Read The Age of Gold for Free Online Page A

yields fromseventy to eighty fold. In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!”
    D ANA’S ACCOUNT APPEARED in the year America’s sixth census showed the population of the United States to be just under 17 million people. To a later generation this number would seem minuscule, but to many of Dana’s contemporaries it occasioned claustrophobia. America in 1840 was a land of farmers, and farmers—and their children and grandchildren—always needed more land. Since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana territory from France, the only appreciable addition to the American patrimony had been Florida—swampy, disease- ridden Florida. The country was filling up; where would all the people live? What fields would they farm?
    Adding to the worries was the dismal condition of the American economy. The previous decade had begun with the “bank war” between Nicholas Biddle, the powerful, prideful director of the Bank of the United States, and Andrew Jackson, the determined, prideful president. Jackson won the war by killing the Bank, but in doing so gravely wounded the economy. The Panic of 1837 bankrupted farmers, who saw the price of their crops fall 50 percent or more, and cast tens of thousands of laborers out on the streets and highways of America. Many headed west, as Americans had always done in times of trouble, hoping to make a new life where land was cheaper and opportunity more abundant. Yet land in 1840 wasn’t as cheap as it had been when there weren’t so many people trying to buy it, and opportunity was accordingly less abundant. As the economic depression continued into the new decade, it intensified demands for more land.
    The demands acquired evangelical overtones. During the first half of the nineteenth century, American Protestantism—which was to say, the religion of nearly all Americans—bubbled and boiled with one reform movement after another. The “second Great Awakening” (the first having occurred during the previous century) saw people speaking in tongues and thrashing about wildly. One man jerked so violently—resisting grace, thepious said—that he broke his own neck. Camp meetings lasted weeks or months and spun off temperance crusades, abolitionist rallies, and missionary voyages. The religious ferment fostered an outlook that had no difficulty interpreting the pressure for territorial expansion in providential terms. If God had smiled on the United States of America—and almost none doubted that He had—wouldn’t He want America to grow? Wouldn’t He want Americans to spread their blessings into neighboring lands? And wouldn’t He want this all the more, considering that the inhabitants of those neighboring lands were heathen Indians and papist Mexicans?
    Of course He would—or so concluded the publicists of what came to be called Manifest Destiny, the ideology of expansion in the 1840s. This ideology was seductive, stroking the conscience of America even as it flattered America’s vanity and served America’s self-interest. It appealed most powerfully to the religiously minded majority of Americans, but the secular, too, could sign on, as advocates of the export of democracy. The popularity of Manifest Destiny naturally caught the attention of politicians, especially those in the Democratic party, who were hungry to regain the presidency after a surprising defeat in 1840. In 1844 the Democrats nominated James K. Polk of Tennessee on a platform promising the vigorous extension of America’s frontiers westward. Looking southwest, Polk vowed to bring Texas into the Union. Looking northwest, he pledged to take all of Oregon.
    Polk won the presidency and proceeded to act on his promises. As it happened, he didn’t get all of Oregon (which at that time stretched to the southern border of Alaska), but, in negotiations with Britain, he got the largest and best part. Nor did
he
take Texas, which was annexed after Polk’s election victory but