\/i\u003e captures the enormous sense of possibility that inspired America’s growth and shows how the acquisition of western territories forced the nation to come to grips with the deep fault line that would bring war in the near future.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSteven E. Woodworth gives us a portrait of America at its most vibrant and expansive. It was a decade in which the nation significantly enlarged its boundaries, taking Texas, New Mexico, California, and the Pacific Northwest; William Henry Harrison ran the first modern populist campaign, focusing on entertaining voters rather than on discussing issues; prospectors headed west to search for gold; Joseph Smith founded a new religion; railroads and telegraph lines connected the country’s disparate populations as never before. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the 1840s dawned, Americans were feeling optimistic about the future: the population was growing, economic conditions were improving, and peace had reigned for nearly thirty years. A hopeful nation looked to the West, where vast areas of unsettled land seemed to promise prosperity to anyone resourceful enough to take advantage. And yet political tensions roiled below the surface; as the country took on new lands, slavery emerged as an irreconcilable source of disagreement between North and South, and secession reared its head for the first time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRich in detail and full of dramatic events and fascinating characters, \u003ci\u003eManifest Destinies \u003c\/i\u003eis an absorbing and highly entertaining account of a crucial decade that forged a young nation’s character and destiny.\u003ci\u003eList of Maps\u003cbr\u003ePreface\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART ONE: The Two Party System\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Log Cabin and Hard Cider Campaign \u003cbr\u003eTyler, Clay, and the Durability of the Two-Party System \u003cbr\u003eAbolitionism\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART TWO: Westward Expansion\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Oregon Trail\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Allure and the Danger of California\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Mormons and Their Migration\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART THREE: The Politics of Expansion\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTyler and Texas\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Election of 1844 \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTexas Annexation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART FOUR: War with Mexico\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eArmies Along the Rio Grande \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Monterrey Campaign \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew Mexico, Chihuahua, and California \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBuena Vista \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eVeracruz, Cerro Gordo, and the Politics of Expansion \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTo the Gates of Mexico City \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Conquered Capital and a Negotiated Peace \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART FIVE: The Political System and the Controversies of Expansion\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Election of 1848 \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe California Gold Rush \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eCalifornia and the Expansion of Slavery \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Struggle for Compromise \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eIndex\u003c\/i\u003e“[This] new, magnificent account . . . is full of wonder even for seasoned students of U.S. history.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Dallas Morning News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A vivid, episodic pageant of westward-ho empire building. . . . This is narrative history writ large and vigorously—with foreshadowings of tragedy.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“In this balanced political and military history, Woodworth tracks political tensions exacerbated by continental expansion. . . . Woodworth dramatically presages the collapse of political parties in the 1850s by his accessible account of the 1840s.” —Gilbert Taylor, \u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003eSteven E. Woodworth was born in Ohio and grew up in the Midwest. He earned his Ph.D. in history at Rice University in 1987, and is the author, coauthor, or editor of twenty-eight books on American history, including \u003ci\u003eNothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865\u003c\/i\u003e. He is currently a professor of history at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.chapter one\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Log Cabin and\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHard Cider Campaign\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmericans  in 1840 felt confident that their country was on the verge of  greatness. The young Republic might be only three score and four years  old, but it was already the world's biggest and oldest land governed of,  by, and for the people, a self-conscious beacon of freedom to the rest  of the world. And the future seemed to stand open to the United States,  just like the rest of the North American continent, beckoning bold  Americans to stride forward and take possession and thus increase the  power and expand the extent of what they liked to call the empire of  liberty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmerica was growing. The census the government would  conduct that year would reveal that the Republic's population, centered  hypothetically on a point 260 miles west of Washington, D.C., numbered  just over seventeen million, an increase of 32.7 percent in the past ten  years. New states were joining the Union. Two had joined in the past  decade (Arkansas in 1836 and Michigan a few months later in 1837), and  more were all but certain to follow in the one now dawning. The Iowa and  Wisconsin territories would likely be ready for admission inside the  next ten years, and interesting prospects lay farther west, even beyond  the broad expanse of the Louisiana Purchase lands that the explorer  Meriwether Lewis had described as \"the fairest portion of the globe.\" In  1836 the Christian missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and Henry  and Eliza Spalding had traveled all the way across the Rocky Mountains.  Fellow missionary Jason Lee had pushed farther west, to the green and  fertile Willamette Valley. Their letters home had brought some of the  first reports of that inviting country, and other of their countrymen  were already beginning to contemplate migrating.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven more  exciting had been the news in recent years from the Southwest, where  Americans had settled the largely empty Mexican province of Tejas at  Mexico's invitation. When that country had tried to subject the  colonists to despotic government, they had risen up and in 1836  overthrown Mexican rule of the province, claiming it and a vast region  beyond the provincial boundary as the new Republic of Texas. There had  been talk of Texas joining the United States, and by all accounts its  citizens were eager.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fast-growing adolescent United States  was not without problems. Twenty years before, in 1820, intense  political strife had arisen from the very issue of expansion itself,  specifically the application of the Missouri Territory to enter the  Union as a slave state. Some northern congressmen had objected, and the  result had been a prolonged political conflict of alarming proportions.  The point of strife was a fundamental contradiction in the nation's  character. Founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created  equal and endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and  that pursuit of happiness that private property ownership made  possible, the \"land of the free\" counted some two and a half million  slaves among its seventeen million inhabitants. The slaves were  property, their owners maintained, and therefore had no right to  liberty. That this was a gross contradiction of the nation's ideals was  once realized even in the South. Now such admissions were out of fashion  below the Mason- Dixon Line, and white southerners were asserting with  increasing volume that slavery was a positive good for both blacks and  whites. Time would tell whether this fundamental flaw would produce  serious consequences for the growing nation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFew in 1840  understood the potential dangers more clearly than the occupant of the  White House. Martin Van Buren had recognized, perhaps sooner than anyone  else in American national politics, that political conflict was  unavoidable and that political parties, far from being the pernicious  factions of which James Madison and the other founders had warned, could  in fact serve as channels to direct that conflict into safe areas of  debate and away from slavery, the one topic that had the potential to  destroy the entire system and possibly divide the country. At the time  of the Missouri crisis, back in 1820, the country had not possessed a  two-party system. All politicians had been at least nominally members of  the Republican Party, and this absence of the strife of \"factions\" had  so pleased that generation of Americans that they had referred to the  decade after the War of 1812 as the Era of Good Feelings. But feelings  had not been at all good when the Missouri issue exploded on the  national scene midway through the era. Without the restraints of  established political parties, the strife in Congress escalated quickly  to a level that former president Thomas Jefferson likened to \"a fire  bell in the night [that] awakened and filled me with terror.\" Congress  had with difficulty reached a compromise in its dispute, and a much  younger Martin Van Buren had taken a lesson from the incident.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVan  Buren was born in Kinderhook, New York, in 1782, the son of a tavern  keeper of Netherlands descent, and the future president's first language  was Dutch. He had received little formal education but had been  determined to succeed, studying for six years under a Kinderhook lawyer  before being admitted to the bar in 1803. A successful law practice led  to an equally successful career in state politics. Van Buren won the  nicknames Wizard of the Albany Regency, for his leadership of the  state's most powerful political faction, and Red Fox of Kinderhook, for  his considerable political skills. He became a U.S. senator from New  York in 1821 and then in 1828, in quick succession, governor of New York  and secretary of state under the newly elected president, Andrew  Jackson. In Jackson's second term Van Buren was vice president, and when  Old Hickory followed Washington's example in declining to seek a third  term in office, Van Buren was his natural successor. He had won the  election of 1836 handily. The eighth president of the United States was  very much a self-made man.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVan Buren's ideal of a political party  was one that would be national in scope, based on an alliance of North  and South. By building a party that drew its strength from every section  of the country, Van Buren could force the opposing party to do the  same-if it wanted to have any hope of competing successfully for control  of Congress and the presidency. Each party would seek to maintain its  appeal throughout the nation, and as this pertained to the South, that  meant each party would do its best to suppress all criticism of slavery.  Once established, the system created a political dynamic that made  slavery persistently invisible on the national political stage. Van  Buren had done as much as anyone to construct the party system by  building the Democratic Party, first as a staunch supporter and trusted  advisor of party founder Andrew Jackson and later as the party's  victorious standard-bearer. As president he was now the active leader of  the more coherent and powerful of the nation's two political parties.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd  he had a serious problem. Within weeks of his taking office, the bottom  had fallen out of the American economy. In April 1837 some 250  businesses had failed in New York City alone, and by mid-May every bank  in the city had suspended payments of gold and silver. By the end of  that month total losses from business failures in New York had reached  $100 million. Over the months that followed, 40 percent of the nation's  banks folded, and many of the others were crippled and on the brink of  collapse. An epidemic of bankruptcies swept the country. Unemployment  was rampant and economic suffering intense as the United States plunged  into a depression that dwarfed any other in the national experience  prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy had all this  happened? As usual with economics, the root causes are hard to untangle,  but it seems that British investors had been bullish on America during  the early 1830s, investing so lavishly that the inflow of their gold  effectively doubled the U.S. money supply. At the same time, U.S.  bankers had recklessly expanded credit, with banknotes in circulation  jumping from $95 million to $140 million during the middle years of the  decade. With the easy credit provided by scores of eager investors, a  number of state governments foolishly borrowed dizzying sums to finance  lavish programs of transportation improvements-railroads, canals, and  the like. Midway through the decade, the Bank of England became alarmed  at the ongoing export of capital and changed its policies so as to make  investing in Britain more attractive. The resulting diversion in the  flow of British investment capital might at first seem an insignificant  cause for the massive financial crash America suffered in 1837, but  credit bubbles, such as the one that had formed in the United States  during the first half of the 1830s, are notoriously skittish. Like a  slight vibration on a snow-covered mountainside, even a small tremor in  the money supply can trigger an avalanche that carries away everything  in its path. So it was with the U.S. economy of the 1830s, as the  withdrawal of British investments triggered an inexorable credit  contraction that historians would come to call the Panic of 1837.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVan  Buren handled the situation about as well as any president could have.  He resisted the temptation to get the government entangled in the  economy-and thus compound the nation's troubles and prolong the  depression. He worked hard to establish an independent subtreasury  system that would keep government funds from distorting the banking and  credit markets, and he did his best to secure the federal government's  financial situation so that it at least would not drag the economy down  further. That was more than could be said of a number of the state  governments, several of which defaulted on payments after their  mid-decade binges of unrestrained borrowing for infrastructure spending.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePublic  opinion, however, was not necessarily going to be shaped by a calm  assessment of Van Buren's performance. As Theodore Roosevelt would  observe more than half a century later, \"When the average man loses his  money he is simply like a wounded snake and strikes right and left at  anything, innocent or the reverse, that presents itself as conspicuous  in his mind.\" The president was conspicuous. Unlike Congress, he was a  recognizable individual. Thus, if a scapegoat was needed, the public  would look first to the White House. The Whigs gleefully did their best  to encourage that reaction, with Whig newspaper editors referring to the  president as \"Van Ruin\" and blaming the nation's economic woes squarely  on the president's economic policies, such as his opposition to the  Bank of the United States and his support for sound money.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eExuberant  at their prospects for finally winning a presidential election, the  Whigs held their first nominating convention in Harrisburg,  Pennsylvania, in December 1839. The Democrats had been holding such  conventions for years, but the Whigs had previously nominated their  candidates by means of the Whig congressional caucus. Now, eager to copy  their opponents' successful tactic, the party embraced the convention  system with its (at least theoretically) more democratic mode of  choosing a presidential candidate. The Whigs were determined to present  their party as more democratic than the Democrats, even if they had to  adopt all of the Democratic Party's methods that they had, until  recently, been loudly denouncing as demagoguery far below their dignity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHenry  Clay had high hopes that he would be the convention's choice, and a  plurality of the delegates agreed with him. If the Whig Party had a  father, he was Clay. As the party had coalesced during the 1830s out of  every faction and splinter group that opposed Andrew Jackson for any  reason whatsoever, Clay had been the most vocal and consistent foe of  Old Hickory. To the extent that the party had any coherent program, it  was Clay's so-called American System. This consisted of support for a  central bank to create inflation, with its illusion of prosperity; high  tariffs to protect domestic producers at the expense of foreign trade;  and federal taxpayer funding for each locality's pet infrastructure  project. It had the makings of a dandy system for buying votes. Clay had  been the presidential nominee of the Whigs' predecessor party, the  National Republicans, in the election of 1832. He had stood aside in  1836, and now, with Whig chances looking better than ever before, it was  his turn again. If ever a party had an obvious choice, Clay was the man  for the Whigs in the 1840 race.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeveral of the party's major  power brokers were of a different mind. They cared much more about a  Whig victory than they did about which Whig won that victory. They had  no intention of squandering the opportunity afforded their party by the  country's gratifyingly miserable current economic condition. Determined  to take every possible step to maximize the party's chance of success at  the polls, they came to the conclusion that some other candidate might  be, in the parlance of the time, more \"available,\" by which they meant  more electable. Clay was well known, but so were his positions. He and  his American System had come before the voters twice before, in the  presidential elections of 1824 and 1832, and lost both times.  Furthermore, the party's anti-Masonic bloc, a holdover from a popular  movement of the previous decade, opposed Clay, and that bloc still  swayed an important number of votes in New York and Pennsylvania.  Abolitionists and other opponents of slavery, many of them evangelical  Christians, were far from enthusiastic about the slaveholding-and  reputedly loose living-Henry Clay. This was all the more true after he  made in February 1839 a widely reported Senate speech denouncing  abolitionists. And though Clay had as much personal charm as any  politician in American history, in twenty-eight years on the national  political scene he could hardly have avoided making a number of enemies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThus  when the delegates gathered in Harrisburg, certain astute political  managers, like New York's jovial Thurlow Weed and his henchman, the  newspaper editor Horace Greeley, as well as the humorless Pennsylvanian  Thaddeus Stevens, were ready to work such magic as they could in favor  of a more available candidate. When Stevens learned that the Virginia  delegation was contemplating support for its favorite son, Winfield  Scott, the politically ambitious commanding general of the United States  Army, he contrived to saunter over to that delegation's part of the  hall and drop, quite casually and apparently accidentally, a letter he  had somehow obtained, written by Scott to a New York politician aiming  to conciliate the abolitionist vote in that state. It did not conciliate  Scott's fellow Virginians, who promptly, as Stevens had calculated,  dropped Scott from consideration. Having persuaded the convention to  adopt the unit rule, mandating a one-state, one-vote nomination, Weed  and Stevens then skillfully maneuvered one delegation after another  toward their chosen candidate, if not as a first-ballot choice, then as a  second. When the wheeling and dealing was finished and the smoke-filled  rooms had cleared, the Whigs had passed over Henry Clay and chosen  instead the soldier and politician William Henry Harrison of Ohio.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304744046821,"sku":"NP9780307277701","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307277701.jpg?v=1767732219","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/manifest-destinies-isbn-9780307277701","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}