Westward Movement Research Paper

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Sanghee Song
Professor Jessie
History 11
21 April 2015
Westward Movement
For now, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every discussion about the frontier. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had tried to settle this question: It had let in Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, conserving the breakable balance in Congress. It had specified that in the future, slavery would be banned north of the southern boundary of Missouri in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. However, the Missouri Compromise did not apply to new territories that were not part of the Louisiana Purchase, and so the issue of slavery continued to suppurate as the nation expanded. The Southern economy got larger increasingly conditional on “King Cotton” and the system of forced labor …show more content…

In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors and won independence from Mexico. They appealed to join the United States as a slave state. This promised to distress the careful stability that the Missouri Compromise had attained, and the seizure of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political prime concern until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James K. Polk was voted for the presidency in 1844. As a result of the steering of Polk and his associated, Texas participated in the union as a slave state in February 1846; in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state. That same month, Polk declared war against Mexico, asserting that the Mexican army had “invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil.” The war showed to be comparatively unpopular, in part because many Northerners objected to what they saw as a war to expand the “slaveocracy.” In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot fastened a condition to a war-appropriations bill proclaimed that slavery should not

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