Transcript
What Hath God Wrought
May 1844
The U.S. Capitol May 24, 1844
Samuel Morse was a painter. He'd spent twelve years trying to send words down a wire.
Annie Ellsworth, the patent commissioner's daughter, chose the first words. She took them from the Bible.
Samuel F. B. Morse What hath God wrought?
Congress had paid thirty thousand dollars for that wire. It ran about forty miles, to Baltimore.
In Baltimore, Alfred Vail read it and sent it straight back. It took seconds.
Three days later, Democrats met in Baltimore to pick a presidential candidate. Vail wired the news to Washington, ballot by ballot.
On the ninth ballot, they picked James K. Polk of Tennessee. He stayed home in Tennessee, hoping at best for vice president.
For vice president they chose Senator Silas Wright, who was in Washington. Wright wired back: no. They wired: please reconsider. He wired: no.
So the convention sent five delegates, by train, to ask him in person.
Polk wanted Texas. He wanted Oregon. Within ten years the country reached the Pacific, and Morse's machine was ticking in Japan.
Twenty-Six Stars
1844 (preview to 1877)
In 1844, the American flag had twenty-six stars. Thirteen were free states. Thirteen allowed slavery.
One line had kept an uneasy peace since 1820. No slavery north of thirty-six thirty in the Louisiana Purchase, except in Missouri.
Beyond them lay Indian Territory, home to the Cherokee and other nations forced west. Then came Mexico, the Texas Republic, and an Oregon shared with Britain.
The market revolution had already made the country smaller. Canals and railroads carried Western grain east and Eastern goods west.
Cotton was over half of America's exports. Nearly two and a half million people were enslaved. Their work grew almost all of it.
Democrats and Whigs fought for every vote. In 1840, about four in five men who could vote did.
Both parties tried to keep slavery out of politics. A House gag rule had blocked antislavery petitions since 1836. In December 1844, John Quincy Adams got it repealed.
A country moving west · A North and South growing apart · Deals that kept slavery quiet
Keep those three things in mind. Period 5 is what happens when they collide.
Here are the next thirty-three years in one breath. First, the country grows to the Pacific.
Then it splits in two, and is stitched back together. Amendments end slavery and say who counts as a citizen.
It starts with land. Every new acre raised two questions. Who already lives here? And will it be slave or free?
Who Is James K. Polk?
1821–1845
Texas had been knocking since 1836. It took a leaked letter and a dark-horse candidate.
In the 1820s, Mexico invited American settlers into Texas. Thousands came, and many brought enslaved people.
Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. Settlers found ways around it. By 1830, American settlers and the people they enslaved outnumbered Mexicans three to one.
In 1836 they rebelled, with Tejano allies, and won.
The Republic of Texas legalized slavery and asked to join the United States. Two presidents put it off.
In 1844, President Tyler tried a treaty to annex Texas. His secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, defended it to Britain.
John C. Calhoun It is with still deeper concern the President regards the avowal of Lord Aberdeen of the desire of Great Britain to see slavery abolished in Texas…
The letter leaked. The Senate voted the treaty down, 35 to 16.
The Whigs jeered, "Who is James K. Polk?" He had been Speaker of the House. Voters found out.
The Democrats promised the "re-annexation" of Texas and the "re-occupation" of Oregon. The United States had never owned either one.
Henry Clay wobbled on Texas, so New York's antislavery voters backed the Liberty Party. Polk won the state by about five thousand votes, and with it the presidency.
A treaty needs two-thirds of the Senate. A joint resolution needs only a simple majority. Tyler signed it three days before leaving office.
It even ran the Missouri line through Texas. The flat top of the Texas Panhandle is still that line.
March 4, 1845. Polk took the oath in the rain. Samuel Morse tapped his speech to Baltimore from the platform.
John Quincy Adams stayed home. He wrote that Polk spoke…
John Quincy Adams …to a large assemblage of umbrellas, for it was raining hard all the time.
James K. Polk Our title to the country of the Oregon is “clear and unquestionable,”…
Texas joined that December, as a slave state.
Overspread
1845–1846
In 1845, a New York magazine gave the mood a name.
The essay ran unsigned. Most historians credit its editor, John O’Sullivan.
…our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.
“Manifest” meant obvious. “Destiny” meant God’s plan.
It saw settlers pouring into California, …armed with the plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls…
It called the settlers an army of Anglo-Saxons. Better institutions, it assumed, came from a better race.
In December, his newspaper claimed Oregon. God gave Americans the continent, it said, for…
John L. O'Sullivan …the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.
In the House, a Whig mocked it.
Robert C. Winthrop …I suppose the right of a manifest destiny to spread, will not be admitted to exist in any nation except the universal Yankee nation!
Mockery helped make the phrase famous. Whigs wanted to improve the country they had. Abolitionists saw a land grab for slavery. Mexico, Britain and Native nations had claims of their own.
Historians still argue whether it was mostly a democratic mission or a racial conquest. The sources support both, often in one sentence.
Oregon was the other half of Polk’s promise, shared with Britain since 1818.
You may know the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” It caught on in 1846, not 1844, among Democrats who wanted all of Oregon.
James K. Polk …the only way to treat John Bull was to look him straight in the eye…
Polk looked, and took the 49th parallel. The Senate approved it in June 1846.
Polk compromised with Britain, a great power. Mexico, he pushed. By June, the United States and Mexico were at war. That’s the next film.
Four Frontiers
1843–1853
Diplomats drew lines. Families moved first.
From 1843, wagon trains left Missouri each spring for Oregon, two thousand miles away. Wagon, oxen and supplies cost hundreds of dollars, so the poorest stayed home.
At twelve or fifteen miles a day, the trip took four to six months. By 1860, about three hundred thousand people had taken the trails west.
Disease, cholera above all, was the great killer. On the trails, emigrants killed more Native people than Native people killed emigrants.
Nobody went west for one reason. Here is the continent in 1844. Four places pulled Americans west, and every one was already somebody's home.
Cotton land in Texas. Farms in Oregon. A refuge in Utah. Gold in California, and a harbor facing Asia.
Then the borders caught up. Texas in 1845. Oregon in 1846. The Mexican Cession in 1848: more than half a million square miles, taken by war.
And in 1853, ten million dollars bought a strip of desert. It held the best route for a southern railroad to the Pacific.
In under nine years, the country grew by more than two-thirds. In place after place, newcomers and the people already there ended up fighting.
And the old Missouri line pointed west into all of it. Did it count out here? Nobody had decided.
Seeing the Elephant
1848–1852
January 24, 1848. At a sawmill on the American River, James Marshall saw something shine in the ditch.
One of his crew, Henry Bigler, wrote it in his pocket diary, spelling it as best he could. Nine days later, Mexico signed California away. Neither side knew.
James K. Polk The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief…
James K. Polk …were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.
In 1849, about eighty thousand people came, around Cape Horn, across Panama or overland. They called it seeing the elephant: the big thing everyone talked about, whatever it cost.
Luzena Wilson crossed the plains with her husband and two small boys. The night before Sacramento, she baked biscuits.
Luzena Stanley Wilson I'll give you five dollars, ma'am, for them biscuit.
He raised it to ten dollars, for bread made by a woman, and put a gold coin in her hand. By morning she'd lost it. She went into the hotel business instead.
Most miners never struck it rich. The steady money went to sellers: shovels, flour, boots, beds and biscuits.
In early 1848, San Francisco had about 800 people. By 1850, its cove was a forest of masts.
Crews walked off their ships for the gold fields. Some captains went too. The ships stayed.
They came from Chile, Mexico, Hawaii, France, Australia and China. Chinese miners called California Gam Saan: Gold Mountain. About twenty thousand arrived in 1852 alone.
California already had people: Californios on their ranchos, and an estimated 150,000 Native Californians.
Within twenty-five years, disease, hunger and killing left about thirty thousand. The next film tells how.
In 1850, California asked to join the Union as a free state. That broke the Senate's balance, and Congress nearly came apart.
Black Ships
1843–1854
American merchants had traded at Canton for sixty years. Tea and silk for silver, furs and, too often, opium.
John Tyler I, John Tyler, President of the United States of America, which States are Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts…
…and twenty-three more. He said his country ran “from one great ocean to the other.” Not yet.
Britain had just won trading rights in China by war. In 1844, Caleb Cushing asked for the same. He got them, plus five open ports, without firing a shot.
Americans accused of crimes in China went before their own consul.
Americans wanted Japan too: coal for steamships, and safety for wrecked whalers. Japan had kept most foreigners out for two centuries.
Millard Fillmore The United States of America reach from ocean to ocean…
This time it was true.
July 8, 1853. Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Edo Bay with four warships.
His orders said to use force only in self-defense.
Guard boats swarmed the flagship. From one, a man called up in English.
Japanese interpreter at Uraga I can speak Dutch.
His English ran out there. The talk went on in Dutch.
An Edo wit 泰平の眠りをさます上喜撰 たった四盃で夜も寝られず
An Edo wit wrote that. Jōkisen was a fancy tea. It sounds like “steamship.” And there were four of them.
The Japanese called them kurofune: black ships.
Perry came back in 1854 with more ships. The Treaty of Kanagawa opened two ports to American ships for coal and supplies, and promised help to shipwrecked sailors.
The Americans brought a steam train too small for a six-year-old, so officials rode on the roof. Their hosts brought sumo wrestlers, who carried two sacks of rice at a time.
They also strung a telegraph wire nearly a mile long. Ten years after “What hath God wrought,” Morse's machine was ticking in Japan.
Every New Acre
1854 → 1872
In ten years the country grew by more than a million square miles and reached the Pacific.
Some went for farms, some for gold. Planters took enslaved people to new cotton land. Their leaders called it destiny.
Who already lived here? The answer was on the map, under the new names.
Slave or free? California forced that question in 1850. Kansas would make it bloody.
In 1861, as the South left, a painter climbed a Capitol scaffold to paint pioneers crossing the Rockies.
In 1862, with Southern members gone, Congress gave settlers 160 acres and backed a Pacific railroad.
In 1872 another painter made Manifest Destiny a woman, floating west with a schoolbook, stringing telegraph wire. Look at the left edge, at who's running ahead of her.
Next, a war, and a congressman who demanded to see the exact spot where it began.