A Young People's History of the United States

Here, Zinn begins to examine the large subject of 19th-century westward expansion. Settlers continued to push the “frontier” of settlement further West as wealthy Americans “bought up huge pieces of land […] to sell it later for great profits” (105). This process—called speculation—and the continued movement of people settling into new territories encroached on Native lands.

Andrew Jackson is a major historical actor in this chapter. Zinn provides some detail about his military and political careers: He “became famous during the War of 1812,” which Zinn describes as “a war for territory” (105). Jackson’s major victories came against Native nations in the American South, most notably the Creeks. As a military leader and later as American president, Jackson seized land from many Native peoples by force, purchase, and bad-faith treaties. Defeating and drawing up a treaty with the Creeks gave white people land in modern-day Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. A long war against the Seminoles in Florida transferred that territory from Spanish-held Native lands to land open for American settlement. Taking Florida was allegedly a necessity in national defense, according to Jackson. Zinn reminds the reader that this defense argument is “just what modern nations often say before starting a war of conquest in some other country’s territory” (107). The “Indian Wars” of the Southeast foretold what was to come across the continent in subsequent decades.

As president, Jackson initiated the main era of “Indian Removal,” during which the government and Army forced Native people to relocate from their homelands to lands further west designated as “Indian Territory.” Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, continued this practice. During these administrations, the government removed 70,000 Native people, killing many in the process. White people wanted land not only for speculation and family settlements but also for new cities, businesses, and railroad lines to accommodate a growing nation. The removal process started with the government making promises to Native people, whom men like Jackson regarded as uncivilized children in need of his protection and command. To entice people to agree to move, the government “bribed [them] with money and land” (114), although much of “Indian Territory” was already inhabited by other Native people or was difficult to cultivate and live on. In the end, the government did not offer the protections and rewards it promised. Native commentators articulated the awful treatment they received and the recurring pattern of broken promises.

The most high-profile example of Indian removal was the Cherokee “Trail of Tears,” though it is just one of many examples of what Native nations endured. The Cherokee had made efforts to adopt some Euro-American ways of life, like taking up farming, converting to Christianity, and creating “a written form of their language” (117). “The whites,” however, “still wanted their land,” and Georgia’s government facilitated the removal of the Cherokees—which largely became a death march. In the initial westward march of 17,000 people, 4,000 died.

Zinn continues to cover the various avenues of US expansion in the mid-19th century. By the late 1840s, Americans had embraced the concept of “Manifest Destiny,” which described a God-given right for Americans to expand across the continent and own the lands they reached. People who subscribed to this thinking were called “expansionists,” and it was an immensely popular ideology—particularly among men in politics, like President James K. Polk.

Polk and notable generals basically invited war in the Southwest so that the US could make a move to seize land from Mexico. Their desire came to fruition. War with Mexico in 1848 exposed a new generation of soldiers to the horrors of war, all to acquire more land by any means necessary. Texas had broken away from Mexico to become the “Lone Star Republic” in 1836 but was annexed by the US in 1845. During the Mexican War, the US gained a territory that included “New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming” (122). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made this land transfer official.

This war received wide support, at least initially, in the name of Manifest Destiny. Many men enlisted in the Army and went away to fight only to become disillusioned and at risk of disease and hazardous conditions. They were also “shocked by the bloody horror of war” (129). Some committed atrocities like rape and looting. One theater of the war was California, where an American officer threatened a gathering of Native tribes to be “faithful to your new rulers” (130). Of course, Mexicans living in these territories as well as Indigenous tribes resisted US conquest. In Los Angeles, for example, Mexicans staved off US military occupation for months. Ultimately, however, the war resulted in a massive land transfer. The new Southern border became the Rio Grande River. The US government paid the Mexican government $15 million which “let people say that the nation’s new territories were bought, not seized by force” (134). Sidestepping the brutality of conquest was, by this point, a burgeoning theme in US history.

Zinn reviews the American Civil War. In the first half of the 19th century, the American economy and the system of slavery that made it possible grew exponentially. In a 70-year period, the number of enslaved people increased from 500,000 to four million: “Slavery was so well established,” the author writes, “that only something enormous—something like a full-scale war—could end it” (135).

The war erupted when President Abraham Lincoln was elected, and Southern plantation owners, fearing “that Lincoln and the Republicans would make their own pleasant, prosperous way of life impossible” (143), persuaded their states to secede (leave) the Union. Lincoln made it clear that he pursued war to preserve the Union, not to emancipate enslaved people, although the war itself ruminated on the future of the US economic structure and increasingly centered on the issue of Black liberation.

An “abolitionist” movement, mainly in the North, was growing long before Lincoln’s elections. Though many whites supported an end to slavery, “black abolitionists were the backbone of the movement against” it (139). Historical figures such as Frederick Douglass, David Walker, and Harriet Tubman took different paths to bring about slavery’s demise. Douglass, formerly enslaved, toured and spoke to crowds and politicians about the evils of the system. Walker published a pamphlet that “[urged] blacks to fight for their freedom” (140) and was killed for doing so. Tubman orchestrated the escape of hundreds of enslaved people out of the South via the “Underground Railroad,” a system of safe houses that hid people running away from bondage until they reached lands in which slavery was illegal.

Before the Civil War, however, the government still upheld slavery. As the US expanded through the events described in previous chapters, it added “nonslave” states to the Union—territories and states where slavery was illegal. These additions made the government feel like it “had to do something for the slave states” to maintain some type of balance, and so in 1850, the government passed the Fugitive Slave Act to force Americans into capturing and returning people who ran away from bondage. This Act also led to the capture of many free Black people whose captors merely claimed had run away from Southern plantations. The 1857 Dred Scott Decision, now regarded as perhaps the worst Supreme Court decision in US history, formally defined those held in slavery as property, not people.

Union victory in the Civil War (which broke out in April 1861) reintegrated the split country and ended slavery. New Constitutional Amendments gave Black people full citizenship and Black men the right to vote. For a brief period after the war, Black people elected members of their own community to political positions and set up post-war institutions for community betterment, but white supremacist backlash was swift—and by the end of the 1870s, the federal government lacked the political will to enforce protections for Black people facing disenfranchisement and horrific, racist violence.