This painting (1872) by John Gast called American Progress, is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Here Columbia, intended as a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she travels; she holds a school book. The different economic activities of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation. The Native Americans and wild animals flee.
Events leading to the US Civil War
Northwest Ordinance
Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions
Missouri Compromise
Tariff of 1828
Nullification Crisis
Nat Turner's slave rebellion
The Amistad
Texas Annexation
Mexican–American War
Wilmot Proviso …show more content…
When the British refused the offer, American expansionists responded with slogans such as "The Whole of Oregon or None!" and "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!", referring to the northern border of the region. (The latter slogan is often mistakenly described as having been a part of the 1844 presidential campaign.) When Polk moved to terminate the joint occupation agreement, the British finally agreed to divide the region along the 49th parallel in early 1846, keeping the lower Columbia basin as part of the United States, and the dispute was settled by the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which the administration was able to sell to congress because Mexico had declared war beginning the Mexican-American war, and the president and others argued it would be foolish to also fight the British …show more content…
It is manifest destiny." On the other hand, former President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat who had blocked the annexation of Hawaii during his administration, wrote that McKinley's annexation of the territory was a "perversion of our national destiny." Historians continued that debate; some have interpreted the overseas expansion of the 1890s of other Pacific island groups as an extension of Manifest Destiny across the Pacific Ocean. Others have regarded it as the antithesis of Manifest Destiny