Westward Expansion Flashcards
How many Americans lived in the “West” by 1840?
By 1840, nearly 7 million Americans–40 percent of the nation’s population–lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity. Like Thomas Jefferson, many of these pioneers associated westward migration, land ownership and farming with freedom.
When was the Louisiana Purchase? By whom? What did it do to the US? What were the boundaries?
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States.
Explain the Gadsen Purchase
In 1853, the Gadsden Purchase added about 30,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States and fixed the boundaries of the “lower 48” where they are today.
Explain the Manifest Destiny, who wrote it, and when?
In 1845, a journalist named John O’Sullivan put a name to the idea that helped pull many pioneers toward the western frontier.
Westward migration was an essential part of the republican project,
he argued, and it was Americans’ “manifest destiny,” to carry the “great experiment of liberty” to the edge of the continent:
to “overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us,” O’Sullivan wrote. The survival of American freedom depended on it.
