The Jacksonian period deserves a word dis sociated from political manoeuvre. It was a time of physical and economic growth. New in ventions found application in industry and mul-• tiplied the products of labor. New channels and new methods of transportation were put into use. When the Erie Canal was opened in 1825, the cost of transportation from Albany to Buffalo was greatly reduced. The steamboat, first used just before the War of 1812, had been of immense importance in building up the West, where the river system was especially adapted to the flat-bottomed steamers; but before 1840 steamships were crossing the ocean, offering facilities for the great tide of European im migration. The first steam locomotive built in the United States was built in 1825; in 1840 there were nearly 3,000 miles of railroad id operation. The emigration to the West went on at a rate more marvelous than before; population pushed on beyond the Mississippi, while such States as Illinois doubled and re doubled their population, and the little cluster of houses near the head of Lake Michigan began its rapid growth into the big, teeming city of Chicago. In intellectual and moral lines the American people were awake. New works of literature were written; new movements for public improvement and reform were undertaken; and with these manifestations of the humanitarian sentiment was a tendency, too, toward ideals, toward ((soaring away,)) as Carlyle wrote Emerson, "after ideas, beliefs, revelations and such like, into perilous alti tudes? When such a spirit was abroad, when men were planning reforms and taking a new out look on life, it was natural that some one should protest against slavery. Garrison founded the Liberator at Boston, and demanded the immediate abolition of slavery. The American Emancipation Society was soon formed. The extreme abolitionist, denounc ing slave-holding as a crime, would consider no means to the end he desired, but insisted on the freedom of the blacks. Soon he was proclaiming the Constitution as as covenant with death and an agreement with and announcing that he would have no dealings or political communion with slave-owners. The South wrought up to a strange pitch of ex citement acted with indiscretion; at least its voluble representatives were indiscreet enough; for the abolitionists were but a handful, and nothing served so well to bring them into notice and ultimately to give the anti-slavery cause standing as the vehement denunciation by the Southern men in Congress. Worst of all for the South, as it soon proved, effort was made to strangle free speech in Congress and to check the right of petition, an effort which resulted naturally in a heated discussion when ever the forbidden subject was mentioned, and increased by many thousands the number of anti-slavery petitions demanding abolition in the District of Columbia, or like measures. Finally the gag policy was abandoned, but it had accomplished an object the reverse from that intended. By 1840 an anti-slavery party, the Liberty party, was in the field, and the political movement which ended with the elec tinon of 1860 was begun.
Soon after 1840 arose interesting questions from which trouble ultimately came. Some times tariff and financial problems were under discussion, sometimes internal improvements and the dredging of rivers and harbors, some times matters of diplomatic concern; but under neath everything, though it did not always come to the surface, was slavery and the divergence of North and South. In 1836 Texas became in dependent of Mexico and asked for admission into the Union. Her separate existence was recognized by sending a minister from Wash ington; but there was for a time no serious movement for annexation. In 1840 Harrison and Tyler were chosen as President and Vice President. Harrison died soon after the in auguration (1841). Tyler, though elected on a Whig ticket, was by training and predilection really more in sympathy with the tendencies of the Democratic party than with those of the Whigs. He did not participate with the Whig leaders in their movement to carry out their plans in regard to a new tariff and a new hank; and before the end of the term he had in stalled Calhoun as his Secretary of State. An
effort to bring Texas into the Union had now begun, hut a treaty prepared to attain that end was rejected by the Senate. In 1844 the Whigs nominated Clay; the Democrats, Polk of Tennessee. Polk's adherents shouted for the tariff of 1842 and demanded the "reannexa tion of Texas," referring by these well-chosen words to the fact that by the treaty of Spain in 1819 we had surrendered our claim to the land beyond the Sabine. The Liberty party, taking a strong stand against slavery, cast a much larger vote than four years before. Polk was elected; and under the influence of the election, the gloom of the Whigs and the en thusiasm of their successful opponents, the an nexation of Texas was consummated (1845). The new State was brought in, not by a treaty as in the case of the acquisition of Louisiana and Florida, but by virtue of a joint resolution authorizing the President to invite Texas to come into the Union as a State. Texas was a slave State; her admission into the Union had been vehemently opposed by many Northern people because it increased slave territory and strengthened the hold of slavery on the land. Difficulties soon ensued, for Mexico was quite unwilling to surrender all the territory Texas claimed as hers and which we purported to have made- our own. The new State claimed all the land from the old southwest boundary of the Union to the Rio Grande River. An effort to support the claim of Texas involved us in war with Mexico, a war which was not distasteful to Polk, who hoped it could soon be ended and that as a result he could obtain the Far West stretching away to the Pacific. The war (May 1846 February 1848) was a long triumph for Ameri can arms, longer than Polk could have wished, but triumphant none the less. In September 1847, General Scott entered the City of Mexico, and the next February was signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, by which the United States secured the land westward to the ocean, and promised, besides assuming certain claims, to pay Mexico $15,000,000. There were thus added to the expanding republic, if we include Texas as the fruit of the war, about 875,000 square miles. In the meantime a treaty with Great Britain had been signed. The title of the United States to the Oregon country south of the 49th parallel was thus made secure. In 1853, by the Gadsden Purchase, something like 45,000 square miles— the southern portion of what became the territories of New Mexico and Arizona—were added to the national domain.
But the annexation of Texas and the new West immediately ushered in new difficulties. Even before the war was over there had come up in Congress the so-called Wilmot Proviso, the purpose of which was to exclude slavery from any land acquired from Mexico. In the election of 1848 Gen. Lewis Cass of Michigan, the Democratic candidate, was opposed by Gen eral Taylor of Louisiana, one of the heroes of the war. The Free-soil party (q.v.), the successors of the Liberty party, presented Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams as their can didates. They believed that Congress was legally bound to forbid slavery in the Tern tories, having, as they said, °no more right to make a slave than to make a Icing.)) Of these parties, the first two did not proclaim definite opinions as to slavery. Cass had, however, already announced that, in his opinion, the people of the Territories should settle their domestic affairs for themselves, a doctrine which was later formulated as the doctrine of "popular sovereignty.° The Whigs as a party were not opposed to slavery; they counted on Southern support and sympathy; but many of their Northern adherents, "the conscience Whigs," were strongly opposed to extension of the system. The extreme proslavery element in the country believed that Congress could not rightfully prohibit the Southern slave-owner from moving into the national domain with his human chattels and holding them there as his own. Taylor was elected; the Free-soilers, no longer an insignificant faction, polled over 290,000 popular votes and held the balance of power in some of the States, actually casting more votes in New York than the Democrats.