06: Expansion and Sectionalism

By this act, slavery will be spread over regions to which it is now impossible to set limits. Texas, I repeat it, is but the first step of aggressions. I trust, indeed, that Providence will beat back and humble our cupidity and ambition. But one guilty success is often suffered to be crowned, as men call it, with greater; in order that a more awful retribution may at length vindicate the justice of God, and the rights of the oppressed. Texas, smitten with slavery, will spread the infection beyond herself. We know that the tropical regions have been found most propitious to this pestilence; nor can we promise ourselves, that its expulsion from them for a season forbids its return. By annexing Texas, we may send this scourge to a distance, which, if now revealed, would appal us, and through these vast regions every cry of the injured will invoke wrath on our heads.

It is the great mission of this country, to forward this revolution, and never was a sublimer work committed to a nation. Our mission is to elevate society through all its conditions, to secure to every human being the means of progress, to substitute the government of equal laws for that of irresponsible individuals, to prove that, under popular institutions, the people may be carried forward, that the multitude who toil are capable of enjoying the noblest blessings of the social state. The prejudice, that labor is a degradation, one of the worst prejudices handed down from barbarous ages, is to receive here, a practical refutation. The power of liberty to raise up the whole people, this is the great Idea, on which our institutions rest, and which is to be wrought out in our history. Shall a nation having such a mission abjure it, and even fight against the progress which it is specially called to promote?

Before 1846 began, California, Oregon, the entire Southwest, weren’t part of America, and Americans tended to think of their country as really going up to the Great Plains and not extending beyond that

The Donner party was part of a movement that was not just one wagon train that went wrong, but part of the whole country kind of looking to expand itself, looking to first, dream its own future, and then make it a reality. And so much of what the Donner party is about is a very tragic sense of how very potent dreams led people astray.

And one thing that is very humbling and very moving about the actual record is that you discover, really, that it’s a great tragedy that’s kind of a great democratizer. Everyone is reduced to the barest and sort of the most harrowing kind of circumstance, which is the circumstance simply to get by. And it makes you — the more you look at the record, the less you want to judge, because you understand that until you are in that similar situation, you’d have no way of really knowing how you yourself would respond.

James Reed

One of the most striking and often noted statistics from the Donner party, which had 87 people in it, was that of the half or so who died, two thirds of the survivors — rather, two thirds of the people who survived the disaster — were women.

Almost all the women were in family units in one kind or another. In the Donner party 22 single men out of the 87 people in the Donner party — there were 22 single men who were attached to the party as teamsters, servants, drivers, hired help of one kind or another. Of the 22 single men, many of the men not in families, 19 of them died. So that pretty much accounts in and of itself for that disparate survival statistic between men and women. What it means is that if you didn’t have a family to help you, you fell by the wayside.

e have sought to give embodiment to the souls of our ancestors frozen in the tactful but inadequate descriptor “enslaved,” a phrase that speaks only to what was done to them, not to who they were nor what they did. My ancestors – midwives and blacksmiths, agrarians and healers; builders and spiritualists, yearn’ers and doers – seen here as embodied by this wonderful cast of principal and background actors, did so very much.

Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas’s struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness.

Manifest Destiny is a term you hear a lot when you’re learning about the history of the United States in the nineteenth century. But what is it, really? Several experts weigh in