1.	The Colonial Period of American History

The first Americans

On August 3, 1492, an Italian adventurer named Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain to find a new way from Europe to Asia. His aim was to open up a shorter trade route between the two continents. Ten weeks after leaving Spain, on the morning of October 12, he stepped ashore on the beach of an island. He named the island San Salvador (Holy Savior). Columbus believed that he landed in the Indies, a groups of islands close to India. For this reason he called the friendly, brown-skinned people Indians. In fact, these were islands off the shore of a new continent. 

There were many different groups of Amerindians. These tribes followed very different ways of life. They spoke over three hundred separate languages. Europeans called America "the New World", but the ancestors of Amerindians had already been living there for maybe 50,000 years. They probably came from Asia, on a bridge of ice that joined Asia to America across what is now the Bering Strait. 

The Pueblo people of present day Arizona and New Mexico were the best organized of the Amerindian farming peoples. They lived in groups of villages or in towns. They made clothing from cotton, which grew wild in the surrounding deserts. For food they grew crops of maize and beans. Long before the Europeans came to America the Pueblo were building networks of canals across the deserts to bring water to the fields.

A people called the Apache were the neighbors of the Pueblo. The Apache never became settled farmers. They wandered the deserts, obtained food by stealing it. They were warlike, and they were much feared by the Pueblo.

The Iroquois were a group of tribes, a nation who lived far away from the Pueblo and the Apache in northeastern North America. They were skilled farmers, hunters and fishermen, they lived in permanent villages. They were fierce warriors, feared by their neighbors. They often fought one another. For them bravery in the battle was the way to win respect and high position in the tribe.

Many miles to the west, on the plains from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, there was another warrior nation that called themselves Dakota. They were better known by the name given by other Amerindians: Sioux ("enemies"). The Sioux grew no crops and built no houses. For food, for shelter and for clothing they depended upon the buffalo. When the buffalo moved, the Sioux moved. Within hours, they could take down their tepees, they even carried fire from one camp to the next.

Potlatches: The "potlatch" was a popular ceremony amongst the wealthy Pacific coast (northwest coast) tribes (which are also known for their carving on totem poles). Potlatch means gift giving. A chief or head of a family might give away everything that he owned, to show his wealth. The person receiving the gifts had to give back even more.
The Amerindian peoples of North America developed widely varied ways of life. All suited natural environments in which the tribes lived, and they lasted for many centuries. But the arrival of Europeans with their guns, diseases and hunger for land would eventually destroy them all.

Explorers from Europe

Why is America called America?
The reason is that to the end of his life Columbus believed that his discoveries were part of Asia. The man who did most to correct this mistaken idea was Amerigo Vespucci (an Italian sailor from Florence).

Who discovered America? In the centuries after 1492 stories and legends grew up about other adventurers having reached the New World long before Columbus. (Buddhist monk in AD 459, Irish monk in AD 551, Leif Ericson, "Lucky Leif", a Viking sailor from Iceland, a Welsh explorer in 1170). Only in the case of the Viking have modern scholars found firm evidence to support the old legends. In the 1960s archaeologists uncovered traces of Viking settlements in both Newfoundland and New England. The saga of Leif Ericson tells how he sailed from Greenland to the eastern coast of North America in about AD 1000. Other Vikings followed Leif to "Vinland", but the settlements did not last.

It was the Spanish who began the lasting European occupation of America. When Columbus returned to Spain he took back some jewelry made of gold. In the next fifty years thousands of treasure-hungry Spanish crossed the Atlantic Ocean. It was the lust for gold that led Hernan Cortes to conquer the Aztecs in the 1520s. The Aztecs were a wealthy, city-building people who lived in what is today Mexico. In the 1530s the same lust for gold caused Francisco Pizarro to attack the equally wealthy empire of the Incas of Peru. A new empire was built up by conquestors – conquistadores – in Central and South America. Between 1539 and 1543 Hernando de Soto and Francisco Coronado, working separately, explored much of the southern part of what is now the US. Ponce de Leon was a Spanish conquistador who in 1513 set off in search of the magic fountain (fountain of everlasting youth). He never found it but he did claim Florida for Spain. In 1565 Spanish settlers founded St. Augustine there, the first permanent European settlement on the mainland of North America. In 1609 other settlers founded Santa Fe in New Mexico.

The growing wealth of Spain made other European nations envious. In 1497 King Henry VII of England hired an Italian seaman named John Cabot to explore the new lands and to look again for a passage to Asia. Cabot found no gold and no passage to the East. 

The French also sent explorers to North America. In 1524 the French king, Francis I, sent an Italian sailor called Giovanni Verrazano for the same purpose. Ten years later another French explorer, a fisherman from Normandy named Jacques Cartier, discovered the St. Lawrence River. Cartier failed to find the way to Asia but he gave France a claim to what would later become Canada. 

Virginian Beginnings

On May 20, 1607, sailors reached the land they had been searching for: Virginia. Their little group of huts became the first lasting English settlement in America. They named it Jamestown (after James I, king of England). The settlers had been sent there by a group of rich London investors, who formed the Virginia Company. The Company's purpose was to set up colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. (Pay the cost of expeditions and get any profit that is made. In hopes of gold.) The Jamestown settlers were employees of this company. As Captain John Smith wrote at that time: "no talk, no hope nor work, but dig gold, wash gold, load gold". And then the colonists began to die. Some died in Amerindian attacks, some of diseases, some of starvation. Jamestown reached its lowest point in the winter of 1609-1610. Of the 500 colonists living in the settlement in October 1609, only 60 were still alive in March 1610.
Yet new settlers continued to arrive. The Virginia Company gathered homeless children from the streets of London and sent them out to the colony. Then it sent a hundred convicts from London's prisons. However, some people sailed willingly. For many English people these early years of the 17th century were a time of hunger and suffering. Many people were without work. In England the land was owned by the rich. In Virginia a poor man could hope for a farm of his own to feed his family.
Captain John Smith was the most able of the original Jamestown settlers. An energetic 27-year-old soldier and explorer, he had already had a life full of action when he landed there in 1607. It was he who organized the colonists and forced them to work. When food supplies ran out Smith set off into the forests to buy corn from the Amerindians. On one of these expeditions he was taken prisoner. According to the story he told later, Pocahontas, the 12-year-old daughter of the chief, saved his life. Pocahontas went on helping Virginia's survival, bringing food to the starving settlers.

Very few women settled in early Virginia, so in 1619 the Virginia Company shipped over a group of 90 young women as wives for the settlers. The settlers had to pay the Company for the wives.

For a number of years after 1611, military governors ran Virginia like a prison camp. But it was tobacco that saved Virginia (a plant that grew wild there). In 1613, John Rolfe (Pocahontas' husband) shipped the first load of Virginia tobacco to England. London merchants paid high prices because of its high quality. Soon most of the Virginia settlers were busy growing tobacco. They cleared new land along the rivers and grew tobacco even on the streets of Jamestown. They even used it as money. The possibility of becoming rich by growing tobacco brought wealthy men to Virginia. Most of the workers on these early plantations were servant from England. At the end they became free to work for themselves. Luckier ones were given a piece of land.

Life in Virginia continued to be hard. Not hunger was the only problem. Diseases like malaria and wars against the Amerindians continued to kill many settlers. Between 1619 and 1621, about 3,560 people left England to settle in Virginia. Before those years were over, 3,000 of them were dead.

Virginia's affairs had been controlled so far by governors sent over by the Company. Now that Company allowed a body called the House of Burgesses to be set up. The Burgesses were elected representatives from the various small settlements. They met to advise the governor on the laws. The House of Burgesses met for the first time in August, 1619.

In that same month Virginia saw another important beginning. A small Dutch warship anchored at Jamestown. On board were 20 captured black Africans. The ship's captain sold them to the settlers as indentured servants. White servants were indentured for a fixed number of years. Black servants had no such hope. Their indenture was for life. In fact, they were slaves, even though it was not yet openly admitted.

The Virginia Company never made a profit. By 1624 it had run out of money and was shut down by the English government. Fierce Amerindian attacks in 1622 had destroyed several settlements and killed over 350 colonists. Out of nearly 10,000 settlers sent out since 1607, a 1624 census showed only 1,275 survivors.

Puritan New England

"Pilgrims" are people who make a journey for religious reasons. But for Americans it means a small group of English men and women who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in the year 1620. The group's members came to be called the Pilgrims because they went to America to find religious freedom. 
In Europe, for more than a thousand years Roman Catholic Christianity had been the religion of most of the people. By the 16th century, however, some Europeans had begun to doubt the teachings of the Catholic Church. Early in the century, a German monk named Martin Luther claimed that individual human beings did not need the Pope or the priests of the Catholic Church to speak to God. A French lawyer named John Calvin put forward similar ideas. Because they protested against the teachings and customs of the Catholic Church, religious reformers were called "Protestants".  In the 1530s the English king, Henry VIII, formed a national church with himself as its head. In the later years of the sixteenth century many English people believed that this Church of England was still too much like the Catholic Church. They disliked the power of its bishops. They disliked its elaborate ceremonies and the rich decorations of its churches. Such people wanted the Church of England to become more plain and simple, or "pure". Because of this they were called Puritans. When James I became king of England in 1603 he warned the Puritans that he would drive them from the land if they did not accept his ideas. His bishops began fining the Puritans and putting them in prison. To escape the persecution, a small group of them left England and went to Holland. Holland was the only country in Europe whose government allowed religious freedom at this time. But the Puritans never felt at home there. Some of them - the Pilgrims - decided to go to America. 

First they returned briefly to England. Here they persuaded the Virginia Company to allow them to settle in the northern part of its American lands. On September 16, 1620, the Pilgrims left the English port of Plymouth and headed for America. The Pilgrims' ship was Mayflower. On November 9, 1620, it reached Cape Cod, now the state of Massachusetts.

The Mayflower Compact
When the Pilgrims arrived off the coast of America they wrote out an agreement. In this document they agreed to work together for the good of all. It became known as the Mayflower Compact. In the Compact the Plymouth settlers agreed to set up a government. 

On December 21, 1620, they set up camp at a place they named Plymouth. The frozen ground and the deep snow maid it difficult for them to build houses. They had very little food. Before spring came, half of the little group of a hundred settlers were dead. The 50 survivors built better houses. They learned how to fish and hunt. Friendly Amerindians gave them seed corn and showed them how to plant it. Other English Puritans followed the Pilgrims to America. Ten years later a much larger group of almost 1000 colonists settled nearby in what became the Boston area. These people left England to escape the rule of a new king, Charles I. Charles was even less tolerant than his father James. Many years later, in 1691, it combined with the Plymouth colony under the name of Massachusetts.

The Puritans of Massachusetts believed that government had a duty to make people obey God's will. They passed laws to force people to attend church and laws to punish drunks and adulterers. Even men who let their hair grow long could be in trouble. Roger Williams, a Puritan minister in a settlement called Salem objected to the fact that the same men controlled both the church and the government. Williams' repeated criticisms maid the Massachusetts leaders angry. In 1535 they sent men to arrest him. But Williams escaped and went south. Williams and his followers set up a new colony called Rhode Island. Rhode Island promised it citizens complete religious freedom and separation of church and state.

Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 by William Penn. Penn belonged to a religious group, the Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers. Quakers refused to swear oaths or to take part in wars. Penn's promise of religious freedom brought settlers from other European countries to Pennsylvania. (Ireland, Germany.)

New York had previously been called New Amsterdam. It had first been settled in 1626. In 1664 the English captured it from the Dutch and re-named it New York. A few years later, in 1670, the English founded the new colonies of North and South Carolina. The last English colony to be founded in North America was Georgia, settled in 1733. 

Thanksgiving
Every year on the 4th Thursday in November Americans celebrate a holiday called Thanksgiving. The first people to celebrate this day were the Pilgrims. In November, 1621, they sat down to eat together and to give thanks to God for enabling them to survive the hardships of their first year in America. Local Amerindians had shared corn with the Pilgrims and shown them the best places to catch fish.

Colonial Life in America

By the year 1733 the English owned thirteen separate colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. In the far north was the New England group, centered on Massachusetts. The colonies to the south of New England were called the Middle Colonies. The biggest were New York and Pennsylvania. 

In 1760 most Americans were farmers. But important towns had grown up whose people earned their living by trade and manufacturing. Philadelphia, with its 28,000 inhabitants, was the largest. The next biggest cities after Philadelphia were New York and Boston, with about 25,000 people each. All three towns owed much of their prosperity to the profits of the transatlantic trade that they carried on with England. Their merchants also traded with one another.

This inter-America trade helped to produce a feeling between the cities that they all belonged to the same American nation. The people of the Middle Colonies were usually more tolerant of religious and other differences than the New Englanders. Many of them also had German, Dutch or Swedish ancestors rather than English one. 

The Southern Colonies of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia formed the third group. Wealthy landowners farmed large plantations. Most of the work in the fields was done by black slaves. Slavery was rare in the other American colonies. 

In all three groups of colonies most people still lived less than fifty miles from the coast. This was called "the tidewater" period of settlement. During the fifty years after 1733 settlers moved deeper into the continent. As they traveled inland they passed fewer and fewer farms and villages. At last there were none at all. This area, where European settlement came to an end and the forest homelands of the Amerindians began, was called the frontier.

In the 1760s land-hungry American settlers moving westwards were stopped by a major obstacle, the Appalachian Mountains. In 1775 a hunter and explorer named Daniel Boone led settlers into the mountains. He cut a track called the Wilderness Road through the forested Cumberland Gap, a natural pass in the Appalachians. Boone's Wilderness Road enabled thousands of settlers to move. These lands now make up the American states of Kentucky and Tennessee. 

Governors and assemblies

Each colony had its own government. At the head of this government was a governor, chosen in most cases by the English king. These governors depended upon the cooperation of assemblies elected by the colonists. In most of the colonies all white males who owned some land had the right to vote. This meant that far more people had the vote in America than in England or in any other European country.

2.	The War of Independence

The Roots of Revolution

In North America, France claimed to own Canada and Louisiana. The French claim that Louisiana belonged to them worried both the British government and the American colonists, because the French would then be able to keep the colonists to the east of the Appalachian Mountains and stop them from moving westwards. 

(After several wars earlier in the 18th century, in 1756 Britain and France began fighting the Seven Years War.) The British sent money and soldiers to North America. In 1758 British and colonial forces captured the French strongholds of Louisburg on the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Fort Duquesne on the Ohio River. In 1759 they took Quebec. In 1760 Montreal fell to them. The war was ended by the Peace of Paris, which was signed in 1763. France gave up its claim to Canada and to all of North America east of the Mississippi River. 

Until the 1760s most Americans seemed quite content to be ruled by Britain. An important reason for this was the presence of the French in North America. Another reason  was that the British government rarely interfered in colonial affairs.

The English king, George III, issued a proclamation in 1763. It forbade colonists to settle west of the Appalachians until proper treaties had been made with the Amerindians. The king's proclamation angered the colonists. The became angrier still when the British  government told them that they must pay new taxes on imports and that they must feed and shelter British soldiers in the colonies. Colonists believed that the taxes would make it difficult for them to profit and would raise the costs of living. They also feared that if British troops stayed in America they might be used to force them to obey the British government.

In 1765 the British Parliament passed another new law called the Stamp Act. This too was intended to raise money to pay for the defense of the colonies. It said that the colonists had to buy special tax stamps. The colonists said: "We have no representatives in the British Parliament, so what right does it have to tax us?". "No taxation without representation" became their demand.

In 1765 representatives from nine colonies met in New York. They formed the "Stamp Act Congress" and organized opposition. All this opposition forced the British government to withdraw the Stamp Act.

In 1767 the British placed new taxes on tea, paper, paint, and various other goods that the colonies imported from abroad. A special customs office was set up in Boston to collect the new duties. Again the colonists refused to pay. Riots broke out in Boston and the British sent soldiers to keep order. In 1770, the British removed all the duties except for the one on tea.

Samuel Adams was a politician and writer who organized opposition in Massachusetts to the British tax laws. On March 5, 1770, a Boston mob began to shout insults at a group of British soldiers. One of the crowd tried to take a soldier's gun and the soldier shot him. More shots were fired and three more members of the crowd fell dead. Samuel Adams used this "Boston Massacre" to stir up American opinion against the British. He wrote and widely distributed a letter which inaccurately described the happening as an unprovoked attack on peaceful citizens.

In December 1773, a group of colonists in Massachusetts disguised themselves as Mohawk Amerindians. They boarded British merchant ships in Boston harbor and threw 342 cases of tea into the sea. The British reply to this "Boston Tea Party" was to pass a set of laws to punish Massachusetts.

On June 1, 1774, British warships took up position at the mouth of Boston harbor to make sure that no ships sailed in or out. A few months later, in September 1774, a group of colonial leaders came together in Philadelphia. They formed the First Continental Congress to oppose what they saw as British oppression.

Fighting for Independence

On the night of April 18, 1775, 700 British soldiers marched silently out of Boston. Their orders were to seize weapons and ammunition that rebellious colonists had stored in Concord, a nearby town. In the village of Lexington the British found 70 American militiamen, farmers and tradesmen. They were known as "Minutemen" (because they promised to take up arms in a minute when needed). 8 Minutemen were killed. These were the first shots in what was to become the American War of Independence.
Hundreds more Minutemen gathered, they shot down 273 British soldiers who were on their way back to Boston. The soldiers were still under attack when they arrived back in Boston. A ring of armed Americans surrounded the city.

The next month, May 1775, a second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and began to act as an American national government. It set up an army of 17,000 men under the command of George Washington. Washington was a Virginia landowner and surveyor with experience of fighting in the French and Indian War. The Continental Congress also sent representatives to seek aid from friendly European nations – especially from France.

By the following year the fighting had spread beyond Massachusetts. It had grown to a full-scale war.

On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress finally took the step that many Americans believed was inevitable. It cut all political ties with Britain and declared that "these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states." Two days later, on July 4, it issued the Declaration of Independence. It was written by Thomas Jefferson, a landowner and lawyer from Virginia. After repeating that the colonies were now free and independent, it officially named them the United States of America.

The Declaration of Independence was more than a statement that the colonies were a new nation. It also set out the ideas behind the change. It claimed that all men had a natural right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It also said that governments can only justly claim the right to rule of they have the agreement of those they govern. Men like Jefferson combined John Locke's ideas with their own experience of life in America to produce a new definition of democratic government.

After some early successes, Americans did badly in the war against the British. Washington's army was more of an armed mob than an effective fighting force. Washington started to train his men and turn them into disciplined soldiers, but meanwhile the Americans suffered defeat after defeat. In September 1776, two months after the Declaration of Independence, the British captured New York City.

Success began to come to Americans on October, 1777. They trapped a British army of almost 6,000 men at Saratoga on northern New York. The Americans marched their prisoners to Boston, put them on ships and sent them back to England.

Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador to France used the victory at Saratoga to persuade the French government to join in the struggle against Britain. In February 1778, the French king, Louis XVI, signed an alliance with the Americans

From 1778 onwards most of the fighting took place in the southern colonies. In September 1781, George Washington, leading a combined American and French army, surrounded 8,000 British troops under General Cornwallis at Yorktown, on the coast of Virginia. On October 17, 1781, Cronwallis surrendered his army to Washington.

British and American representatives began to discuss peace terms. In the Treaty of Paris, which was signed in September 1783, Britain officially recognized her former colonies as an independent nation. The treaty granted the United States all of North America from Canada to Florida, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River.

3.	The Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution

Forming the New Nation

In 1783 most Americans felt more loyalty to their own state than to the new United States. Each individual American state had its own government and behaved very much like an independent country. During the War of Independence the states had agreed to work together in a national Congress to which each state sent representatives. The agreement that set up this plan for the states to cooperate with one another was called the Articles of Confederation. It had begun to operate in 1781.

Under the Articles of Confederation the central government of the United States was very weak. Congress could vote to set up an army, but it could only obtain soldiers by asking the states for them. It could vote to spend money, but it had no power to collect taxes to raise the money. When, for example, Congress needed money to pay debts owed to France, some states refused to pay.

When the War was over, individual states began to behave more and more like independent nations. Some set up tax barriers against others. In some places states even began fighting one another. The British felt that the American government was so weak it was not worth dealing with. Even France, the ally of the Americans during the War, refused to recognize Congress as a real government.

It was clear that for the United States to survive there would have to be changes in the Articles of Confederation. In February 1787, Congress asked each state to send delegates to a convention in Philadelphia to talk about such changes. The smallest state, Rhode Island refused, but the other twelve agreed. The meeting became known as the Constitutional Convention. It began in May 1787.

The original purpose of the Constitutional Convention was simply to revise the Articles of Confederation. But the delegates did more than this. They started afresh and worked out a completely new system of government for the United States. They set out the plan for this government in a document called the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution gave the US a "federal" system of government. A federal system is one in which the power to rule is shared. The new Constitution still left the individual state governments with a wide range of powers. But it made the federal government much stronger than before.

(Itt el kell még mondani, hogy a Constitution rendelkezett mindarról, amit am. civilizációból megtanultunk, president, congress, branches of power, stb. Azt is, hogy a Constitution pontosan rendelkezik arról, milyen jogai vannak az államoknak, és milyenek a szövetségi szintnek, mik a közösek stb.)

In 1788 George Washington was elected as the first President of the US.

Before the new system of government set out in the Constitution could begin, it had to be approved by a majority of the citizens in at least nine of the thirteen states. In June 1788, the assembly of the state of New Hampshire voted to accept, or "ratify" the Constitution. It was the ninth state to do so. The Constitution went into effect in March 1789. 

In 1791 ten amendments, or additions, were made to it. Together these ten amendments are called the Bill of Rights. The reason for the Bill of Rights was that the original Constitution had said nothing about the rights and freedoms of the individual citizens. It promised all Americans freedom of religion, a free press, free speech, the right to carry arms, the right to a fair trial by jury, and protection against "cruel and unusual punishments". 

In 1801 John Adams, who in 1797 had succeeded George Washington as president of the United States, appointed a new head of the Supreme Court. The Court's new Chief Justice, to give him his official title, was John Marshall. In an 1803 legal case known as Marbury v. Madison, Marshall stated that the Supreme Court has the power to decide whether particular American laws are according to the Constitution. If the Supreme Court decides that any law is "repugnant to the Constitution" – that is, does not agree with it – the Court can declare the law illegal. This power became known as the "power of judicial review".

The first political parties

The Federalist Party favored a strong President and federal government. For this reason it appealed to rich people, who believed that a strong central government would make their property safer. The Democratic Republican Party attracted the less wealthy. This was because it supported the rights of the individual states. 

4.	The New Republic (from Washington to Madison) 

Years of Growth

After 1783 more and more people set off for the new territories between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River that the Treaty of Paris had granted to the United States. Many of new settlers moved to lands north of the Ohio River. Amerindians who already lived on these lands saw the settlers as thieves who had come to steal their hunting grounds. The new government of the United States tried at first to keep the peace by making treaties with the Amerindians. A law of 1787 called the Northwest Ordinance said that the Amerindians' "lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent". 

But the American government soon changed its ideas. By 1817 President James Monroe was writing that "if the Indian tribes do not become civilized they will decline and become extinct".

In 1830 the United States government passed a law called Indian Removal Act. The law said that all Indians living east of the Mississippi River would be moved west to a place called Indian Territory. 

The Cherokees were an Amerindian people who suffered greatly from the Indian Removal policy. Their lands lay between the state of Georgia and the Mississippi River. They had become Christians and attended church and sent their children to school. They had a written language and published their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English. They even wrote for themselves a Constitution. None of this saved the Cherokees. In the 1830s Congress declared that their lands belonged to the state of Georgia and they were divided up for sale to white settlers. The Cherokees were driven from their homes and forced to march hundreds of miles overland to what is now the state of Oklahoma. The worst year was 1838. In bitterly cold winter weather American soldiers gathered thousands of Cherokee men, women and children, and drove them west. The nightmare journey lasted almost five months. By the time it was over, 4,000 of them – a quarter of the whole Cherokee nation – were dead. This episode came to be called "The Trail of Tears". 

Long before the Indian Removal Act the federal government had begun to organize the new western lands for settlement. It ordered that the lands should be divided into square units called "townships". Each township was to be six miles by six miles in size and each was to be further divided into smaller square units, one mile by one mile, called "sections". Every year more settlers moved in. When the number of white males living in a territory reached 5,000 it could elect its own law – making body. It could also send a representative to give its point of view in Congress. When the population of a territory reached 60,000 it became a new state, with the same rights and powers as the original 13 states. These arrangements for governing new territories were first introduced by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. 

Old Hickory

The first six Presidents of the United States were all from rich families. Then, in 1828, a different sort of President was elected. His name was Andrew Jackson and he had been born into a poor family on the western frontier. Frontier farmers always felt that he was one of them and called him "Old Hickory". Jackson was one of the founders of the Democratic Party. He said that government should be organized to benefit "the great body of the United States – the planter, the farmer, the mechanic and the laborer". It was the votes of such people that made him President in 1828 and then again in 1832. Jackson provided cheap money by encouraging banks to make loans at low rates of interest. He provided cheap manufactured goods by reducing import duties. And he provided cheap land by forcing the Cherokees and other eastern Amerindians to move west of the Mississippi. His policies of giving voters what they wanted = "Jackson's democracy".

Samuel Slater imports the Industrial Revolution

At the end of the War of Independence the United States was mainly a land of farmers. Yet as early as the 1790s America's first factory opened. In 1789 an English mechanic named Samuel Slater took the Industrial Revolution across the Atlantic to America. Before leaving England, Slater memorized the details of the latest English cotton spinning machines. He carried them in his memory because it was against the law to take plans of the machines out of England. The success of Slater's cotton mill in Rhode Island began a process of change in the United States.

The War of 1812

Between 1803 and 1815 Britain and France were at war. Both countries' warships interfered with American trade. They stopped American merchant ships and sometimes seized their cargoes. In June 1812, Congress declared war on Britain. The much stronger British navy soon gained complete control of the coastal waters of the United States and blockaded American ports. American attempts to invade British-ruled Canada ended in disaster. British forces captured and burned Washington, their new capital city. In December 1814, the United States and Britain signed a treaty of peace in Europe. 

James Madison
1751-1836
 
As member of the Continental Congress Madison played a leading role in framing the US Constitution. He helped to found the Democratic-Republican Party; served President Jefferson as Secreatary of State; and became the fourth US President (1809-17). During his presidency war broke out between America and Great Britain. 

It taught Americans an important lesson. The British navy's wartime blockade of United States ports had cut off the imported European manufactured goods upon which the country relied. This forced Americans to begin making goods of their own and so gave a start to American manufacturing industry. Thomas Jefferson was one of many people who had been against the growth of industry in the United States. Now he saw how important it was. Soon after the War of 1812 he wrote: "We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist".

West to the Pacific

In 1800 the western boundary of the United States was the Mississippi River. The land stretched west for more than 600 miles to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It was known at the time as Louisiana. In 1800 Louisiana belonged to France. Then the Americans were very lucky. In 1803 Napoleon was about to go to war with Britain and needed money. For fifteen million dollars he sold Louisiana to the United States. Louisiana stretched north from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border and west from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. Its purchase almost doubled the land area of the United States. In time, all or parts of 13 new states would be formed there. 

The Louisiana Purchase was authorized by President Thomas Jefferson. Even before this Jefferson had been planning to send an expedition to explore Louisiana. The expedition was led by Merriwether Lewis and William Clark. In the spring of 1804 its twenty-nine men set off up the Missouri by boat. They carried goods to trade with Amerindians along the way. For months the explorers rowed and sailed their boats up the Missouri. Then they marched for ten weeks across the Rocky Mountains. At last they reached the westward-flowing Columbia River. They floated down it to the Pacific. Lewis and Clark arrived back in St. Louis in late September 1806. They brought back much useful information about both Louisiana and the western lands that lay beyond it. These lands were known as Oregon. 

In 1805 four countries claimed to own Oregon – Russia, Spain, Britain and the US. Russia owned Alaska, and Spain ruled California. But in Oregon, the British and the Americans were in the strongest position. American political leaders made great efforts to persuade more Americans to start farms in Oregon. At first Americans traveling to Oregon went by ship (around South America). Settlers began traveling to Oregon by land in 1832. This overland route to the Pacific coast became known as the Oregon Trail. In spite of the dangers, settlers continued to make the long journey. In 1843, "Oregon fever" came to many parts of the US. People left their worn-out farms in the east, packed their possessions on wagons and set off for the west. American settlers soon outnumbered the British in Oregon. American newspapers and political leaders began to express an idea called "manifest destiny." This was a claim that it was the clear intention of faith that the territory of the US should stretch across North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
In 1844 James K. Polk was elected President of the US. In the speech at the start of his presidency he said that the American claim "to the whole of Oregon is clear and unquestionable." For a time war seemed possible.

But by the summer of 1846 the US was already at war with Mexico. In June, Polk agreed to divide Oregon with Britain in two almost equal sections. The 1846 war with Mexico had grown out of events that had been taking place in Texas. Thousands of Americans had settled in Texas, but up to the 1830s it was ruled by Mexico. The Texas Americans, or Texans, came to dislike Mexican rule. In October 1835, they rebelled. Led by General Sam Houston, they defeated a much larger Mexican army in 1836, at the Battle of San Jacinto and made Texas an independent republic. They wanted their country to join the US. Eventually, the two countries reached an agreement and in 1845 Texas became part of the US. 
President Polk saw an opportunity to take land from Mexico and he declared war. American soldiers invaded Mexico and defeated the Mexican army. By September 1847, they had occupied Mexico City, the country's capital. 
The Mexican – American War was ended by a peace treaty signed in February 1848. The treaty forced Mexico to hand over enormous stretches of its territory to the US. Today these lands form the states California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado.

Wagon Trains

Most of the settlers who traveled to Oregon made the journey in four-wheeled wagons. A group of these wagons traveling together was called "wagon train." Each wagon could carry a load of between 2-2.5 tons and was pulled by a team of either mules or oxen.

5.	The Institution of Slavery; the Road to the Civil War

North and South

In the year 1810 there were 7.2 million people in the US. For 1.2 million of these people the words of the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal" were far from true. They were black and they were slaves.

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, owned slaves himself. So did George Washington and other leaders of the movement for American independence and freedom. Big landowners in southern states such as Virginia defended slavery. How could they cultivate their fields of tobacco, rice and cotton without slave workers?

In the north of the US farms were smaller and the climate was cooler. Farmers there did not need slaves to work the land for them. Some northerners opposed slavery for moral and religious reasons also. Many were abolitionists – that is, people who wanted to end or abolish slavery by law. By the early 19th century many northern states had passed laws abolishing slavery. In 1808 they also persuaded Congress to make it illegal for ships to bring any new slaves from Africa. 

By the 1820s southern and northern politicians were arguing about whether slavery should be permitted in the new territories in the West. Northern farmers moving west did not want to find themselves competing for land against southerners who had slaves to do their work for them. Eventually the two sides agreed on a compromise. Slavery would be permitted in the Missouri and Arkansas territories but banned in lands to the west and north of Missouri. The Missouri Compromise, as it was called, did not end the disputes between North and South.

By the early 1830s another angry argument was going on over important duties. Northern states favored such duties because they protected their young industries against the competition of foreign manufactured goods. Southern states opposed them because southerners relied upon foreign manufacturers for both necessities and luxuries. A southern political leader named John C. Calhoun claimed that a state had the right to disobey any federal law if the state believed that the law would harm its interest. It became known as the "states' rights doctrine". Calhoun's claim was strongly denied by Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. The power to decide whether the federal authorities were acting rightly or wrongly belonged to the Supreme Court said Webster. 

In the next 20 years the US grew much bigger. In 1846 it divided the Oregon territory with Britain. In 1848 it took vast areas of the Southwest from Mexico. Obtaining these new lands raised again the question that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had tried to settle - should slavery be allowed on new American territory? Once again southerners answered "yes" and northerners said "no".

In 1850 Congress voted in favor of another compromise. To persuade southerners to agree to these arrangements, Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Act. This was a law to make it easier for southerners to recapture slaves who escaped from their masters. Slave owners offered rewards, or "bounties" for the return of runaway slaves. This had created a groups of men called "bounty hunters." These men made their living by hunting down fugitive slaves in order to collect the rewards on them. With the support of the new law, bounty hunters now began searching free states for escaped slaves.

Some northern judges refused to enforce it. Other people provided food, money, and hiding places for fugitives. The final stop on these escape routes was Canada, where fugitives could be followed by neither American laws nor bounty hunters. Because railroads were the most modern form of transport at this time, this carefully organized system was called the "Underground Railroad." Guides who led the fugitives to freedom were called "conductors", and hiding places were called "depots". 

As the number of fugitive slaves increased, gunfights between bounty hunters and conductors became more and more common. In 1854 a Senator named Stephen Douglas persuaded Congress to end the Missouri Compromise. West of Missouri was a western territory called Kansas. In 1854 Congress voted to let its people decide for themselves whether to permit slavery there. A race began to win control of Kansas. Pro-slavery immigrants poured in from the South and anti-slavery immigrants from the North. Each group was determined to outnumber the other. Soon fighting and killing began. 

The most famous "conductor" on the "Underground Railroad" was a young black woman named Harriet Tubman. She was a slave on a plantation in Maryland. In 1849 she escaped to Philadelphia. Over the next 10 years she made 19 trips into slaves states and led more than 300 men, women, and children to freedom. 

Some Americans opposed to slavery were prepared to wait for it to come to an end gradually and by agreement with the slave owners. Others wanted to immediately and without compromises. The best known spokesman of the second group was a Boston writer named William Lloyd Garrison.

A slave named Dred Scott had been taken by his owner to live in a free state. Scott asked the Supreme Court to declare that this had made him legally free. But the Court refused. It said the black slaves had no rights as American citizens. It added also that Congress had gone beyond its constitutional powers in claiming the right to prohibit slavery in the western territories. The Dred Scott decision caused great excitement in the US.

A few years earlier opponents of slavery had formed a new political group called the Republican Party. A Republican named Abraham Lincoln said that the spread of slavery must be stopped. He was willing to accept slavery in the states where it existed already, but that was all. In 1860 the Republicans chose him as their candidate in that year's presidential election.

By now relations between North and South were close to breaking point. In 1859 John Brown tried to start a slave rebellion in Virginia. The attack failed and Brown was captured tried for treason and hanged.

In the presidential election of 1860 the southerners put forward a candidate of their own to oppose Lincoln. But voters in the North supported him and he won the election. A few weeks later, in December 1860, the state of South Carolina voted to secede from the US. It was soon joined by 10 more southern states. In February 1861 these eleven states announced that they were now an independent nation, the Confederate States of America, known as the Confederacy.

The Civil War

On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as President of the US. In his inaugural address as President, Lincoln appealed to the southern states to stay in the Union. But on April 12 Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter, a fortress in the harbor of Charlestown, South Carolina, that was occupied by US troops.

Lincoln called for 75,000 men to fight to save the Union. Jefferson Davis, the newly elected President of the Confederate States, made a similar appeal for men to fight for the Confederacy. Some people found it difficult to decide which side to support. The decision sometimes split families.

From the first months of the war Union warships blockaded the ports of the South. They did this to prevent the Confederacy from selling its cotton abroad and from obtaining foreign supplies.
In both men and material resources the North was much stronger than the South. It had a population of 22 million people. The South had only 9 million people and 3.5 million of them were slaves. However, the North faced one great difficulty. The only way it could win the war was to invade the South and occupy its land. The South had no such problem. It did not need to conquer the North to win independence. All it had to do was to hold out until the people of the North grew tired of fighting. Many of the best officers in the pre-war army of the US were southerners. Most important of all, the fact that almost all the war's fighting took place in the South meant that Confederate soldiers were defending their own homes. Southerners denied that they were fighting mainly to preserve slavery. They were fighting for their independence from the North.

The war was fought in two main areas - in Virginia and the other east coast states of the Confederacy, and in the Mississippi valley. In Virginia the Union armies suffered one defeat after another in the first year of the war. Again and again they tried to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital. The Confederate forces in Virginia had two great advantages. The first was that many rivers cut across the roads leading south to Richmond and so made the city easier to defend. The second was their leaders. Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson showed much more skill than the generals leading the Union army at this time.

Fortunately for the North, Union forces in the Mississippi valley had more success. In April 1862 they captured New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy. 

By spring 1863, the Union armies were closing in on an important Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi called Vicksburg. On July 4, Vicksburg surrendered to a Union army. Union forces now controlled the whole length of the Mississippi. The had split the Confederacy in two. It became impossible for western Confederate states like Texas to send any more men and supplies to the east.

In the last week of June 1863, Lee marched his army north into Pennsylvania. At a small town named Gettysburg a Union army blocked his way. The battle which followed was the biggest that has ever been fought in the US. In three days of fighting more than 50,000 men were killed or wounded. The Confederate army had suffered a defeat.

By 1864 the Confederacy was running out of almost everything - men, equipment, food, money. In November 1864, a Union army led by General William T. Sherman began to march through the Confederate state of Georgia. Its soldiers destroyed everything in their path. On December 22 they occupied the city of Savannah. 

Richmond, the Confederate capital was in danger from another Union army led by General Grant. Lee was trapped. On April 9, 1865, he met Grant in a house in a tiny village called Appomattox and surrendered his army. Grant treated the defeated Confederate soldiers generously. After they had given up their weapons and promised never again to fight against the US, he allowed them to go home.

The Civil War put an end to slavery. In 1865 this was abolished everywhere in the US by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. And it decided finally that the US was one nation, whose parts could not be separated. The Civil War caused terrible destruction at home. All over the South cities and farms lay in ruins. An more Americans died in this war than in any other. By the time Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, the dead on both sides totaled 635,000.

6. Reconstruction and the Gilded Age

Reconstruction

On the night of April 13, 1865, crowds of people were celebrating Lee's surrender. The next day was Good Friday. In the evening President Lincoln and his wife went to Ford's Theater in Washington. At exactly 10:13, a pistol shot rang through the darkened theater. As the President slumped forward in his seat, a man jumped from the box on to the stage. He waved a gun in the air and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis" (Thus always to tyrants) and then ran out of the theater. It was discovered later that the gunman was an actor named John Wilkes Booth. He was captured a few days later, hiding in a barn in the Virginia countryside. (Walt Whitman's poem: "O Captain, My Captain!" expressed the poet's grief at the death of the admired President.)

Lincoln was succeeded by his Vice President, Andrew Johnson. The biggest problem he faced was how to deal with the defeated South. Lincoln blamed individual southern leaders for the war, rather than the people of the southern states as a whole. Johnson had similar ideas. He began to introduce plans to reunite the South with the rest of the nation. He said as soon as the citizens of the seceded states promised to be loyal to the government of the US they could elect new state assemblies to run their affairs. When a state voted to accept the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (that abolished slavery) Johnson intended that it should be accepted back in the Union as full and equal member.

But white southerners were determined to resist any changes that threatened their power. They were especially horrified at the idea of giving equal rights to their former black slaves. Former Confederate states' assemblies passed laws to keep blacks in an inferior position. Such laws were called "Black Codes". Black Codes refused black the vote, said that they could not serve on juries, forbade them to give evidence in courts against a white man. In Mississippi blacks were not allowed to buy or rent farm land. With no land, no money and no protection from the law, it was almost as if blacks were still slaves.

A group in Congress called Radical Republicans believed that the most important reason for fighting the Civil War had been to free blacks. They said that President Johnson was treating the defeated white southerners too kindly, and that the southerners were taking advantage of this.

In July 1866, despite opposition from the President, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act. It also set up an organization called the Freedmen's Bureau. Both these measures were intended to ensure that blacks in the South were not cheated of their rights. Congress then introduced the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. It gave blacks full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote.

All the former Confederate states except Tennessee refused to accept the 14th Amendment. In March 1867, Congress replied by passing the Reconstruction Act. This dismissed the white governments of the southern states and placed them under military rule. They were told that they could again have elected governments when the accepted the 14th Amendment.

By 1870 all the southern states had new "Reconstruction" governments. Most were made up of blacks, a few white southerners who were willing to work with them and white men from the North. The newly arrived northerners were called by southerners "carpetbaggers".

Most white southerners supported the Democratic political party. These southern Democrats claimed that the Reconstruction governments were incompetent and dishonest. There was some truth in this. Many of the new black members of the state assemblies were inexperienced and poorly educated. Some carpetbaggers were thieves (stole a 100,000 dollars from state funds, for example).

But Reconstruction governments also contained honest men who tried to improve the South. They passed laws to provide care for orphans and the blind, to encourage new industries and the building of railroads, and to build schools for both white and black children. None of these improvements stopped southern whites from hating Reconstruction. They organized terrorist groups to make white men the masters once more. The main aim of these groups was to frighten black people and prevent them from claiming their rights. The largest and most feared terrorist group was the Ku Klux Klan.

This use of violence and fear helped white racists to win back control of state governments all over the South. By 1876 Republican supporters of Reconstruction held power in only three southern states. When Congress withdrew federal troops from the South in 1877, white Democrats won control of these, too. Reconstruction was over.

From this time onwards southern blacks were treated more and more as "second class citizens" - that is, they were not given equal treatment under the law. The were robbed of their right to vote. Segregation was enforced on trains, in parks, in schools, in restaurants, in theaters, even in cemeteries. In the 1890s an average of 150 blacks were killed illegally - lynched - by white mobs.

In 1896 the Supreme Court announced its decision in a case called Plessy v. Ferguson. It ruled that the Constitution allowed separate facilities and services for black and white people, so long as the facilities and services were of equal quality. This decision made racial segregation a legal part of the American way of life (until 1954).

Years of Growth

Miners, Railroads and Cattlemen

In March 1848 a group of workmen found gold in a stream in California. By the middle of the summer a gold rush had begun. By the spring of 1849, people from all over the world were rushing to California to look for gold. In 1848 its population was 15,000 people. By 1852 the population was more than 250,000.
By the late 1850s they were mining in the mountains of Nevada and Colorado, by the 1860s they had moved into Montana and Wyoming and by the 1870s they were digging in the Black Hills of the Dakota country. ("mining settlements")

By 1890 the separate areas of settlement on the Pacific Coast and along the Mississippi Rived had moved together. The frontier had disappeared. Railroads played an important part in this "closing" of the frontier. During the Civil War, Congress had become anxious to join the gold-rich settlements along the Pacific Coast more closely to the rest of the US. In 1862 it granted land and money to the Union Pacific Railroad Company to build a railroad west from the Mississippi towards the Pacific. At the same time it gave a similar grant to the Central Pacific Railroad Company to build eastwards from California. 

Most of the workers of the Union Pacific were Irishmen or other recent immigrants from Europe. The Central Pacific workers were mainly Chinese, who had been brought to America under contract especially to do the job.

Finally, on May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific lines met at Promontory Point in Utah. A golden spike fixed the last rail into position. The new railroad was quickly joined by others. By 1844 four more major lines had crossed the continent.

Farming the Great Plains

In 1862 Union and Confederate armies were fighting some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. But the same year Congress found time to pass a law that was called the Homestead Act.

The Homestead Act offered free farms (homesteads) in the West to settlers. Any head of a family who was at least 21 years of age and an American citizen could claim one. So could immigrants who intended to become citizens. All that homesteaders had to do was to move onto a piece of land, live on it for 5 years and the land became theirs (or they could by it cheap after 6 months). Transcontinental railroad companies such as the Union Pacific also provided settlers with cheap land.

Settlers faced many difficulties (no trees, no water, hard to cultivate the land, drought, insects). But machines and metal tools helped them overcome the difficulties. These aids were manufactured in big new factories in cities like Chicago. From Chicago the railroads carried them to the Plains. The railroads also carried away the farmers' crops.

In the last 30 years of the 19th century over-production became a big problem of American farmers. Its cause was not only that farmers were cultivating more land. Improved agricultural machines were also making their farms more productive. Farmers formed political action groups to try to improve their position. The were trying to force railroad companies to reduce the high prices that they charged to transport farmers' crops. They included the Patrons of Husbandry, which was formed in the 1870s, and the Populist Party of the 1890s. Members of the Patrons of Husbandry were also known as "Grangers". The voting power of the Grangers caused many western states to pass "Granger laws". Grangers also joined together in cooperative societies. Some survive even today.

Inventors and Industries

In 1876 President Ulysses S. Grant traveled to Philadelphia to open a special exhibition. The exhibition was called the Centennial Exposition. It had been organized to celebrate the US's 100th birthday by showing some of its achievements.

The main attraction of the Centennial Exposition was the Machinery Hall. Inside it visitors could see such recent American inventions as the typewriter and the telephone as well as machines for countless other uses - for sewing, screwing, printing, pumping, etc.

At the time of the Exposition the US was still mainly a farming country. But in the years that followed, American industries grew quickly. The production of coal and iron grew especially fast.
By 1900 ten times more coal was being produced in the US than in 1860. The output of iron was 20 times higher. Railroads were very important in this growth of manufacturing. Vast amounts of coal and iron were used to make steel for their rails, locomotives, wagons, etc. The railroads also linked together buyers and sellers all over the country. Without them big centers of industry like Pittsburgh and Chicago could not have developed.

By 1890 the industries of the US were earning the country more than its farmlands. By 1913 more than one third of the whole world's industrial production came from the US.

The growth of American industry was organized and controlled by businessmen. By a mixture of hard work and ability, and by ignoring the rights of others they made themselves wealthy and powerful. Their admirers called such men "captains of industry." Their critics called them "robber barons" or worse.

Andrew Carnegie was one of the best known of these men. Carnegie concentrated his investments in the iron and steel business. Nothing like Carnegie's wealth and industrial power had ever before been seen in America. By 1900, his annual income was 20,000 times more than the income of the average American. Businessmen like Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, the "king" of the oil industry, realized that they could greatly increase their profits by swallowing up rival firms or driving them out of business. (The railroad "king" was William Vanderbilt.)

The giant industrial organizations that such men created were known as "corporations". As they grew bigger, they often became "trusts." By the early 20th century trusts controlled large parts of American industry. The biggest trusts were richer than most nations. By their power - and especially their power to decide wages and prices - the controlled the lives of millions of people.

It seemed that the country was coming under the control of a handful of rich and powerful men who were able to do more or less anything they wished. Some bribed politicians to pass laws which favored them. Others hired private armies to crush any attempt by their workers to obtain better conditions.

Many people came to see this matter as the most important problem facing the US in the early years of the 20th century.

Thomas Edison

Up to the middle of the 19th century the inventors often had little scientific knowledge. Their inventions were based on practical "know-how." Many later developments called for an understanding of basic scientific principles in, for example, electricity, magnetism and chemistry. 
Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847 and died in 1931. He made more than a thousand original inventions. Edison's laboratory contained every material and chemical that was then known. Edison had his great success in making practical use of electricity. In 1878 he formed the Edison Electric Light Company. He had a clear commercial aim - to capture from gas the huge market for lighting homes, streets and places of work. To do this, one thing Edison had to develop was a long-lasting electric light bulb (he made it from bamboo). He developed dynamos to produce the electricity, underground cables to carry it, fuse boxes to make it safe to use. The age of electricity had begun. 

Eli Whitney and mass production

Eli Whitney, the man who had invented the cotton gin (a cotton processing machine) began to make guns in about 1800. Until this time these had always been made by skilled gunmakers. Each gun was individually made. Whitney changed this. In his factory they made parts that were exactly alike, so that any part would fit any gun. Different workers were each carrying out one particular task. Whitney had worked out the main ideas of a way of manufacturing that would later become known as the "American system." Later still this became known as "mass production."

The Golden Door

The Statue of Liberty was presented to the US in 1886. It was given by the people of France to mark the 100th anniversary of the War of Independence. For millions of immigrants it was the first sight of America.

The story of the American people is a story of immigrants. More than 75 percent of all the people in history who have ever left their homelands to live in another country moved to the US. Between 1840 and 1860 more immigrants than ever before arrived. Most came from Europe, many Irish. For five years after 1845 their potatoes became diseased and rotted. About 750,000 Irish people starved to death. Many of the survivors went to the US. During the Civil War in the 1860s the federal government encouraged emigration from Europe by offering land to immigrants who would serve as soldiers in the Union armies. 
Until about 1880 most immigrants came from Ireland and Germany. Then there was a big change: more people began to arrive from the south and east of Europe. Between 1880 and 1925 about two million Jews entered the US. To control the situation, the government opened a special place of entry in New York harbor in 1892, called Ellis Island. For most immigrants this new life was a hard one. Only the hardest and lowest paid jobs were open to them. They had to work long hours in dangerous conditions and to live in overcrowded slums, places of disease and misery.

Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?

In 1908 Israel Zangwill wrote a play, The Melting Pot. The hero, a refugee from Czarist Russia, escapes to the US. In the final scene he speaks with enthusiasm about the mixture of peoples in his new homeland. Zangwill's play was a great success. It was comforting for Americans to be told that their country could turn the newcomers into Americans like themselves.
The US turned out to be more of a salad bowl than a melting pot. ("Chinatown", "Little Italy")

Reformers and Progressives

By 1900 the US was the richest and most productive industrial country in the world. Men, women and children labored for long hours in factories, mines and workshops. The workers' homes were dirty and overcrowded slums. Wages were often low. The work was often unhealthy or dangerous.

Workers tried to form trade, or labor, unions to improve the conditions of their lives. These attempts often failed. One reason for this was the competition for jobs between American-born and immigrant workers. Another was the violent opposition unions faced from employers. Employers would dismiss union members and put their names on a "blacklist." If a worker's name appeared on a blacklist, other employers would not give him a job. Employers sometimes persuaded politicians to send soldiers to break up strikes. At other times they hired private armies to control their workers.

Employers and the government were not the only enemies labor unions faced. The general public was usually against them. Americans had always seen their country as a land where individuals should be free to become rich. Such people were unlikely to favor organizations which aimed to limit businessmen's freedom.

In the early years of the 20th century a stream of books and magazine articles drew people's attention to a large number of national problems. Some dealt with conditions of life, some with bribery and corruption in government, other with the dishonesty of wealthy businessmen. One of the best-known "muckrakers" (authors of such reports) was Upton Sinclair. In 1906 he attacked the meat-packing industry in his novel The Jungle. This gave a horrifying description of life among immigrant workers in the slaughter houses of Chicago.

People began to demand that the nation's leaders should deal with other scandals exposed by the muckrakers. This pressure brought about an important change in American economic and political life. Before 1900 most Americans had believed in "laissez faire" - the idea that governments should interfere with business and with people's lives as little as possible. After 1900 many Americans became "Progressives". A Progressive was someone who believed that, where necessary, the government should take action to deal with the problems of society.

The Progressive movement found a leader in the Republican Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt became President in 1901. He was particularly concerned about the power of the trusts. He wanted to allow businessmen enough freedom, but at the same time to prevent them from taking unfair advantage of other people. A good example came in 1902. Coal miners went on strike to obtain better wages and working conditions. Their employers refused even to discuss. Then the President stepped in and told the mine owners that unless they negotiate with their workers, the federal government would take control of the coal mines. (The threat was enough.) Another example: Roosevelt forced the big railroad companies to charge all their customers fair rates.

Roosevelt also pointed out that unless action were taken to slow down the destruction of the country's forests, mineral resources and soil fertility, Americans would soon discover that much of the natural wealth of the US had been destroyed for ever. Congress listened to Roosevelt's advice and passed conservation laws.

Theodore Roosevelt retires as President in 1909. In 1912 he tried to regain the position, but he was defeated by Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat. Wilson, too, supported the Progressive movement. He introduced reforms such as laws to give workers compensation for injuries at work.

Despite Roosevelt's attempts to control the trusts, they were even more powerful in 1913 than in 1900. Real equality of opportunity seemed in danger of disappearing in the US. Wilson believed that only action by the federal government could halt this process.

Wilson called his policies "The New Freedom." They were put into effect by a series of laws passed between 1913 and 1917. One of Wilson's first steps was to reduce custom duties in order to encourage trade. Then he reformed the banking system and introduced federal taxes on high incomes. Other laws reduced the power of the trusts, gave more rights to labor unions and made it easier for farmers to borrow money to develop their land. Many individual states also passed progressive laws. The forbade factories to employ children, introduced secret voting, improved safety at work, and protected natural resources.

But not all of Wilson's reforms were accepted. A law stopping child labor in factories everywhere was declared to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Monroe's Doctrine

In the early nineteenth century most of Central and South America, or Latin America, was ruled by Spain. In the 1820s these Spanish colonies rebelled. In 1823 President Monroe warned European nations not to interfere in Latin American affairs. "The American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by European powers." Monroe's statement came to be called the "Monroe's Doctrine." It became one of the most important ideas in America foreign policy.
Theodore Roosevelt made an addition to the original Monroe's Doctrine. He said that the US would intervene there whenever
it thought necessary. In the next 20 years American soldiers landed in countries like Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and took over their governments for years.

An American Empire

In the 1890s a new spirit started to enter American foreign policy. These were years when Britain, France and German were busy claiming colonies, foreign lands which they could rule and exploit. Some Americans believed that the US should do the same. Politicians, businessmen, newspapers and missionaries joined together to claim that the "Anglo-Saxon race" - by which they meant Americans as well as North Europeans - had a right and a duty to bring western civilization to the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 

From 1895 onwards feelings of this kind were focused more and more upon Cuba. But at this time Cuba was a Spanish colony. In 1895 the people of Cuba rose in rebellion against their Spanish rulers. By 1898 many Americans felt that the US should do something to help the Cubans. In April President McKinley demanded that Spain should withdraw from Cuba, and a few days later Spain and the US went to war.

The Spanish-American war was fought in two parts of the world. One was Cuba; the other was the Philippines. The first battle was fought in the Philippines. A few weeks later American soldiers occupied Manila, the chief city. American soldiers also landed in Cuba. In less than two weeks of fighting, the Spanish were again defeated. Other American soldiers occupied Puerto Rico. 

Spain gave most of its overseas empire to the US - Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and a small Pacific island called Guam. At the same time the US also annexed Hawaii. In less than a year the US had become a colonial power. Some Americans were worried by this. After all, they, too, had once been a colonial people. How could Americans fight against such people without being unfaithful to the most important traditions and values of their own country? Most Americans answered this question by claiming that they were preparing underdeveloped nations for civilization and democracy.