When was manifest destiny started

Many lived more equitably as partners with their husbands than did their eastern US counterparts. If widowed, a wife typically took over responsibility for the farm, a level of management very rare back east, where the farm would fall to a son or another male relation. Pioneer women made important decisions and were considered by their husbands to be more equal partners in the success of the homestead.

This was because of the necessity that all members had to work hard and contribute to the farming enterprise for it to succeed. Outside the family, women also played a crucial role in the community. People living in rural areas created rich social lives for themselves, often sponsoring activities that combined work, food, and entertainment, such as barn raising, corn husking, quilting bees, Grange meetings, church activities, and school functions. Women also organized shared meals, potluck events, and extended visits between families.

Homesteading family : Many women traveled west with family groups, such as the mother in this photograph. While homesteaders were often families, gold speculators and ranchers tended to be single men in pursuit of fortune. The few women who went to these wild outposts were typically prostitutes, and even their numbers were limited. In , in the Comstock Lode region of Nevada, for example, there were reportedly only 30 women in a town with some 2, men.

Women found occupations in all walks of frontier life. Some women worked in brothels despite the harsh and dangerous working conditions.

Many Chinese women, for example, came to the western camps as prostitutes to make money to send back home. However, life for these young women remained a challenging one as western settlement progressed. A handful of women, no more than , braved both the elements and male-dominated culture to become teachers in several of the more established cities in the West.

Even fewer arrived to support their husbands or operate stores in the mining towns. Toward the latter part of the 19th century, wealthy men began bringing their families west, and the mostly lawless landscape slowly began to change. Middle-class women arrived in the s with their husbands and established boarding houses, organized church societies, and worked as laundresses and seamstresses.

These women began to organize churches, school, civic clubs, and other community programs to promote family values. They fought to remove opportunities for prostitution and other vices they felt threatened their values.

Annie Oakley — was an American sharpshooter and exhibition shooter whose talent first came to light when, at age 15, she won a shooting match with traveling show marksman Frank E. Butler whom she later married. Pearl Hart c. She committed one of the last recorded stagecoach robberies in the United States. Her crime gained notoriety primarily because she was a woman. A native of County Cork, Ireland, she and her sister were brought as young children to the United States by their mother around to escape the poverty of the Great Famine.

Cashman established her first boarding house for miners in British Columbia during the Klondike Gold Rush. During her time there, she led a rescue of dozens of miners in the Cassiar Mountains. In the late s, Cashman set up several restaurants and boarding houses in Arizona. In , she went to the Yukon for gold prospecting, and worked there until She became nationally known as a frontierswoman, with the Associated Press covering a later trip.

After a series of skirmishes with Mexico, the Republic of Texas won independence in and was annexed into the United States in Examine the economic motivations behind the Mexico and Texas war and the subsequent annexation of Texas by the United States. Anglo-Americans, primarily from the southern United States, began emigrating to Mexican Texas in the s at the request of the Mexican government, which sought to populate the sparsely inhabited lands of its northern frontier and mitigate attacks from American Indian tribes in the region.

Anglo-Americans soon became a majority in Texas and quickly became dissatisfied with Mexican rule. The soil and climate were conducive to expanding slavery and the cotton kingdom. To many whites, it seemed not only their God-given right but also their patriotic duty to populate the lands beyond the Mississippi River, bringing with them American slavery, culture, laws, and political traditions. They were also dissatisfied with the Mexican legal system, which was markedly different from the representative democracy and jury trials found in the United States.

Most US settlers were from southern states, and many had brought slaves with them. Mexico tried to accommodate them by maintaining the questionable assertion that the slaves were indentured servants. However, American slaveholders in Texas distrusted the Mexican government and wanted Texas to be a new US slave state. The great dislike for Roman Catholicism coupled with a widely held belief in American racial superiority led to a generally racist and discriminatory view toward Mexicans.

Fifty-five delegates from the Anglo-American settlements in Texas gathered in with demands including creation of an independent state of Texas separate from Coahuila. When ordered to disband, the delegates reconvened in early April to write a constitution for an independent Texas. The Consultation delegates met again in March of They declared their independence from Mexico and drafted a constitution calling for a US-style judicial system and an elected president and legislature.

Notably, they also established that slavery would not be prohibited in Texas. Many wealthy Tejanos supported the push for independence, hoping for liberal governmental reforms and economic benefits. Mexico had no intention of losing its northern province.

Santa Anna and his army of some 4, troops had besieged San Antonio in February Hopelessly outnumbered, its defenders fought fiercely from their refuge in an old mission known as the Alamo. The Battle of the Alamo, as it came to be called, lasted from February 23 to March 6, This was a pivotal event in the Texas Revolution.

Following a day siege, Mexican troops under Santa Anna launched an assault on the Alamo Mission, and all of the Texian defenders were killed. Buoyed by a desire for revenge, the Texians defeated the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, , ending the revolution.

Sam Houston became the first president of the Republic of Texas, elected on a platform that favored annexation to the United States. Battle of the Alamo : The Fall of the Alamo, painted by Theodore Gentilz fewer than 10 years after this pivotal moment in the Texas Revolution, depicts the assault on the Alamo complex. Mindful of the vicious debates over Missouri that had led to talk of disunion and war, US politicians were reluctant to annex Texas or, indeed, even to recognize it as a sovereign nation.

Annexation would almost certainly trigger war with Mexico, and admission of a state with a large slave population, though permissible under the Missouri Compromise, would once again bring the issue of slavery to the fore. Texas had no choice but to organize itself as the independent Lone Star Republic.

To protect itself from Mexican attempts to reclaim it, Texas sought and received recognition from France, Great Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The United States did not officially recognize Texas as an independent nation until March , nearly a year after the final victory over the Mexican army at San Jacinto. Uncertainty about its future, however, did not discourage Americans committed to expansion, especially slaveholders, from rushing to settle in the Lone Star Republic. Between and , its population nearly tripled.

By , American slaveholders had brought nearly 12, enslaved Africans to Texas. In keeping with the program of ethnic cleansing and white racial domination, Americans in Texas generally treated both Mexican Tejano and American Indian residents with contempt, eager to displace and dispossess them.

In August , Memucan Hunt, Jr. After the election of Mirabeau B. Lamar, an opponent of annexation, as president of Texas in , Texas withdrew its offer. While John Tyler had a difficult time with domestic policy during his presidency — , he oversaw many accomplishments in foreign policy, especially in the areas of westward expansion.

He had long been an advocate of expansion toward the Pacific, and of free trade, and was fond of evoking themes of national destiny and the spread of liberty in support of these policies. He applied the Monroe Doctrine to Hawaii, told Britain not to interfere there, and began the process toward eventual US annexation of Hawaii. By the mids, US expansionism was articulated in the ideology of manifest destiny.

Major events in the western movement of the US population were the Homestead Act, a law by which, for a nominal price, a settler was given a title to acres of land to farm. However, its members were not ready to receive him. He knew that with little chance of re-election, the only way to salvage his presidency and legacy was to move public opinion in favor of the Texas issue, and he formed his own political party to lobby the Democratic Party in favor of annexation.

Ballot after ballot, Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren failed to win the necessary super- majority of Democratic votes and slowly fell in the ranking. It was not until the ninth ballot that the Democrats discovered an obscure pro-annexation candidate named James K. They found him to be perfectly suited for their platform, and he was nominated with two-thirds of the vote.

Tyler considered his work vindicated and implied in an acceptance letter that annexation was his true priority, rather than re-election. President Tyler entered negotiations with the Republic of Texas for an annexation treaty, which he submitted to the Senate.

On June 8, , the treaty was defeated 35 to 16, well below the two-thirds majority necessary for ratification. Of the 29 Whig senators, 28 voted against the treaty with only one Whig, a southerner, supporting it.

The Democratic senators were more divided on the issue; in the north, six opposed while five supported the treaty, while one opposed and 10 supported it in the south. Tyler was unfazed, however, and he felt annexation was now within reach.

He called for Congress to annex Texas by joint resolution rather than by treaty. Former President Jackson, a staunch supporter of annexation, persuaded presidential candidate Polk to welcome Tyler back into the Democratic party, and ordered Democratic editors to cease their attacks on the him. Satisfied by these developments, Tyler dropped out of the presidential race in August and endorsed Polk for the presidency.

After the election, the Tyler administration consulted with President-elect Polk and set out to accomplish annexation via a joint resolution. On February 26, , 6 days before Polk took office, Congress passed the joint resolution, and Tyler signed the bill into law on March 1, just 3 days before the end of his term.

On July 4, , the Texan Congress endorsed the American annexation offer with only one dissenting vote, and began writing a state constitution. The citizens of Texas approved the new constitution and the annexation ordinance on October 13, , and President Polk signed the documents formally integrating Texas into the United States on December 29, O'Sullivan wrote in favor of the U. Mexico maintained that the region was Mexican territory.

For more than 20 years, Anglo-Americans had migrated into the region, bringing ever-increasing numbers of enslaved men and women with them, tying the region to the economics and politics of the U. Sentiment for and against annexation reached fever pitch in and became a major feature of the presidential election campaigns of Henry Clay and James Polk.

Opponents to annexation, he argued, were trying to stop "the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions" 1.

In simple terms, Manifest Destiny was the idea that Americans were destined, by God, to govern the North American continent. This idea, with all the accompanying transformations of landscape, culture, and religious belief it implied, had deep roots in American culture. In , John Winthrop, writing decades before the 13 original colonies declared independence, said that the English men and women who hoped to settle New England "shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world" 2.

He, proudly, stood fifth in his class. Following a two-year cruise on the steam frigate USS Wabash , flagship of the Mediterranean Squadron, Dewey took his examination for lieutenancy and was commissioned in the dark month of April Mere weeks later, he paced the deck of the steam frigate Mississippi , a year-old executive officer untested in battle and assigned to blockade a rebellious Gulf coast. Protected by a large garrison, the heavy guns of two forts and other batteries, and a small Confederate fleet that included the ironclad ram CSS Manassas —plus the Mississippi River currents, twists and treacherous snags—New Orleans seemed impregnable.

He also learned the import of decisive action when Manassas tried to ram Mississippi. Only a quick command from Dewey to the helmsman turned a potentially deadly direct hit into a glancing blow. Over the course of the Civil War, Dewey was executive officer on six ships, eventually reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. But he did learn well the skills of command: leadership, intelligence, logistics, focus on the objective and decisive action.

Unfortunately for Dewey, three decades would elapse before he could employ these skills to prove himself an outstanding fleet commander. Fortunately for the United States, Dewey persevered in his chosen career across those 30 years, despite the best efforts of his nation to virtually eliminate its own Navy. As the years of fratricide ground toward Appomattox, the ship U. Navy blockaded the Rebel coast, patrolled rivers, supplied Union forces and combed the high seas for the remaining Confederate raiders.

Its ironclad monitors, designed only for coastal and riverine operations, followed—some sold for scrap but most laid up to be reactivated if war threatened. More ships met their end as Congress focused on Reconstruction, the Western frontier and internal expansion.

By only 52 vessels including auxiliaries remained for sea and coastal duties, and those were far from the state-of-the-art warships then sliding down the ways in Europe. The Navy returned to its overseas stations in the late s. From those stations established in and dependent upon foreign ports , lone ships cruised distant waters to show the flag and assist American merchantmen and civilians. Furthermore, the penny-pinching Congress relegated steam to secondary propulsion.

Naval regulations permitted the use of coal only under extreme conditions. Research into armament, armor and ship design languished. The state of strategic thinking matched the deterioration of warships and tactical capability. In essence, the United States returned to the outmoded doctrines of , relegating its ships to coastal defense and commerce raiding.

This does not mean the Navy was inactive after the Civil War. These were invariably small affairs—or at least incidents that did not threaten to escalate into war with major powers.

Such was not the case in when Spanish authorities seized Virginius , a former Confederate blockade-runner supplying guns to Cuban rebels under a false American registry see story this issue. American sympathies lay with the rebels and gunrunners, but cooler heads in Washington and Madrid avoided escalating tensions into war.

However, the Virginius Incident was a wakeup call for the naval establishment. In preparing for war, it found many of the mothballed monitors decayed beyond use.

The following year, maneuvers incorporating reactivated vessels revealed a top fleet speed of less than five knots. Consensus held that one modern cruiser could sink the entire American force. Still, reaction from Congress proved slow and less than satisfactory. In Congress finally authorized construction of four steel-hulled vessels: the protected cruisers Atlanta , Boston and Chicago each featuring an armored deck at the waterline to protect magazines and engines from plunging fire and the dispatch boat Dolphin.

From to , Congress authorized 30 additional warships, ranging from gunboats to the small battleships Texas and Maine. Building delays ensued when Congress mandated in that all naval vessels be built with domestic materials. At the time, American manufacturers could not provide the necessary guns, armor or steel plating.

Other warships, increasing in size and potential, followed the first As the new ships entered service, world events lifted American eyes from their own shores to blue waters.

But imperial ventures required a rethinking of naval strategy, and in Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, then-president of the U. His treatise not only supported trade-based imperialism, it provided a naval theory and strategy that guided industrialized seafaring nations for several generations.

Naval officers worldwide welcomed this concept of firepower projection and, of course, the many ships required to carry that firepower , while the eyes of statesmen glistened at the thought of colonies to be gained and raw materials to be exploited. Cuba and the remaining Spanish possessions in the Caribbean attracted American interest for a variety of reasons. Some pointed to Spanish cruelty and the brutalized people who desperately sought the caress of democracy and the guidance of Republican values.

Navalists sought an American base in the Caribbean from which to enforce the old Monroe Doctrine. Industrialists desired sugar and markets. Last, the American press wanted to sell newspapers—and greedy publishers did not hesitate to juggle facts to ensure those sales. By Feb. As the Navy evolved, George Dewey quietly persevered. Many officers abandoned the slow promotion schedule and other frustrations of service life, turning their talents to the civilian world and its monetary rewards.

But something drove Dewey, likely the desire to make his mark on history in the names of his heroes, Dr. Julius Dewey and Admiral David Farragut.