1. The Free-Labor Ideal The expansion of the railroad free labor (the word “free” referred to laborers who were not slaves. It did not mean laborers who worked for nothing) free-labor ideal celebrated hard work, self- reliance, and independence Economic Inequality Immigrants and the Free-Labor Ladder

2. Pat Lyon at the Forge, an 1826–1827 painting of a prosperous blacksmith. Proud of his accomplishments as a self- made man who had achieved success through hard work and skill rather than inheritance, Lyon asked the artist to paint him in his shop wearing his work clothes.

3. Total number of immigrants by five-year period

4. Westward Movement The nation’s swelling population, booming economy, and boundless confidence propelled a new era of rapid westward migration Manifest Destiny – Americans belief that the superiority of their institutions and white culture bestowed on them a God-given right to spread their civilization across the continent

5. American expansionists and the British competed for the Oregon Country – a vast region bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean, on the east by the Rocky Mountains, on the south by the forty- second parallel, and on the north by Russian Alaska In the late 1830s, settlers began to trickle along the Oregon Trail, by 1843 about 1,000 emigrants a year set out from Independence, Missouri Emigrants encountered the Plains Indians, a quarter of a million Native Americans scattered over the area between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains

6. In the 1830s, wagon trains began traveling to the Southwest and the Pacific coast

7. The Mormon Exodus After years of persecution in the East, the Mormons fled west to find religious freedom and communal security Joseph Smith Jr., founder and author of The Book of Mormon Converts, attracted to the promise of a pure faith in the midst of antebellum America’s social turmoil and rampant materialism, flocked to the new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons)

8. In this 1846 photograph the massive Mormon temple in Nauvoo, Illinois, towers over the ramshackle wooden buildings of this town along the Mississippi River.

9. The Mexican Borderlands In the Mexican Southwest, westward-moving Anglo American pioneers confronted northern- moving Spanish speaking frontiersmen Wanting to populate and develop its northern territory, the Mexican government granted the American Stephen F. Austin a huge tract of land along the Brazos River By 1830, the Mexican govt. banned further immigration to Texas from the U.S. & outlawed the introduction of additional slaves

10. As Americans spilled into lightly populated and loosely governed northern Mexico, Texas and then other Mexican provinces became contested territory

11. The Anglo-Americans made it clear that they wanted to be rid of the “despotism of the sword and the priesthood” and to govern themselves When the Texan settlers rebelled, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna ordered the Mexican army northward The Alamo – Mexican army vs. Texas Rebels General Sam Houston’s army adopted the massacre of Goliad as a battle cry and crushed Santa Anna’s troops

12. As shown on this map, major battles between Texas rebels and Mexican forces took place in San Antonio, Goliad, and San Jacinto

13. The Texans had succeeded in establishing the Lone Star Republic (1836), and the following year, 1837, the United States recognized the independence of Texas from Mexico The Politics of Expansion – any suggestion of adding another slave state to the Union outraged most Northerners in addition, Mexico had never relinquished its claim to its lost province The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)

14. Two political cartoons from the period of the Mexican-American War

18. Golden California Another consequence of the Mexican defeat was that California gold poured into American, not Mexican pockets James Marshall discovered gold in the American River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1848 Between 1849 and 1852, more than 250,000 “forty- niners,” as the would-be miners were known, descended on the Golden State Foreign Miners Tax Law (1850) – levied high taxes on non-Americans to drive them from the goldfields

19. Transcendentalists & Utopians Transcendentalists believed that individuals should conform neither to the dictates of the materialistic world nor to the dogma of formal religion Ralph Waldo Emerson – leading Transcendentalist - proclaimed that the power of the solitary individual was nearly limitless Fourierist followed the ideas of Charles Fourier. They believed that individualism and competition were evils that denied the basic truth that “men….are brothers and not competitors”

20. The daguerreotype, an early form of photography, required the sitter to remain perfectly still for twenty seconds or longer. The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, depicted here, did not like the result. He complained in his journal that in his “zeal not to blur the image,” every muscle had become “rigid” and his face was fixed in a frown as “in madness, or in death.”

21. UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES, MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY In the first half of the nineteenth century, dozens of utopian communities were established in the United States, where small groups of men and women attempted to establish a more perfect social order within the larger society.

22. Woman’s Rights Activists Women participated in the many reform activities that grew out of evangelical churches In 1848, about 300 reformers led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott gathered at Seneca Falls, New York, for the first national woman’s rights convention in the U.S. The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments set an ambitious agenda to demand civil liberties for women and to right the wrongs of society