Unit 5 · Pushing National Boundaries

By 1824 the old Federalist Party had faded away. Four men from the same party ran for president. They were Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, William Crawford of Georgia and Henry Clay of Kentucky. Jackson was a famous general who had won the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. Adams was the son of President John Adams and an experienced diplomat.

Jackson won the most popular votes and the most electoral votes. But he did not win a majority, meaning more than half, of the electoral votes. The Constitution says that when this happens, the House of Representatives picks the president from the top three candidates. Henry Clay came in fourth, so he was out. But Clay was Speaker of the House, and he had great influence there.

Clay backed Adams, and the House chose Adams as president. Soon after, Adams named Clay his secretary of state. Jackson’s supporters were furious. They called the deal a corrupt bargain. They claimed Clay had traded his support for a top job. No one ever proved such a deal was made. Still, the charge hurt Adams for four years, and Jackson began planning to run again in 1828.

The 1828 rematch between Jackson and Adams was one of the nastiest campaigns in U.S. history. Both sides attacked each other’s character. Jackson’s side called Adams an out-of-touch aristocrat. Adams’s side called Jackson a violent, uneducated brawler. Jackson won easily. His supporters formed the Democratic Party, which still exists today.

Jackson was the first president from west of the Appalachian Mountains. He had been born poor and had lost his parents young. Many farmers, workers and frontier families saw him as one of them. Crowds poured into the White House to celebrate after he took office in 1829. People came to call this new style of politics the rise of the common man.

Voting changed too. In the early 1800s, many states only let men who owned property vote. By the 1820s and 1830s, most states had dropped that rule for white men. Many more ordinary men could now take part in democracy, government by the people. Parties also began choosing candidates at big meetings called nominating conventions, instead of in small groups of leaders.

But “the common man” meant white men only. Women could not vote anywhere. Enslaved people had no rights at all. Free Black men actually lost voting rights in several states during these years, including North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Most Native Americans were not treated as citizens. The growth of democracy was real, but it was not shared by everyone.

Jackson believed ordinary citizens could handle most government jobs. He also believed that officials who stayed in office too long became lazy or dishonest. So he removed many federal workers and gave their jobs to people who had helped him win. Giving government jobs to loyal supporters is called the spoils system.

The name came from a New York senator, William Marcy, who defended the practice in 1832. He said that the winners of an election had a right to the rewards of winning, the way soldiers took the “spoils” from a defeated army. Critics said the system filled offices with people who were loyal but not skilled. Some of Jackson’s appointees did steal public money.

Jackson also relied on a group of friends and advisers outside his official cabinet. Critics called them the kitchen cabinet, as if they slipped in through the back door. Supporters said Jackson was simply listening to people he trusted. Either way, it was clear that Jackson meant to run the government his own way, with a strong president at the center.

A tariff is a tax on goods brought in from other countries. In 1828 Congress passed a high tariff to protect factories in the North from foreign competition. The South had few factories. Southern planters sold cotton overseas and bought many manufactured goods. The tariff made those goods cost more. Angry Southerners called it the Tariff of Abominations. An abomination is something hateful.

Jackson’s own vice president, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, led the fight against it. Calhoun argued for nullification. This was the idea that a state could declare a federal law null and void, meaning it had no force inside that state. He even said a state could leave the Union if pushed too far. In 1830 Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts answered in a famous speech defending the Union.

In 1832 South Carolina declared the tariff laws nullified. It threatened to secede, or leave the Union, if the government used force. Calhoun resigned as vice president. Jackson was a Southerner and a slaveholder, but he believed the Union came first. He warned that he would enforce the law. Congress passed the Force Bill, which allowed the president to use the military to collect the tariff.

Henry Clay helped work out a compromise tariff in 1833 that lowered the rates over time. South Carolina backed down. The crisis ended, but the argument over states' rights did not. Southern leaders would return to Calhoun’s ideas again, especially in the fight over slavery.

The Second Bank of the United States held the federal government’s money and made loans. Its president, Nicholas Biddle, used it to keep state banks from printing too much paper money. Many business owners liked the bank because it kept money steady. But Jackson distrusted it. He thought it gave a small group of wealthy people too much power over the country.

The bank’s charter, its official permission to operate, would run out in 1836. In 1832 Jackson’s opponents, led by Henry Clay, pushed Congress to renew it early. They hoped to make the bank a campaign issue. Congress passed the renewal. Jackson used his veto, his power to reject a bill, and sent a strong message explaining why.

Jackson won reelection in 1832 in a landslide over Clay. He then moved the government’s money out of the national bank and into state banks. Critics called them “pet banks” because many were run by his friends. With federal money to lend, many of these banks made risky loans and printed large amounts of paper money. That set the stage for trouble a few years later.

In 1830 tens of thousands of Native Americans still lived east of the Mississippi River. In the Southeast, the largest nations were the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole. They had farms, towns and governments. White settlers, especially cotton planters, wanted their rich land. Many leaders, including Jackson, argued that Native people should be moved west.

That year Congress narrowly passed the Indian Removal Act. It allowed the president to make treaties trading Native lands in the East for land in the West, in what was called Indian Territory. Much of that land later became Oklahoma. The law said nations could choose to move. In practice, the government used heavy pressure, bribes, threats and finally soldiers.

Some Americans spoke out against removal. Missionaries, some members of Congress such as Davy Crockett of Tennessee, and many Northern church groups called it cruel and unjust. The Choctaw were the first nation forced to go, starting in 1831. They left in winter, with too little food and poor supplies. Many died on the way. Over the next twenty years, tens of thousands of Native people were forced west.

The Cherokee chose to fight removal with laws and courts instead of weapons. They had a written constitution, an elected government and a principal chief, John Ross. When Georgia passed laws claiming power over Cherokee land, the Cherokee said Georgia had no right to rule them. Gold was found on Cherokee land in 1829, and Georgia became even more eager to take it.

Georgia made a law that white people could not live on Cherokee land without a state license. Samuel Worcester, a missionary who lived with the Cherokee, refused to get one. He was arrested and sentenced to hard labor. His case, Worcester v. Georgia, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1832. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee Nation was a separate nation and that Georgia’s laws had no force there.

The Cherokee had won. But the Supreme Court has no army. It depends on the president to carry out its rulings. Jackson did not act to protect the Cherokee, and Georgia ignored the decision. A popular story says Jackson dared Marshall to enforce the ruling himself. Historians doubt he said those exact words, but his actions matched the idea. Winning in court was not enough to save Cherokee land.

In 1835 a small group of Cherokee, not chosen by the nation’s government, signed the Treaty of New Echota. They agreed to give up all Cherokee land in the East. Its signers believed removal could no longer be stopped and hoped to get the best deal possible. Principal Chief John Ross and most Cherokee rejected it. More than 15,000 Cherokee signed a petition protesting the treaty. The U.S. Senate approved it anyway.

In 1838 U.S. soldiers rounded up the Cherokee and held them in crowded camps. Families lost homes, farms and livestock. Many had to leave with only what they could carry. Then they were sent west in large groups, most on foot, some by boat. The journeys took months. Many groups traveled through fall and winter.

Several routes crossed southern Illinois. In the winter of 1838 to 1839, thousands of Cherokee waited near the Mississippi River because ice made it impossible to cross. Many suffered from cold, hunger and disease. Today, Trail of Tears State Forest near Jonesboro, Illinois, marks part of that path.

About 4,000 Cherokee died during the roundup and the removal. The Cherokee called the journey “the trail where we cried.” Today it is known as the Trail of Tears. In Indian Territory, the Cherokee rebuilt their government, schools and newspaper. The Cherokee Nation’s capital is still in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Not every nation left quietly. In Florida, many Seminole refused to move. A leader named Osceola became famous for his resistance. Among the Seminole lived Black Seminoles, people of African descent, many of whom had escaped slavery. They feared being enslaved again if the Seminole were moved. The Second Seminole War lasted from 1835 to 1842. It was one of the longest and most costly wars the U.S. fought against a Native nation.

Most Seminole were eventually forced west. Osceola was captured while meeting U.S. officers under a white flag of truce, and he died in prison. But a small number of Seminole hid deep in the Florida swamps and were never removed. Their descendants still live in Florida today.

In Illinois, the Sauk and Meskwaki had been pushed west of the Mississippi River by earlier treaties. The Sauk leader Black Hawk said those treaties were unfair. In 1832 he led more than 1,000 Sauk and Meskwaki people, including many women and children, back across the river into northern Illinois. Settlers panicked, and the state called out its militia. A young Abraham Lincoln joined and was elected captain of his company, though he never saw battle.

The Black Hawk War lasted about four months. It ended in August 1832 at the Bad Axe River in Wisconsin, where soldiers killed many of Black Hawk’s people as they tried to cross the Mississippi. Black Hawk was captured. Within a few years, the Potawatomi and other nations also gave up their remaining lands in northern Illinois, and most were moved west. Northern Illinois, including Chicago, then filled quickly with settlers.

Jackson chose his vice president, Martin Van Buren of New York, to follow him. Van Buren won the election of 1836. He was a skilled organizer who had helped build the Democratic Party. But he entered office just as the economy was about to crash.

During the mid-1830s, many people borrowed paper money from state banks to buy western land, hoping its price would rise. In 1836 Jackson ordered that public land be paid for only in gold or silver, called specie. People rushed to trade paper money for coins. Banks did not have enough. In 1837 many banks failed. A sudden wave of fear like this is called a panic.

The panic turned into a depression, a long period of economic hardship. Businesses closed. Workers in cities lost their jobs. Farmers could not sell crops for a fair price. Some people went hungry. Van Buren believed the government should not step in to help the economy directly. His opponents blamed him for the hard times and gave him the nickname “Martin Van Ruin.”

Jackson’s enemies came together in the 1830s to form the Whig Party. They took the name from a British party that opposed the power of kings. They mocked Jackson as “King Andrew the First” for using the veto so often. Leading Whigs included Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Whigs wanted a national bank, tariffs and federal money for roads and canals.

In 1840 the Whigs chose William Henry Harrison, an old general who had fought at Tippecanoe in 1811. His running mate was John Tyler. Their slogan was “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” When a Democratic newspaper sneered that Harrison would be happy sitting in a log cabin drinking cider, the Whigs turned the insult into a campaign theme. They held parades with log cabins on wheels and sold songs and souvenirs.

Harrison actually came from a wealthy Virginia family. But the image worked, and the hard times hurt Van Buren. Harrison won, and a record share of eligible voters turned out. Then, only a month after taking office in 1841, Harrison died. John Tyler became the first vice president to take over after a president died. The age of big, loud campaigns aimed at ordinary voters had arrived to stay.

In the 1840s many white Americans believed their country had a special mission. They thought the United States was meant to spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific, bringing its government, religion and way of life. In 1845 a New York newspaper editor named John L. O’Sullivan gave this belief a name. He called it Manifest Destiny. Manifest means obvious. Destiny means a future that is sure to happen.

People had different reasons for going west. Some wanted cheap farmland. Some wanted to trade or find gold. Some wanted to spread their religion. Some wanted freedom from people who treated them badly. Many leaders also wanted ports on the Pacific Ocean to trade with Asia. Manifest Destiny gave all of these goals a sense of purpose, as if they were part of a larger plan.

But the West was not empty. Native nations had lived there for thousands of years. Mexico owned much of the Southwest and California. Britain also claimed the Oregon Country. Believers in Manifest Destiny often ignored these people or saw them as obstacles. The idea helped Americans justify expansion, growing the nation’s territory, even when it meant taking land by force.

Some of the first Americans to explore the Rocky Mountains were fur trappers called mountain men. In the 1820s and 1830s, they trapped beaver, whose fur was used to make fashionable hats. Mountain men lived rough, lonely lives. Many learned survival skills from Native people, and some married Native women. Jim Beckwourth, an African American mountain man, lived with the Crow people and later found a mountain pass into California.

Once a year, trappers met traders at a gathering called a rendezvous, a French word for meeting. They traded furs for supplies, told stories and held contests. Native people came to trade too. By about 1840 the beaver trade was fading. Beavers had been overtrapped, and hat styles had changed. Many mountain men became guides for wagon trains heading west.

Trade also opened the Southwest. In 1821 Mexico won its independence from Spain and welcomed American traders. That year a trader named William Becknell led a pack train from Missouri to Santa Fe, in what is now New Mexico. His route became the Santa Fe Trail. For years, wagons carried cloth and tools to Santa Fe and returned with silver, furs and mules.

The Oregon Country was rich farmland in the Pacific Northwest. Both the United States and Britain claimed it. In the 1830s missionaries such as Marcus and Narcissa Whitman went there hoping to convert Native people to Christianity. Their letters praised the land. In 1843 about a thousand people set out together from Missouri. After that, the stream of settlers never stopped.

The Oregon Trail ran about 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The trip took four to six months. Families packed flour, bacon, coffee, tools and seeds into covered wagons pulled by oxen. The wagons were so full that most people walked the whole way. They had to cross rivers, deserts and mountains before winter snows closed the passes.

The greatest danger was disease, especially cholera, which spread through dirty water. Accidents such as drownings and wagon wheels were also common. Fights with Native people were rare. In fact, Native people often traded food and horses with emigrants, people leaving one place to settle in another, and helped guide them across rivers. Still, the flood of wagons used up grass, water and game that Native nations needed to survive.

Women and children did much of the work on the trail. They cooked, gathered fuel, cared for the sick and drove the animals. Many kept diaries that tell us about daily life. Between the 1840s and 1860, hundreds of thousands of people traveled the overland trails to Oregon, California and Utah.

In 1830 Joseph Smith founded a new church in New York, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its members are often called Mormons. Many neighbors distrusted their beliefs and their habit of voting together. Mobs attacked them in Ohio and Missouri. In 1839 they settled in Illinois, along the Mississippi River, and built a town called Nauvoo.

Nauvoo grew quickly and became one of the largest cities in Illinois. But tensions with neighbors grew too. Some Mormon leaders practiced polygamy, having more than one wife, which angered many Americans. In 1844 Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were jailed in Carthage, Illinois. A mob stormed the jail and killed them both.

The new leader, Brigham Young, decided his people needed a home far from other Americans. Starting in 1846, thousands of Mormons left Nauvoo and crossed Iowa. In July 1847 the first group reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake, then part of Mexico. They dug ditches to bring mountain water to their dry fields, a method called irrigation. Salt Lake City grew into the center of a large Mormon community in the region that became Utah.

After 1821, Texas was part of Mexico. Few people lived there besides Native nations such as the Comanche and a small number of Tejanos, Mexican Texans. To build up the region, Mexico invited Americans to settle. Stephen F. Austin brought about 300 families in the early 1820s. Each settler agreed to become a Mexican citizen, follow Mexican law and join the Catholic Church.

Many more Americans followed. By the early 1830s, they far outnumbered Tejanos. Many were cotton farmers from the South who brought enslaved people with them. In 1829 Mexico ended slavery, but Texans found ways around the law. Many settlers also ignored Mexican customs and kept the Protestant faith.

Mexican leaders worried they were losing control. In 1830 Mexico tried to stop new American settlers from coming. Then General Antonio López de Santa Anna took power. He threw out Mexico’s constitution and made the national government stronger over the states. Many Anglo settlers and some Tejanos, such as Juan Seguín, believed their rights were being taken away. In 1835 fighting broke out.

In early 1836 Santa Anna marched a large army north to crush the revolt. About 200 Texans held an old mission in San Antonio called the Alamo. They included William Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and several Tejanos. After a siege of about thirteen days, Mexican troops stormed the Alamo on March 6. Nearly all the defenders were killed. A few women, children and an enslaved man named Joe survived.

While the Alamo was under siege, Texas leaders declared independence on March 2, 1836. Soon after, Mexican forces captured and executed several hundred Texan prisoners at Goliad. Anger spread. Texans took up the cry “Remember the Alamo!”

On April 21, 1836, Sam Houston’s army surprised Santa Anna’s troops at San Jacinto. The battle lasted less than twenty minutes. Santa Anna was captured and signed treaties agreeing to Texan independence, though Mexico’s government refused to accept them. Texas became an independent country, the Republic of Texas, nicknamed the Lone Star Republic. Houston became its president.

Most Texans wanted to join the United States. But the U.S. waited nearly ten years. Texas allowed slavery, and many Northerners did not want another slave state. Americans also feared war with Mexico. Finally, in 1845, Congress voted for annexation, and Texas became a state.

In 1844 voters elected James K. Polk of Tennessee as president. Polk was a strong believer in Manifest Destiny. He promised to gain both Texas and all of the Oregon Country. Some of his supporters demanded the whole Oregon region up to the line of 54°40’ north latitude, near Alaska. A popular slogan warned, “Fifty-four forty or fight!”

Polk did not really want a war with Britain, a powerful nation. In 1846 the two countries signed a treaty, a formal agreement between nations. They split the Oregon Country at the 49th parallel, the line of latitude that already formed much of the border with Canada. The U.S. gained the land that became Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

Polk also wanted California and the lands between Texas and the Pacific, which belonged to Mexico. He offered to buy them, but Mexico refused. Mexico was still angry about Texas. The two countries also disagreed about Texas’s southern border. The United States claimed the Rio Grande. Mexico said the border was the Nueces River, farther north. Polk sent troops into the land between the two rivers.

In April 1846 Mexican and American soldiers clashed in the land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Polk told Congress that Mexico had “shed American blood upon the American soil.” Congress declared war in May 1846. Not everyone agreed. Some Americans thought Polk had provoked the fight. Many Northerners feared the war would spread slavery. In Congress, a first-term representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, demanded to know the exact spot where the blood had been shed.

U.S. forces moved on several fronts. General Zachary Taylor pushed into northern Mexico. Other troops took New Mexico and California. In California, some American settlers rebelled against Mexico and raised a flag with a bear on it. In 1847 General Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz and fought his way inland to Mexico City. Young Mexican cadets died defending Chapultepec Castle, and Mexico still honors them today.

In 1848 the two nations signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico accepted the Rio Grande as the Texas border. It also gave up California and a huge region called the Mexican Cession, which included all or part of today’s California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. The U.S. paid Mexico $15 million. Mexico lost about half of its land.

In 1853, in the Gadsden Purchase, the U.S. paid Mexico $10 million for a strip of land in what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico. It was a good route for a railroad. With it, the main borders of the lower 48 states were set.

In January 1848, James Marshall found gold at a sawmill he was building for John Sutter in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The news spread across the country and the world. In 1849 about 80,000 people rushed to California. They were called forty-niners. Some came overland by wagon. Others sailed around South America or crossed Panama.

Most miners started with placer mining, washing sand and gravel from streams in a pan to find heavy flakes of gold. The work was hard, wet and cold. Prices in mining camps were sky-high. A few miners struck it rich. Most did not. Many of the people who made steady money were merchants who sold food, tools and clothing. Some women earned good money running boarding houses, cooking or doing laundry.

The Gold Rush changed California almost overnight. Towns sprang up, and San Francisco became a busy port. California had so many people by 1850 that it skipped the usual territory stage and became a state. It entered the Union as a free state, where slavery was not allowed. That upset the balance between free and slave states and set off a fierce national debate.

For Native Californians, the Gold Rush was a disaster. Miners took over their lands, streams and hunting grounds. Many Native people died from disease, hunger and violence, some of it supported by state leaders. Historians estimate that California’s Native population fell from about 150,000 in 1848 to about 30,000 by 1870.

Californios were Spanish-speaking Californians of Mexican and Spanish descent. Many owned large cattle ranches. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised that Mexicans in the new U.S. lands could become citizens and keep their property. But in 1851 Congress required landowners to prove their titles in court. The cases took years and cost a great deal. Many Californios lost their land to lawyers, taxes and squatters.

Miners from around the world came to California, including many from Mexico, Chile and China. Chinese miners called California “Gold Mountain.” White miners often drove them off good claims. California passed a foreign miners' tax, a monthly fee charged to miners who were not U.S. citizens. It fell mainly on Latin American and Chinese miners. Chinese immigrants faced growing discrimination, unfair treatment because of race or background, but many stayed and built communities, like San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Between 1830 and 1860, immigration to the United States grew enormously. An immigrant is a person who moves to a new country to live there. Most came from Ireland and Germany. They crossed the Atlantic in crowded sailing ships and, later, steamships. The voyage could take weeks, and disease spread easily on board.

In 1845 a plant disease called blight began destroying Ireland’s potato crop. Potatoes were the main food for most poor Irish families. For years the crop failed. About a million people died in what is called the Great Famine, a time of extreme food shortage. More than a million others left Ireland. Many came to U.S. port cities such as Boston and New York. Most were poor and took hard, low-paying jobs building canals and railroads or working as servants.

Germans came for many reasons, including crop failures and a failed revolution in 1848. Many had money and skills. Some became farmers in the Midwest. Others settled in cities such as Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee, and in Illinois towns such as Belleville. They opened shops, breweries, newspapers and schools. Germans brought the idea of the kindergarten to America.

Both groups changed American life. Many Irish immigrants were Catholic, in a country where most people were Protestant. Many Germans were Catholic or Jewish, and they spoke a different language. Their arrival made the United States more diverse, meaning it had more different kinds of people.

Not everyone welcomed the newcomers. Some native-born Protestant Americans feared that Catholic immigrants would be loyal to the pope instead of the United States. Workers worried that immigrants would take their jobs for lower pay. Opposition to immigrants by people born in a country is called nativism.

Nativism sometimes turned violent. In 1834 a mob burned a Catholic convent school near Boston. In 1844 riots in Philadelphia destroyed Catholic churches and homes. Some job advertisements said that Irish people need not apply.

In the 1850s nativists formed a political party called the American Party. It began as a secret group. When asked about it, members were told to say, “I know nothing.” So people called them the Know-Nothings. The party wanted to limit immigrants’ political power and make them wait many years to become citizens. For a short time, it won many elections.

In Chicago, a Know-Nothing mayor elected in 1855 raised the cost of saloon licenses and enforced a Sunday closing law. Many German and Irish immigrants saw these rules as aimed at them. Protests led to a clash with police known as the Lager Beer Riot. Within a few years, the Know-Nothings faded as the fight over slavery took over national politics.

In 1830 most Americans still lived on farms. But cities were growing faster than ever. Factories, ports, canals and new railroads drew workers and immigrants. New York became the largest city in the nation. Chicago grew from a small trading post into a booming city after the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened in 1848 and railroads began to arrive. Moving from farms to cities is part of urbanization.

City life had real attractions. There were jobs, shops, newspapers, theaters and churches. People could hear lectures and visit libraries. But most cities had no clean water systems and poor sewers. Garbage piled up in the streets. Diseases such as cholera spread quickly in crowded neighborhoods.

Many poor families, often immigrants, lived in tenements, crowded buildings with small, dark apartments. Wooden buildings packed close together made fire a constant danger. Most cities had no paid police or fire departments at first. Over time, cities began to hire police, create fire departments and build water systems. The problems of city life also gave reformers plenty of work to do.

In the early 1800s, a wave of religious excitement swept the country. It is called the Second Great Awakening. Preachers such as Charles Finney held outdoor camp meetings and revivals that drew huge crowds. They taught that every person could choose to be saved and live a better life. Many listeners came away believing they should also make society better.

Black churches grew strong in these years too. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded by Richard Allen in Philadelphia, spread to many cities, including Chicago. Black churches became centers of community life, education and protest against slavery.

People who work to change society for the better are called reformers. Women played a large part in reform groups, even though they could not vote. One major cause was temperance. Many Americans drank large amounts of alcohol, and drunkenness hurt families and workers. The temperance movement urged people to drink less or give up alcohol. In 1851 Maine became the first state to ban the sale of alcohol, and several other states followed for a time.

In the early 1800s, many children never went to school or went only for a short time. Horace Mann of Massachusetts believed that a democracy needed educated citizens. In 1837 he became the head of the state’s new board of education. He pushed for public schools paid for by taxes, longer school years, better schoolhouses and training for teachers. Other states, including Illinois, set up free public school systems in the following decades.

Most of these schools were for white children. In many places, African American children were kept out or sent to separate schools. In the South, it was often against the law to teach enslaved people to read. Still, Black communities in the North started their own schools.

Dorothea Dix was a teacher in Massachusetts. In 1841 she visited a jail and was shocked to find people with mental illness locked in cold, bare cells alongside criminals. She spent the next two years visiting jails and poorhouses across the state. Then she reported what she saw to lawmakers. Dix traveled through many states urging them to build asylums, hospitals for people with mental illness. Her work led to new hospitals across the country.

For years, many Americans felt their books and art were copies of Europe’s. In the 1830s and 1840s that began to change. A group of New England writers called transcendentalists believed that people could find truth by looking inward and by studying nature. Their leader was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a lecturer and essayist who urged Americans to think for themselves.

Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau put these ideas into practice. In 1845 he built a small cabin by Walden Pond in Massachusetts and lived there simply for about two years. His book Walden (1854) describes that life. Thoreau also refused to pay a tax because he opposed slavery and the war with Mexico. He spent a night in jail. His essay on civil disobedience, peacefully refusing to obey an unjust law, later inspired leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Painters also found American subjects. Thomas Cole and other artists of the Hudson River School painted huge, glowing scenes of forests, rivers and mountains in New York and beyond. Their paintings showed the American wilderness as grand and beautiful. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe wrote stories and novels still read today.

By 1830 slavery had ended in the Northern states, but about two million people were enslaved in the South. Some reformers called for abolition, the complete end of slavery. People who worked for this were called abolitionists. Free Black Americans led the way. In 1829 David Walker, a free Black man in Boston, published a pamphlet called Walker’s Appeal. It called on enslaved people to resist and condemned slavery as a crime against God.

In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison, a white printer in Boston, began a newspaper called The Liberator. He demanded that slavery end immediately, not slowly. Garrison helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Many Northerners disliked abolitionists. They feared trouble with the South, or held racist views themselves. Mobs sometimes attacked abolitionist speakers.

Illinois saw the most famous of these attacks. Elijah Lovejoy, a white minister and newspaper editor, published antislavery articles. After mobs in St. Louis drove him out, he moved across the river to Alton, Illinois. There, mobs destroyed his printing press more than once. In November 1837, a mob attacked the warehouse where he was guarding a new press, and Lovejoy was shot and killed. His death shocked many Northerners and brought new supporters to the cause. His brother Owen Lovejoy became a leading abolitionist in Illinois.

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland. As a boy he secretly learned to read. In 1838 he escaped to the North. He became a powerful speaker for the antislavery cause. In 1845 he published a book about his life, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In 1847 he started his own newspaper in Rochester, New York, called The North Star.

Sojourner Truth was born enslaved in New York around 1797 with the name Isabella. She gained her freedom in the 1820s and later chose her new name. She traveled widely, speaking against slavery and for women’s rights. Her most famous speech was given in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. Many people know it as “Ain’t I a Woman?” But that version was written down years later by someone else, and it probably does not match her real words.

Sarah and Angelina Grimké grew up in a wealthy slaveholding family in South Carolina. They saw the cruelty of slavery firsthand and moved north. In the 1830s they spoke out against slavery in public, which was unusual for women at the time. Some people attacked them for speaking to mixed crowds of men and women. The sisters answered by defending women's rights too.

The Underground Railroad was a network of people who helped enslaved people escape to freedom. Most freedom seekers came from the Upper South, closer to free states. Many traveled at night and hid by day. Some made it on their own. Others were helped by free Black communities, churches and white allies. Some went to Northern cities. Many went all the way to Canada, where slavery was illegal.

Harriet Tubman was the most famous conductor, or guide. After escaping from Maryland in 1849, she returned again and again to lead others out. Slaveholders offered rewards for her capture, but she was never caught. Levi Coffin, a Quaker in Indiana and later Ohio, and William Still, a free Black man in Philadelphia, each helped hundreds or more freedom seekers.

Illinois was a free state, but it was not a friendly place for Black people. State laws limited the rights of free Black residents, and an 1853 law tried to ban free Black people from moving into Illinois at all. Still, freedom seekers crossed from Missouri near Quincy and Alton. Helpers passed them north through towns such as Galesburg and Princeton toward Chicago.

In Chicago, free Black residents and churches such as Quinn Chapel AME helped freedom seekers board boats across Lake Michigan to Canada. Because the work was secret and illegal, few records were kept. Historians are careful about legends of hidden tunnels, since many are not supported by evidence. What is certain is that thousands of people escaped, and their courage changed how many Northerners saw slavery.

In the early 1800s, married women had few legal rights. In most states, a married woman’s property and wages belonged to her husband. Women could not vote or serve on juries. Few colleges admitted women. Most people believed a woman’s place was in the home.

Yet women were active in public life. Young women worked in textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, and some organized protests over pay and hours. Many women joined reform groups and raised money, wrote petitions and gave speeches. Working against slavery made many of them think about their own position. Like enslaved people, they had no vote and few rights under the law.

In 1840 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott went to a World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. When they arrived, the men in charge would not let women take part. Women had to sit behind a curtain in a gallery. Stanton and Mott were angry. They agreed that they would one day hold a meeting about the rights of women. It would take eight more years.

In July 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and a few other women organized a meeting in Seneca Falls, New York. About 300 people came, both women and men. It was the first meeting in the United States called to discuss women’s rights. It became known as the Seneca Falls Convention.

Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments. She modeled it on the Declaration of Independence. But where Jefferson listed wrongs done by the British king, Stanton listed wrongs done to women. These included being denied the vote, an education and control over their own property and wages.

The most controversial idea was suffrage, the right to vote. Some people at the meeting thought demanding the vote went too far. Frederick Douglass spoke strongly in favor of it, and the resolution passed. In the end, about 100 people signed the Declaration. Many newspapers mocked the meeting.

Seneca Falls began an organized women’s rights movement. In 1851 Stanton met Susan B. Anthony, and the two worked together for the next fifty years. Women won some property rights in several states before the Civil War. But the right to vote in all states would not come until 1920, long after most of the Seneca Falls signers had died.