The Making of America 1789–1900

This is one of the optional non-British period studies for OCR Paper 2. It covers the United States from its founding documents through westward expansion, the Civil War and Reconstruction to the near-completion of the frontier by 1900.

Westward Expansion

"Manifest Destiny"

The 19th-century belief that the United States was destined (even divinely ordained) to expand across the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific:

• Coined by journalist John L. O'Sullivan (1845).
• Justified displacement of Native Americans as part of a "civilising mission".
• Drove the Louisiana Purchase (1803, doubled US territory), Mexican-American War (1846–48, added California/Texas), Gadsden Purchase (1853).

The Oregon Trail and migration

• From early 1840s, thousands of settlers travelled the 3,200 km Oregon Trail from Missouri to Oregon/California.
• Motivations: free land (Homestead Act 1862 — 160 acres free after 5 years' residence), gold (California Gold Rush 1848–49), religious freedom (Mormons to Utah).
• Impact on Plains Indians: migration routes disrupted buffalo migration and traditional territories.

Transcontinental Railroad (completed 1869)

• Linked the east and west coasts.
• Built by two companies: Union Pacific (westward) and Central Pacific (eastward), meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah.
• Workforce: largely Chinese immigrants and Irish immigrants.
• Impact: opened the West to settlement; accelerated the destruction of buffalo herds (sportsmen shot from trains); undermined Plains Indian way of life.

Slavery and the Civil War

Slavery in America

• By 1860: c.4 million enslaved African Americans, almost entirely in the South.
• The cotton economy of the South was entirely dependent on enslaved labour.
• Moral challenge: the Declaration of Independence ("all men are created equal") vs the reality of slavery — a tension at the heart of American identity.

Causes of the Civil War (1861–65)

• Missouri Compromise (1820): attempted to balance slave and free states as the nation expanded west.
• Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854): allowed new territories to vote on slavery ("popular sovereignty") — led to "Bleeding Kansas" violence.
• Dred Scott case (1857): Supreme Court ruled enslaved people were property, not citizens — outraged the North.
• John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry (1859): anti-slavery militant seized a federal arsenal; hanged — became a martyr in the North.
• Election of Abraham Lincoln (1860): Southern states seceded rather than accept an anti-slavery president.

The Civil War (1861–65)

• Confederacy (South) vs Union (North); 11 Southern states seceded.
• Emancipation Proclamation (1863): Lincoln declared enslaved people in Confederate states free — war aim now explicitly included ending slavery.
• Key battles: Antietam (1862); Gettysburg (1863 — turning point); Sherman's March to the Sea (1864 — total war).
• Appomattox (April 1865): Confederate General Lee surrendered. Lincoln assassinated days later.
• Cost: c.620,000 dead — the deadliest war in American history.

Reconstruction (1865–1877)

The attempt to rebuild the South and integrate formerly enslaved people as citizens:

• 13th Amendment (1865): abolished slavery.
• 14th Amendment (1868): equal citizenship for all born in the US.
• 15th Amendment (1870): voting rights regardless of race.

Why did Reconstruction fail?

• Black Codes: Southern states immediately passed laws restricting Black freedoms.
• KKK (Ku Klux Klan): terrorist violence against Black voters and Republican officeholders.
• Compromise of 1877: Northern Republicans abandoned Reconstruction in exchange for the presidency — federal troops withdrawn from the South.
• Jim Crow laws: segregation laws established across the South; "separate but equal" upheld by Plessy v Ferguson (1896).

The Plains Indians

Way of life

• Great Plains tribes: Sioux, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho — nomadic, following the buffalo.
• Buffalo: central to Plains Indian life — food, clothing, shelter, tools, spiritual significance.
• Plains Indians were highly effective cavalry warriors.

Conflict and destruction

• Indian Removal Act (1830): earlier forced relocation of eastern tribes to "Indian Territory" (Oklahoma).
• Battle of Little Bighorn (1876): Sioux/Cheyenne warriors defeated General Custer's 7th Cavalry — the last major Native American victory.
• Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890): US Army killed c.250 Lakota Sioux — men, women, children. Marked the end of organised Native American resistance.
• Destruction of the buffalo: from c.30 million buffalo (1800) to fewer than 1,000 (1890s). The US government encouraged hunting to eliminate the Plains Indian food supply.
• Dawes Act (1887): broke up tribal reservations into individual plots — aimed to force assimilation; took 90 million acres from Native Americans.

Common OCR exam mistakes

1. Saying the Civil War was only about slavery — it was also about states' rights, economic differences and political power — though most historians see slavery as the fundamental cause.
2. Saying Lincoln freed all enslaved people in 1863 — the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to Confederate states; border states' enslaved people remained enslaved until the 13th Amendment (1865).
3. Forgetting Wounded Knee (1890) — a crucial endpoint for Native American resistance.
4. Confusing the Compromise of 1877 with the end of the Civil War — they are 12 years apart; Reconstruction lasted from 1865 to 1877.