roots.

conversation with Horace Binney, a Northern friend, in 1834, boasted of the superiority of slave labor over free labor in a democracy. Of the Northern laborers he said: "The poor and uneducated are increasing. There is no power in representative government to suppress them. Their numbers and disorderly tempers will make them in the end the enemies of the men of property. They have the right to vote, and will finally control your elections, invade your houses, and drive you out of doors. . . . They will increase till they overturn your institutions. Slavery cuts off this evil at its . . There cannot be a durable republic without slavery." 364. The Failure of the Moral Argument. The moral argument of the abolitionists had less and less weight as this caste system hardened. "By what moral suasion," asked an apologist for slavery in the South, "do you imagine you can prevail on us to give up a thousand millions of dollars in the value of our slaves and a thousand millions more in the depreciation of our lands?" Had the South been willing, there is little doubt that a plan of gradual emancipation could have been found. Other nations had got rid of slavery without revolution or bloodshed, and the example of England, which purchased and set free the slaves in her West Indian colonies in 1833, was before the eyes of the world. But under the provocation of the abolitionists' attacks the legislatures of the Southern states, instead of devising plans of emancipation, passed laws to fix the status of slavery on the negroes forever.

REFERENCES

The Missouri Compromise: W. E. B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, chaps. i-iii; A. B. HART, American History told by Contemporaries, Vol. I, Nos. 86, 87; Vol. II, Nos. 42, 102-108; F. J. TURNER, Rise of the New West (Am. Nation), chap. x; JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, Memoirs, Vols. IV, V; J. A. WOODBURN, Historical Significance of the Missouri Compromise, in American History Association Report, 1893, pp. 249–298; J. W. BURGESS, The Middle Period, chap. iv; J. B. MCMASTER, History of the People of the United States, Vol. IV, chap. xxxix; J. F. RHODES, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, Vol. I, pp. 29–39; CARL SCHURZ, Henry Clay, Vol. I, chap. viii.

The Abolitionists: HART, Contemporaries, Vol. III, Nos. 174-181, 186; Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation), chaps. vii-xviii; W. P. and F. J. GARRISON, Life of William Lloyd Garrison; McMASTER, Vol. VI, chap. lxi; HIGGINSON and MACDONALD, History of the United States, chap. xix; JESSE MACY, The

Anti-Slavery Crusade (Chronicles, Vol. XXVIII), chaps. ii-v; WILLIAM MACDONALD, Select Documents of United States History, 1776-1861, Nos. 63-69; T. C. SMITH, The Liberty and Free-Soil Parties in the Northwest, chaps. ii, iii; BURGESS, chap. xi; RHODES, Vol. I, pp. 53-75; BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, The Story of the Negro, chap. xiv.

TOPICS FOR SPECIAL REPORTS

1. Antislavery Sentiment in the Eighteenth Century: HENRY WILSON, The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, Vol. I, pp. 1-30; THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on Virginia; WILLIAM BIRNEY, James G. Birney, His Life and Times, Appendix C; JOHN WOOLMAN, Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes; HART, Contemporaries, Vol. II, Nos. 102, 103, 106; GAILLARD HUNT, Life of James Madison, pp. 70-76.

2. Slavery in the Constitution of the United States: WILSON, Vol. I, pp. 39-56; DuBois, pp. 53-69; JONATHAN ELLIOT, Debates on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, Vol. V; J. R. BRACKETT, The Status of Slavery, 1775-1789 (in J. F. JAMESON's Essays in Constitutional History), pp. 263-311; H. V. AMES, Slavery and the Constitution.

3. The "Gag Resolution": J. Q. ADAMS, Memoirs, Vol. VIII, pp. 434-481; Vol. IX, pp. 267-286; HART, Contemporaries, Vol. III, No. 184; C. H. PECK, The Jacksonian Epoch, pp. 273-279, 373-392; J. T. MORSE, JR., John Quincy Adams, pp. 243-262; JOSIAH QUINCY, Memoir of John Quincy Adams, pp. 251262; HART, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation), pp. 256-275.

4. Abolitionist Literature in the United States Mail: HART, Contemporaries, Vol. III, No. 180; Slavery and Abolition, pp. 286-288; J. D. RICHARDSON, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. III, pp. 175 ff.; Amos KENDALL, Autobiography, pp. 645 ff.

5. James G. Birney: WILLIAM BIRNEY, James G. Birney, His Life and Times; SAMUEL J. MAY, Recollections of the Antislavery Conflict, pp. 203-211; HART, Contemporaries, Vol. III, No. 177; WÄLSON, Vol. I (use index).

CHAPTER XII

TEXAS

WESTWARD EXPANSION

365. The Freedom of the New World. One of the chief traits of the American people has been their restless activity. The settlers who came to our shores in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came in search of an ampler life than they found in the Old World. They wanted elbow room. They demanded freedom-freedom from religious persecution, social oppression, and commercial restriction. For the sake of living untrammeled lives and working out their own destinies they accepted the privations and hardships of the New World. Their descendants, increased by new thousands of adventurous immigrants, tended constantly westward, making the extension of our frontier to the Pacific the most important influence in American history.

366. Waves of Westward Migration. The westward movement is characterized by successive waves of migration. The first great wave followed the expulsion of the French from North America in 1763. Through the passes of the Alleghenies, "the arteries of the West," a stream of pioneers led by Boone, Sevier, Robertson, Harrod, and our other early "empire builders"1 poured into the forest lands of the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland valleys; while George Rogers Clark, during the American Revolution, won for Virginia and the Union the magnificent territory between the Ohio and the Great Lakes, extending westward to the Mississippi. A second wave of westward migration followed the War of 1812, filling Indiana and Illinois Territories on the north and Mississippi and Missouri Territories to the south and bringing five new Western states (Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri) into the Union

1 "A roughened race, embrowned in the sun, loving the rude woods and the crack of the rifle, delicate in nothing but the touch of the trigger, leaving cities in their track as if by accident rather than by design.... Settled life and wild life side by side; civilization frayed at the edges; Europe frontiered!" Woodrow Wilson, in The Forum, Vol. XIX, p. 544.

in as many years (1816-1821). The third and most wonderful era of westward expansion (1835-1848) carried our boundary across the Rockies and the Sierras to the Pacific Ocean. It is this third period which we are to study in the present chapter. The chapter is entitled "Texas," because the annexation of that great commonwealth to the Union, and the disposition of the land that was acquired in the war with Mexico which followed the annexation, determined the whole policy of our government toward the West during the decade 1840-1850.

367. The Opposition of the East. The path of westward expansion was never smooth. Besides the dangers of the wilderness,

the pioneer communities had to contend with opposition from the older states. Up to the time of the Missouri Compromise this opposition arose from the apprehension of the original states that the burden of the defense and the development of the new communities would fall upon their shoulders, and from the jealousy of the political power which the new communities would wrest from them. When the bill to admit Louisiana to the Union was proposed in 1811 Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts declared on the floor of Congress: "If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of the Union. . . . Do you suppose the people of the Northern and Atlantic states will, or ought to, look on with patience and see representatives and senators from the Red River and the Missouri pouring themselves on this floor, managing the concerns of a seaboard 1500 miles, at least, from their residence ?"

368. Slavery and the West. This narrow and selfish opposition of the East to the expansion of the West was broken down by the democratic revolution of the third decade of the nineteenth century, which put Andrew Jackson into the presidential chair. But a still more serious complication arose with the debates over the Missouri Compromise and the abolitionist agitation. Then the question of the growth of the West became connected with the question of the extension of slavery. After the bitter struggle of the years 1835-1837 in Congress over the antislavery petitions and the use of the United States mails for antislavery propaganda, no movement for the acquisition of new territory or the admission of new states could arise without immediately starting the strife between the friends and the foes of slavery. Senator Benton of Missouri likened the slavery question to the plague of frogs sent on the Egyptians. "We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed," he said, "without having this pestilence thrust before us." It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of this connection between westward expansion and slavery. The slavery issue came to a crisis not as a struggle between North and South, but as a struggle of North and South for the West. The sentiment of expansion, so deeply implanted in the breasts of Northerners and Southerners alike, and the glory of carrying the American flag to the Pacific Ocean impelled our fathers to take possession of the Western land and trust to future compromises to settle the question of freedom or slavery within its borders. The history of those compromises we shall trace in a later chapter. First we must see how the Western land was won.

369. Claims to the Oregon Region. It will be remembered that the treaty of 1819 with Spain fixed our western boundary as far north as the forty-second parallel. We had just concluded (1818) a treaty with Great Britain by which we agreed to share with that power for ten years the great Oregon region lying beyond the Rocky Mountains (between 42° and 54° 40′ north latitude). The agreement was fair, for both countries had claims on Oregon, based upon exploration and settlement. For the Americans, a Boston sea captain named Gray had sailed into the mouth of the Columbia River in 1792; the famous Lewis and Clark expedition had traversed the region to the Pacific in 1804-1806; and John Jacob Astor had established the fur post of Astoria near the mouth of the Columbia in