Chapter 30

Eyewitness, Fatt Hing Chin, hunting for gold

• Advertisements were put around China, enticing the Chinese with the promise of Gold, despite the persecution of Chinese people leaving the country
• Within 2 years of sifting and mining, he had accumulated a pile of gold and urged his brothers to come
• He then went back to China with a fortune of his mining, but he lost a solid chunk of gambling
• He only now had enough to buy land, build a house and return to the USA
• After struggling to find gold mining again, this time Chin decided to open a restaurant with his cousins in the city
• Chin's story shows the path many Chinese migrants took to the USA, but they all contributed to the transformation of the Americas
• Along with the Chinese, millions of other migrants added diversity to American populations and were orchestral to political, social and economic development
• The end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th century brought independence from European colonizers for most of the Western half of the world
• Canada built a powerful state likewise, under British Canadian Leadership
• While lands in Latin America built states which were smaller and often fell to local military, the US made the strongest state in the Western Hemisphere
  • However, the USA struggled with the legacy of the enlightenment
    • The effort to build societies based on freedom, equality, and constitutional government was a monumental challenge only partially realized in lands characterized by enormous social, economic, and cultural diversity
• Slavery, its institution and abolition, made building societies, particularly a new type of diverse workforce for free and increasingly industrial economies, much harder
• New migrants took part in labour systems with native-born workers and freed slaves
• Independence for the western hemisphere meant migration, explosive economic growth, civil war, ethnic violence, class conflict and racial and sexual equality
• Independence did not mean an immediate answer to all conflicts but created a new context in which effective states, enjoyment of economic prosperity and cultural cohesion evaded the American people

The building of American States

• Since winning independence, the US built a government and quickly expanded into the temperate lands of North America
• However, they had an unstable society due to diverse religions and diverse economic and social structures
• Slavery and rights of individual states vs federal government caused a civil war in the 1860s
• This conflict forced the abolishment of slavery and a stronger federal state
• Canada, on the other hand, gained this independence without fighting a war, and despite having cultural diversity, did not slide into a civil war
• Although afraid of US expansion up north, Canada established a relatively weak federal government - it had presided over provinces that had considerable power over local affairs
• Latin America was even more diverse, but no real possibility they could unite in a confederation
  • Throughout the 19th century, it was a politically fragmented area, with many individual states facing serious problems and divisions

The United States: Westward Expansion and Civil War

• After gaining independence, the US needed to create the framework of government
• During the 1780s, leaders from rebellious colonies drafted a constitution
  • Gave the responsibility of general issues to the federal government
  • Individual states had authority on local issues
  • Provided for admission of new states and territories to the confederation
• Although the Declaration of Independence had stated that "all men are created equal," most individual states limited the vote of men of property
• The enlightenment ideal of equality motivated politicians to extend the franchise
  • By the late 1820s, most property qualifications had disappeared, and by the mid-1800s, all adult white males were eligible to participate in the political affairs

Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny

• While dealing with constitutional issues, the US kept expanding to the west
• After the American Revolution, Britain ceded to the new republic all lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, and the United States doubled in size
• In 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte required funds right away to protect revolutionary France from their enemies
• To make some money, France sold their Louisiana Territory, which stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky mountains
• Now the US doubled again
• Between 1804 and 1806, Lewis and William Clark headed a mapping expedition, where they mapped territory and surveyed all resources
• Settlers started moving to the west in search of some cheap land to cultivate
• By the 1840s, westward expansion was booming, and US citizens spoke of a Manifest Destiny
  • Manifest Idea - The Us was destined to expand across North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast and beyond
    • It was often invoked to justify US annexations

Conflict with Indigenous Peoples

• The Westward expansion brought conflict with the indigenous of North America - they did not want to leave their ancestral lands and hunting grounds
• The various indigenous tribes began forming alliances and sought help from the British colonial forces in Canada
  •  But US officials were for Euro-American settlers and slowly forced the continent open to white expansion
• With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the US government decided to move all Native Americans west of the Mississippi River to "Indian Territory" 
  • The Indian territory they are referring to is Oklahoma
• Seminoles were one of the tribes who were affected, and they resisted capture and retreated to Florida's swampy lowlands
• The Cherokees also had to suffer an 800-mile migration from the eastern woodlands to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears
  • Given this name due to the thousands that died from disease, starvation and the difficulties of relocation
• In 1840 - the Euro-American and indigenous people shifted to the plains of the Mississippi river
• Settlers of the region faced indigenous who had firearms and great equestrian skills
• The native peoples of the plains offered effective resistance to encroachment by white settlers and at times celebrated powerful victories over U.S. forces
• Battle of the Little Bighorn
  • It took place in Southern Montana
  • Thousands of Kajita Suiyx and their allies annihilated an army under the command of Colonel George Armstrong Custer
• Despite the occasional success, the Indigenous on the plains ultimately lost the war against the forces of US expansionism
• The technology employed against the Indigenous was too sophisticated and included deadly Gatling guns
• They helped break native resistance and opened the western plains for conquest
• The last conflict took place in 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota
• Whites were scared of the Sioux adoption of the Ghost Dance
  • expression of religious beliefs that included a vision of an afterlife in which all white peoples disappeared
• US cavalry forces chased the Sioux, who were fleeing to the South Dakota Badlands
• A Sioux member accidentally shot off a gun, and the cavalry overreacted, slaughtering more than 200 men, women and kids
• Wounded Knee represented the harsh treatment of the Indigenous and the place where "a people's dreams died"

The Mexican-American War

• The expansion also caused tension between the United States and Mexico
• Mexico then included Texas, California and New Mexico
• Texas had declared independence from Mexico in 1836 due to American Migrants who wished to run their own affairs
• 1845 - the United States accepted Texas as a new State, against Mexican protest
• This escalated and caused The Mexican-American War
• The US instigated this with a defeat of the Mexican army
• Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848
  • The US took possession of ~ 1/2 of Mexican territory
  • They paid only $15 Million for Texas north of the Rio Grande, California, and New Mexico
• Thousands of troops on both sides died in the process, and thousands of Mexican families found themselves stranded
• Some left, but most got a US citizenship
• This conflict  fueled Mexican nationalism, plus disdain for the United States
• While satisfying for the United States to achieve its manifest destiny
  • Westward expansion meant problems within the republic by aggravating tensions between regions
• The most serious issue - slavery, which had plagued American politics since independence
• The Enlightenment ideal of equality suggested the right course of action to abolish slavery but  leaders of the American revolution and framers of the Constitution recognized the sanctity of private property, including slaves
• U.S. independence initially promoted antislavery sentiment, as states from Delaware north abolished slavery 
• Abolition did not mean full equality for free blacks in northern states but worsened conflict between pro-slave and non-slave states
• The concept of slavery in new states was also an important issue

Sectional Conflict

• Anti-slavery believers had hoped that slavery would die out with the decline of tobacco cultivation
• Their hopes faded with the re-establishment of slavery thanks to a new cotton picking industry
• The U.S. slave population rose from five hundred thousand (1770) to two million (1820)
• As the population grew, antislavery forces opposed the spread of slavery to new territories
• Beginning with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, a series of political compacts attempted to  balance slave and free states as the republic admitted new states
• Those compromises proved too fragile to endure, as proslavery and antislavery forces became more hostile
• Abraham Lincoln stated in 1858 that the US could not be divided on these issues, either fully for slavery or against 
• The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 sparked a war between the states
• Lincoln was a sectional candidate, convinced that slavery was immoral, and was committed to free soil territories without slavery
• Although slavery stood at the center of the conflict, Lincoln insisted the main motive of the war was to restore union
• He was therefore hesitant to embrace an abolitionist policy
• Not only had Lincoln been elected on a platform of neutrality with slavery within the states, but he also doubted the constitutionality of any federal action
• He was also concerned about the difficulties of assimilating four million freed slaves into the nation's social and political fabric
• Lincoln feared that an abolitionist program would cause border states to join the Confederacy and upsetting the loyalty of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, the four slave states that remained in the Union
• The Civil War also revolved around some of the issues in the United States as a society like the nature of the Union, states and federal authority, and the imperatives of an industrial capitalist system against an export-oriented plantation economy

The US Civil War

• 11 southern states departed from the Union in 1860 and 1861, declaring their right to dissolve the Union plus their support for states' rights.

• Slavery and cotton farming as a cash crop isolated southern states from economic developments in the rest of the United States

• By the mid 19th century, the southern states were the major exporter of cotton to the world, with the British Isles importing most of it

• The manufactured goods consumed in southern states mostly came from Britain, and the food almost all came from farms

• Southerners regarded themselves as self-sufficient and did not see a need for the rest of the U.S

• Northerners did not approach the world from the same lens

  •  They fought against slavery, viewed secession as illegal insurrection and an act of betrayal and fought against the idea of a state subject to blackmail by its constituent parts.

  • They also fought for a way of life

    • Their emerging industrial society and an expansive western agricultural system based on free labour

• The first 2 years of the war were a draw

• This changed when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, making the abolition of slavery a main goal of the war

• As the war went on, Lincoln saw abolishing slavery as the only way to achieve union

• Five days after the Union victory at Antietam, President Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

• Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation 1 January 1863, and it freed the slaves in the states that had rebelled

• Ironically, in the slaves that were for the union, slavery was protected by the Constitution

• The solution, which Lincoln firmly backed, was the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1865, which abolished slavery everywhere in the United States

• Eventually, the northern states won in the Civil War, after the grisly battle at Gettysburg in July 1863 had turned the military tide against southern forces

• The northern states brought substantial resources to the war effort ~90 percent of the country's industrial capacity and ~2/3 of its railway lines, but it still took 4 years against a formidable enemy

• The northern states prevailing meant that the US abolished slavery 

• As European lands were becoming powerful based on revolutionary ideals, liberalism, and nationalism, the United States also fashioned a strong central government to oversee the westward expansion and take care of issues plaguing the country -- social and political

The Canadian Dominion: Independence without War

• Despite deep regional divisions, Canada did not experience bloody internal conflict nor war for independence
• Rather, it came eventually as Canadians and the British government agreed on the general principles of autonomy
• The distinctiveness of the British Canadians and the French Canadians ensured that the process of creating an independent society would be difficult, but fears of US expansion coming up north and the possibility of an invasion from the south helped overcome these differences
• By the late 19th century, Canada was free land, in control of its own land, issues and resources, despite keeping ties with Britain, and the lasting threat of the US
• Originally colonized by France as New France, Canada was then Britain after having won the Seven Years War against France
• Until the late eighteenth century French Canadians outnumbered British Canadians, so imperial officials made large concessions to their subjects of French descent to forestall unnecessary strife.
• Since French Canadians outnumbered British Canadians, up until the late eighteenth century, imperial officers made a considerable concession to the French subjects, to avoid any problems
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