2. Manifest Destiny In 1804 40% of the nation’s population lived in the Appalachian West. Thomas Jefferson’s pioneers associated westward migration. In the United States the western frontier offered the possibility of independence. In 1845 the journalist named John O’Sullivan put an idea that helped pull many pioneers toward the western frontier. It was the Americans’ “manifest destiny” to carry the “ great experiment of liberty”.

3. Manifest Destiny Pictures

4. Louisiana Purchase In 1803 president Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French. Also Louisiana stretched to the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans. He believed that a republic depended on an independence, virtuous citizenry for its survival.

5. Andrew Jackson He signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which allowed government to forcibly relocate Native Americans to territories west of the Mississippi River.

6. Western Expansion and the Compromise of 1850 In 1848 he Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase to the United States.

7. James K. Polk He was the 11 th President from 1845-1849. He also succeeded in his primary goals: to reduced the tariff, create an independence treasury, settle the long-standing dispute with Britain over the northern Oregon boundary, and expand the nation. Polk tried unsuccessfully to buy territory from Mexico. This set off the Mexican War of 1846.