Sectionalism

Long-Term Origins

1787 // Constitution and Slavery
1798 // Alien & Sedition and STATE INTERPOSITION (nullifcation)
1820 // Missouri Compromise
1831 // Garrison’s The Liberator and Nat Turner’s revolt

Short-Term Origins

1830s-1850s // Market Revolution and sectionalism
1846-48 // Mexican War
1850 // Compromise (California, Fugitive Slave Law)
1854 // Kansas-Nebraska Act
1856 // Bleeding Kansas
1854-56 // Rise of Republican party
1857 // Dred Scott Decision
1858 // Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Triggers

1859 // John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry
1860 // Republicans win four-way presidential election
1861 // (Dec – Feb) Seven states secede and form Confederacy
1861 // (March) Lincoln’s inauguration
1861 // Firing on Fort Sumter

Mexican War and “Manifest Destiny”

For more information on this famous painting, please see this online piece from Martha Sandweiss

This painting offers a series of iconic images to represent various stages of US expansion in the nineteenth-century. Try to identify these various images and then speculate about the larger meaning, both perhaps as intended by the painter and as perceived by the audience.

Origins of the term “manifest destiny” (1845)

On Texas (July 1845)

“…other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

–Excerpted from John L. O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (July 1845): 5–10