# data[].attributes.body
How did migration to the United States and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny change popular ideas of American identity and citizenship, affect territorial expansionism, cause conflict and impact regional and racial identities?

# data[].attributes.body
In 1844 President James K. Polk of Tennessee was elected president. President Polk was an expansionist and favored the annexation of Texas and occupation of Oregon. With the election of President Polk, came the emergence of Manifest Destiny as a popular American ideal.

# data[].attributes.headline
1.2 Annexation of Texas December 29, 1845

# data[].attributes.subject
1.2 Annexation of Texas December 29, 1845

# data[].attributes.body
Texas was annexed by President Tyler at the end of his term in 1845. This annexation led to tension with Mexico over border disputes.

# data[].attributes.body
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American war. The terms of the treaty included the Rio Grande River being the southern border of Texas and the United States aquiring California and New Mexico. This treaty caused tension between the North and the South and is viewed by some historians as a prelude to the Civil War.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
En Español The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, that brought an official end to the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), was signed on February 2, 1848, at Guadalupe Hidalgo, a city north of the capital where the Mexican government had fled with the advance of U.S. forces. By its terms, Mexico ceded 55 per…

# data[].attributes.body
Between the period of 1830 to 1860 nearly half of the immigrants coming to the United States were Irish. The majority of the Irish came during the 1840s Potato Famine. When they in America many Irish were met with discrimination, due to the nativists fear of loosing their jobs and their culture changing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of being rapists.

These undesirables were Irish.
WATCH: America: Promised Land on HISTORY Vault
A Famine Forces an Unprecedented Migration.

Fleeing a shipwreck of an island, nearly 2 million refugees from Ireland crossed the Atlantic to the United States in the dismal wake of the Great Hunger. Beginning in 1845, the fortunes of the Irish began to sag along with the withering leaves of the country's potato plants. Beneath the auld sod, festering potatoes bled a putrid red-brown mucus as a virulent pathogen scorched Ireland's staple crop and rendered it inedible.

While the potato blight struck across Europe, no corner of the continent was as dependent on tubers for survival as Ireland, which was mired in extreme poverty as a result of centuries of British rule. Packed with nutrition and easy to grow, potatoes were the only practical crop that could flourish on the minuscule plots doled out by wealthy British Protestant landowners. The Irish consumed 7 million tons of potatoes each year. They ate potatoes for dinner. They ate them for lunch. They even ate them for breakfast. According to Irish Famine Facts by John Keating, the average adult working male in Ireland consumed a staggering 14 pounds of potatoes per day, while the average adult Irish woman ate 11.2 pounds.

Through seven terrible years of famine, Ireland's poetic landscape authored tales of the macabre. Barefoot mothers with clothes dripping from their bodies clutched dead infants in their arms as they begged for food. Wild dogs searching for food fed on human corpses. The country's legendary 40 shades of green stained the lips of the starving who fed on tufts of grass in a futile attempt for survival. Desperate farmers sprinkled their crops with holy water, and hollow figures with eyes as empty as their stomach scraped Ireland's stubbled fields with calloused hands searching for one, just one, healthy potato. Typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis and cholera tore through the countryside as horses maintained a constant march carting spent bodies to mass graves.

British Neglect Exacerbates the Irish Plight

More than just the pestilence was responsible for the Great Hunger. A political system ruled by London and an economic system dominated by British absentee landlords were co-conspirators. For centuries British laws had deprived Ireland's Catholics of their rights to worship, vote, speak their language and own land, horses and guns. Now, with a famine raging, the Irish were denied food. Under armed guard, food convoys continued to export wheat, oats and barley to England while Ireland starved.

British lawmakers were such adherents to laissez-faire capitalism that they were reluctant to provide government aid, lest it interfere with the natural course of free markets to solve the humanitarian crisis. "Great Britain cannot continue to throw her hard-won millions into the bottomless pit of Celtic pauperism," sneered the Illustrated London News in March 1849. Charles E. Trevelyan, the British civil servant in charge of the apathetic relief efforts, even viewed the famine as a divine solution to Hibernian overpopulation as he declared, "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated."

Ireland's population was nearly halved by the time the potato blight abated in 1852. While approximately 1 million perished, another 2 million abandoned the land that had abandoned them in the largest-single population movement of the 19th century. Most of the exiles-nearly a quarter of the Irish nation-washed up on the shores of the United States. They knew little about America except one thing: It had to be better than the hell that was searing Ireland.
READ MORE: When Irish-Americans Attacked Canada-With the White House's Blessing
A Mass Exodus Begins

A flotilla of 5,000 boats transported the pitiable castaways from the wasteland. Most of the refugees boarded minimally converted cargo ships-some had been used in the past to transport slaves from Africa-and the hungry, sick passengers, many of whom spent their last pennies for transit, were treated little better than freight on a 3,000-mile journey that lasted at least four weeks.

Herded like livestock in dark, cramped quarters, the Irish passengers lacked sufficient food and clean water. They choked on fetid air. They were showered by excrement and vomit. Each adult was apportioned just 18 inches of bed space-children half that. Disease and death clung to the rancid vessels like barnacles, and nearly a quarter of the 85,000 passengers who sailed to North America aboard the aptly nicknamed "coffin ships" in 1847 never reached their destinations. Their bodies were wrapped in cloths, weighed down with stones and tossed overboard to sleep forever on the bed of the ocean floor.

Although most certainly tired and poor, the Irish did not arrive in America yearning to breathe free; they merely hungered to eat. Largely destitute, many exiles could progress no farther than within walking distance of the city docks where they disembarked. While some had spent all of their meager savings to pay for passage across the Atlantic, others had their voyages funded by British landlords who found it a cheaper solution to dispatch their tenants to another continent, rather than pay for their charity at home.

And in the opinion of many Americans, those British landlords were not sending their best people. These people were not like the industrious, Protestant Scotch-Irish immigrants who came to America in large numbers during the colonial era, fought in the Continental Army and tamed the frontier. These people were not only poor, unskilled refugees huddled in rickety tenements. Even worse, they were Catholic.

The influx heightens religious tensions.

Conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the United States had already broken out in violence before the first potato plant wilted in Ireland. Anti-Catholic, anti-Irish mobs in Philadelphia destroyed houses and torched churches in the deadly Bible Riots of 1844. New York Archbishop John Hughes responded by building a wall of his own around Old St. Patrick's Cathedral in order to protect it from the native-born population, and he stationed musket-wielding members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians to guard the city's churches. Wild conspiracy theories took root that women were held against their will in Catholic convents and that priests systematically raped nuns and then strangled any children born as a result of their union.

The maltreatment of newcomers to the United States was, of course, hardly a cross for the Irish to bear on their own. However, while the number of German immigrants entering the United States nearly matched that of the Irish during the 1850s, the Irish were particularly vilified by the country's Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose ancestors had explicitly made their exodus across the ocean to find a refuge from papism and ensure their worship was cleansed of any remaining Catholic vestiges. Feelings toward the Vatican had softened little in the two centuries following the sailing of the Mayflower. The country's oldest citizens could still personally remember when America was an English colony and papal effigies were burned in city streets during annual Guy Fawkes Day celebrations.

Certainly, many Protestants reacted with Christian charity to the refugees. It was a Boston Brahman-Captain Robert Bennet Forbes-who spearheaded America's first major foreign disaster relief effort by delivering food and supplies to Ireland aboard a government warship during "Black '47." In the new Irish exiles, however, many Protestants saw a papal plot at work. According to "Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia," some Protestants feared the pope and his army would land in the United States, overthrow the government and establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati. They believed the Irish would impose the Catholic canon as the law of the land.

With immigration controls left primarily to the states and cities, the Irish poured through a porous border. In Boston, a city of a little more than 100,000 people saw 37,000 Irish arrive in the matter of a few years. Naturally, it was difficult to integrate the newcomers in such sheer numbers. The Irish in Boston were for a long time "fated to remain a massive lump in the community, undigested, undigestible," according to historian Oscar Handlin, author of "Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation."

The Irish filled the most menial and dangerous jobs, often at low pay. They cut canals. They dug trenches for water and sewer pipes. They laid rail lines. They cleaned houses. They slaved in textile mills. They worked as stevedores, stable workers and blacksmiths. Not only did working-class Americans see the cheaper laborers taking their jobs, some of the Irish refugees even took up arms against their new homeland during the Mexican-American War. Drawn in part by higher wages and a common faith with the Mexicans, some members of the St. Patrick's Battalion had deserted the U.S. Army after encountering ill-treatment by their bigoted commanders and fought with the enemy. After their capture, 50 members of the "San Patricios" were executed by the U.S. Army for their treasonous decisions.

A nativist backlash begins.

The discrimination faced by the famine refugees was not subtle or insidious. It was right there in black and white, in newspaper classified advertisement s that blared "No Irish Need Apply." The image of the simian Irishman, imported from Victorian England, was given new life by the pens of illustrators such as Thomas Nast that dripped with prejudice as they sketched Celtic ape-men with sloping foreheads and monstrous appearances.

In 1849, a clandestine fraternal society of native-born Protestant men called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner formed in New York. Bound by sacred oaths and secret passwords, its members wanted a return to the America they once knew, a land of "Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism." Similar secret societies with menacing names like the Black Snakes and Rough and Readies sprouted across the country.

Within a few years, these societies coalesced around the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party, whose members were called the "Know-Nothings" because they claimed to "know nothing" when questioned about their politics. Party members vowed to elect only native-born citizens-but only if they weren't Roman Catholic. "Know-Nothings believed that Protestantism defined American society. From this flowed their fundamental belief that Catholicism was incompatible with basic American values," writes Jay P. Dolan in The Irish Americans: A History.

Buoyed by the war-cry "Americans must rule America!", the Know-Nothings elected eight governors, more than 100 congressmen and mayors of cities including Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago in the mid-1850s. They found their greatest success in Massachusetts where in 1854 the American Party captured all state offices, the entire State Senate and all but a handful of seats in the House chamber. According to Dolan, once in power in Massachusetts the Know-Nothings mandated the reading of the King James Bible in public schools, disbanded Irish militia units while confiscating their weapons and deported nearly 300 poor Irish back to Liverpool because they were a drain on the public treasury. They also barred naturalized citizens from voting unless they had spent 21 years in the United States.

Millard Fillmore, the former president most notable for being un-notable, ran on the American Party's 1856 presidential ticket. Throughout his political career, the 13th president had persistently courted the votes of nativist Yankees fearful of the changes brought by the Great Hunger refugees, and he blamed "foreign Catholics" for his defeat in the 1844 New York gubernatorial election. Although Fillmore finished third behind Democrat James Buchanan and Republican John C. Fremont, who had to swat down rumors that he was both a Catholic and a cannibal, the American Party received more than 20 percent of the popular vote and eight electoral votes.

Nativists use violence to further an agenda.

In 1854, an anti-Catholic mob in Ellsworth, Maine, dragged Jesuit priest John Bapst-who had circulated a petition denouncing the use of the King James Bible in local schools-into the streets where they stripped him and sheltered his body in hot tar and feathers. That same year, the Know-Nothings in Bath, Maine, smashed the pews of a church recently purchased by Irish Catholics before hoisting an American flag from the belfry and setting the building ablaze. When the bishop of Portland returned to the city a year later to lay a cornerstone for the church's replacement, another mob chased him away and beat him.

The violence turned deadly in Louisville, Kentucky, in August 1855 when armed Know-Nothing members guarding polling stations on an election day launched street fights against German and Irish Catholics. Immigrant homes were ransacked and torched. Between 20 and 100 people, including a German priest fatally attacked while attempting to visit a dying parishioner, were killed. Thousands of Catholics fled the city in the riot's aftermath, but no one was ever prosecuted for crimes committed on "Bloody Monday."

A Know-Nothing mob even seized a marble block gifted by Pope Pius IX for construction of the Washington Monument and tossed it in the Potomac River. A pamphlet published by Baltimore's John F. Weishampel suggested that the stone could be used as a signal from the pope to launch an immigrant uprising to take over America. "The effects of this block, if placed in the monument, will be a mortification to nearly every American Protestant who looks upon it," he warned, "and its influence upon the zealous supporters of the Roman hierarchy will be tremendous-especially with foreigners."

Abraham Lincoln was among the many Americans disturbed at the rise of the nativist movement as he explained in an 1855 letter: "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

The good news for Lincoln and those Americans with similar views is that the Know-Nothing Party cratered quickly after reaching its high-water mark, although nativism has proven to be stubbornly persistent. The party splintered as the slavery question superseded the immigrant menace with flashpoints such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision and the uprising at Harper's Ferry steering the country to armed conflict.

Although stereotyped as ignorant bogtrotters loyal only to the pope and ill-suited for democracy, and only recently given political rights by the British in their former home after centuries of denial, the Irish were deeply engaged in the political process in their new home. They voted in higher proportions than other ethnic groups. Their sheer numbers helped to propel William R. Grace to become the first Irish-Catholic mayor of New York City in 1880 and Hugh O'Brien the first Irish-Catholic mayor of Boston four years later.

A generation after the Great Hunger, the Irish controlled powerful political machines in cities across the United States and were moving up the social ladder into the middle class as an influx of immigrants from China and Southern and Eastern Europe took hold in the 1880s and 1890s. "Being from the British Isles, the Irish were now considered acceptable and assimilable to the American way of life," Dolan writes.

No longer embedded on the lowest rung of American society, the Irish unfortunately gained acceptance in the mainstream by dishing out the same bigotry toward newcomers that they had experienced. County Cork native and Workingmen's Party leader Denis Kearney, for example, closed his speeches to American laborers with his rhetorical signature: "Whatever happens, the Chinese must go."

Kearney and the other Irish failed to learn the lesson of their own story. Yes, the Irish transformed the United States, just as the United States transformed the Irish. But the worst fears of the nativists were not fulfilled. The refugees from the Great Hunger and the 32 million Americans with predominantly Irish roots today strengthened the United States, not destroyed it. A country that once reviled the Irish now wears green on St. Patrick's Day. That's something to raise a glass to.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
When America Despised the Irish: The 19th Century's Refugee Crisis | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Forced from their homeland because of famine and political upheaval, the Irish endured vehement discrimination before making their way into the American mainstream.

# data[].attributes.body
The Califorina Gold Rush began in 1848 and attracted nearly 100,000 settlers. This caused a need for law and order and California was admitted as a state, expanding the territory of the United States.

# data[].attributes.headline
1.6 Kansas-Nebraska Act      May 30, 1854

# data[].attributes.subject
1.6 Kansas-Nebraska Act      May 30, 1854

# data[].attributes.body
Manifest Destiny inspired America to aquire more terriotory. Among this territory was Kansas and Nebraska, which were previously Indian Reservation. With this new terriotory came the question of slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act established that the status of slavery would be decided by the regions settlers.

# data[].attributes.body
In the 1840s and 1850s many Chinese emigrated from China. They helped build the transcontinental railroad which helped fulfill the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The Chinese were met with racial discrimination which would cause a rift into the 20th century.

# data[].attributes.body
The Gadsden Purchase included the southern parts of New Mexico and Arizona. The United States purchased it from Mexico to build a southern transcontinental railroad. This purchase completed the modern day southern border.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Gadsden Purchase, or Treaty, was an agreement between the United States and Mexico, finalized in 1854, in which the United States agreed to pay Mexico $10 million for a 29,670 square mile portion of Mexico that later became part of Arizona and New Mexico. Gadsden's Purchase provided the land necessary for a southern transcontinental railroad and attempted to resolve conflicts that lingered after the Mexican-American War.

Map Depicting the Gadsden Purchase

While the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formally ended the Mexican-American War in , tensions between the Governments of Mexico and the United States continued to simmer over the next six years. The two countries each claimed the Mesilla Valley as part of their own country. The Mexican Government demanded monetary compensation for Native American attacks in the region because, under the Treaty, the United States had agreed to protect Mexico from such attacks; however, the United States refused to comply, insisting that while they had agreed to protect Mexico from Native American attacks, they had not agreed to financially compensate for attacks that did occur. The persistent efforts of private American citizens to enter Mexico illegally and incite rebellions in an effort to gain territory exacerbated tensions between the governments.

These continuing tensions between Mexico and the United States complicated U.S. efforts to find a southern route for a transcontinental railroad as the only viable routes passed through Mexican territory. In 1847, the United States attempted to buy the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, an isthmus on the southern edge of North America, as an alternative means of providing a southern connection between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Mexico, however, had already granted Mexican Don José de Garay the right to build colonies for Americans on the isthmus with capital from the New Orleans Company. Fearing the colonists would rebel as those in Texas had, Mexican President Juan Ceballos revoked the grant, angering U.S. investors.

In 1853, Mexican officials evicted Americans from their property in the disputed Mesilla Valley. When the U.S. Government did not act, Governor William Lane of New Mexico declared the Mesilla Valley part of the U.S. territory of New Mexico. Mexican President Antonio de Santa Anna responded by sending troops into the valley. Attempting to defuse the situation, U.S. President Franklin Pierce sent James Gadsden, the new U.S. Minister to Mexico, to negotiate with Santa Anna. Secretary of State William Marcy instructed Gadsden to renegotiate a border that provided a route for a southern railroad, arrange for a release of U.S. financial obligations for Native American attacks, and settle the monetary claims between the countries related to the Garay project.

Gadsden met with Santa Anna on September 25, 1853. President Pierce sent verbal instructions for Gadsden through Christopher Ward, an agent for U.S. investors in the Garay project, giving Gadsden negotiating options ranging from $50 million for lower California and a large portion of northern Mexico to $15 million for a smaller land deal that would still provide for a southern railroad. Ward also lied to Gadsden, stating the President wanted the claims of the Garay party addressed in any treaty concluded with the Mexican Government; however, President Pierce never gave Ward these instructions because he did not believe in government involvement in affairs between private companies and foreign governments. Santa Anna refused to sell a large portion of Mexico, but he needed money to fund an army to put down ongoing rebellions, so on December 30, 1853 he and Gadsden signed a treaty stipulating that the United States would pay $15 million for 45,000 square miles south of the New Mexico territory and assume private American claims, including those related to the Garay deal. The United States Government agreed to work toward preventing American raids along Mexico's border and Mexico voided U.S. responsibility for Native American attacks.

With a great deal of difficulty resulting from the increasing strife between the northern and southern states, the U.S. Senate ratified a revised treaty on April 25, 1854. The new treaty reduced the amount paid to Mexico to $10 million and the land purchased to 29,670 square miles, and removed any mention of Native American attacks and private claims. President Pierce signed the treaty and Gadsden presented the new treaty to Santa Anna, who signed it on June 8, 1854.

After Gadsden's Purchase a new border dispute caused tension over the United States' payment, and the treaty failed to resolve the issues surrounding financial claims and border attacks. However, it did create the southern border of the present-day United States, despite the beliefs of the vast majority of policymakers at the time who thought the United States would eventually expand further into Mexico.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Milestones: 1830-1860 - Office of the Historian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Gadsden Purchase, or Treaty, was an agreement between the United States and Mexico, finalized in 1854, in which the United States agreed to pay Mexico $10 million for a 29,670 square mile portion of Mexico that later became part of Arizona and New Mexico.

# data[].attributes.headline
Concluding Question: Why did attempts at compromise before the war fail?

# data[].attributes.subject
Concluding Question: Why did attempts at compromise before the war fail?

# data[].attributes.body
The compromises that attempted to keep tensions low before the war failed because they could not find a way to please both sides. The compromises did not satisfy the North and the South because neither side got what they wanted and so the war ensued.

# data[].attributes.body
How did the maturing of northern manufacturing and adherence of the South to an agricultural economy change the national economic system and impact the Civil War? How was the American conflict over slavery part of larger global events?

# data[].attributes.headline
2.3 Southern Dependence on the North 1860s

# data[].attributes.subject
2.3 Southern Dependence on the North 1860s

# data[].attributes.body
Before the war the South depended on textiles from the North and food from the West. During the war the South had to import these goods, but due to the blockade they were unable to import them and their citizens suffered.

# data[].attributes.body
During the Civil War the South hoped to make an alliance with Britain. Britain however, was uninterested due to uneasiness at starting a war with the Union. Had they sided with the South, the America-Great Britian realtionship would have been damaged. They also did not want to get involved due to their opposition to slavery. The effects of this may still have been seen today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The involvement of foreign nations is often overlooked when examining the American Civil War. European nations were extremely cautious when dealing with the United States of America during the Civil War, usually attempting to remain neutral during its duration. Though many nations remained neutral out of fear of war with the United States, Great Britain chose to become more and more involved as the Civil War progressed until the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln forced Great Britain to reconsider their relationship with the Southern States.

The reason behind Great Britain's involvement within the American Civil War was primarily economic interest. In the mid-nineteenth century, a vast majority of the world's cotton was produced within the Southern States of America. After the Southern States seceded from the Union, Great Britain was forced to tread carefully in order to avoid another war with the United States, which maintained that any foreign nation that aided the rebellious states would be committing an act of war against the United States. Though the United States issued a global decree warning against foreign involvement, Great Britain chose to ignore said decree and remained involved in trade and commerce with the Confederate states.

On May 13th, 1861 Queen Victoria issued the proclamation of neutrality stating that the government of Great Britain would remain formally neutral in the United States' domestic affairs for the remainder of the war, and instructed British citizens to observe this neutrality. However, many private British citizens and businesses covertly funded the Confederate cause. A vast majority of the Confederate Navy was built in Liverpool, England during the war using private dollar, and the port also became the unofficial location for the Confederate embassy within Great Britain. Not only were warships commissioned in Great Britain,so too were ships specifically designed to outrun Union blockade forces and smuggle illegal goods to and from Confederate controlled land. The use of Liverpool by the Confederacy, which was a source of great animosity between Union and Great Britain, could have forced Great Britain to join the American Civil War in favor of the Confederate States of America. Had it not been for Abraham Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, they may have contemplated their role in the war further.

The Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1st, 1863, effectively made the Civil War become a matter of slavery and ethics. This was important because the people of Great Britain had forbidden slavery in their lands and holdings in 1833. In order to avert open rebellion among the working class, Great Britain officially withdrew its support of neutrality and condemned the Confederate States of America for their continued use and expansion of slavery.

Great Britain's involvement within the American Civil War was not only a factor during the war itself, but the legacy of their involvement would affect the United States' foreign policy for years to come. Due to strong diplomatic ties with the United States, Great Britain was forced to tread carefully in the public eye, while private citizens and businesses dealt with the Confederate States of America covertly. With the amassing of funds and resources there for the war effort, the port of Liverpool became the home station for the Confederate States of America's Navy; ships were built in order to evade the Union blockade, allowing cotton to go back to Great Britain, which would then be sold to the benefit both the Confederate and British economy.

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 caused the British government to change their pledged neutrality to outright condemnation of the Confederacy in order to appease their own citizens. The overall role Great Britain played in the American Civil War was more prominent than most people know about, which is what this exhibit is focused on sharing. Enjoy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
British Involvement in the American Civil War

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The involvement of foreign nations is often overlooked when examining the American Civil War. European nations were extremely cautious when dealing with the United States of America during the Civil War, usually attempting to remain neutral during its duration.

# data[].attributes.body
The expansion of railroads linked the Midwest and Northeast. This made trade and transportation easier. This railroad expansion did not continue into the South and they would have a major disadvantage in the war.

# data[].attributes.headline
2.5 Recognition of Black Dominated Countries      1862

# data[].attributes.subject
2.5 Recognition of Black Dominated Countries      1862

# data[].attributes.body
In 1862 there were only two nations ruled by Africans. The US had never recognized them because of slaveholders influence in Congress, but Abraham Lincoln changed this by recognizing their soveirgnty. This was the first step to America becoming a leader in human rights internationally.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With events continuing in the 150th commemoration of the Civil War, it strikes me that one of the more overlooked aspects of the war continues to be its global impact. The Union's victory over the Confederacy not only dealt a fatal blow to slavery in the United States, but it served as a catalyst to human rights reform across the world.

We all know the famous lines from Abraham Lincoln: "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth." "[A] new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

But we tend to forget that the party that nominated Lincoln for president in 1860 invented the phrase "crimes against humanity." The Republican Party's 1860 national platform branded the recently reopened African slave trade a "crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age."

We also tend to forget that in 1862 there were only two independent sovereign nations ruled by Africans or people of African descent-Haiti and Liberia-and that until that year the United States had refused to extend official diplomatic recognition to those nations because of the influence of slaveholding states in the federal government. But in 1862, President Lincoln took the "revolutionary" step of offering diplomatic recognition to the two "black republics," as they were frequently called.

We see, then, that the Civil War was indeed a global event-with global implications. Most historians point out that if the Confederacy had won, slavery in the western hemisphere would have continued for at least another half century. Instead, with the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the 13th Amendment, and the end of slavery in the United States, only Brazil (an independent former colony of Portugal) and Cuba (a colony of Spain) continued to maintain a system of human slavery. But with emancipation in the United States, America was in a position to take the lead on global ethical and moral issues-on global human rights.

In the decades after the Civil War, then, the United States was able to use its newly-found moral standing to end, once and for all, the Atlantic slave trade (in collaboration with Great Britain) and to pressure Spain to end slavery in Cuba. Once slavery in Cuba had ended (in 1886, two decades after the end of the Civil War), Brazil could see the handwriting on the wall and ended its slave system two years later.

The Civil War, then, had monumental implications for the role of the United States in the world area. Over the years, many Americans-ranging from Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams to William H. Seward and James G. Blaine-understood that an active American role in the world hinged on domestic American reform.

Recognizing Liberia and Haiti meant that the U.S. could deal with the rest of the world, and at least potentially be John Winthrop's "city upon a hill." The "new birth of freedom" proclaimed by Lincoln could now steer American foreign policy and, in turn, transform the "Monroe Doctrine"-previously a relatively general statement of American principles -into an instrument with moral and ethical overtones that justified a forceful U.S. presence, throughout the hemisphere.

The United States began, even in the midst of a civil war, to stride the Western Hemisphere like a colossus. The rearrangement of the U.S. relationship with the world, brought about by the Civil War, and the power of the message of human rights, are clearly illustrated by the U.S. relationship with its Latin American and Caribbean neighbors during that war. Crimes against humanity could never again be allowed to continue.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With events continuing in the 150th commemoration of the Civil War, it strikes me that one of the more overlooked aspects of the war continues to be its global impact. The Union's victory over the Confederacy not only dealt a fatal blow to slavery in the United States, but it served as a catalyst to human rights reform across the world.

# data[].attributes.body
Before the war the North dominated the banking industry. When the South seceded they did not have an established banking system which would lead to extreme inflation.

# data[].attributes.body
How did the growth of mass migration to the Unites States, the end of slavery and technilogical, including railroad, and military developments transform the enviorment and settlement patterns in the South and West?

# data[].attributes.headline
Concluding Question: How did the Civil War struggle to shape Americans' beliefs about equality, democracy, and national destiny? To what extent and in what ways, did the Civil War transform American political and social relationships.

# data[].attributes.subject
Concluding Question: How did the Civil War struggle to shape Americans' beliefs about equality, democracy, and national destiny? To what extent and in what ways, did the Civil War transform American political and social relationships.

# data[].attributes.body
After the Civil War Americans began to recognize the rights of nonwhites. Before the war a small percentage of Americans had argued for abolition but after the more Americans began to believe in these views. Ideas about the United States began to change as well. Americans no longer viewed themselves by their regional identities, but as citizens of the United States.

# data[].attributes.headline
3.3 Sharecropping Emerges     Early 1870s

# data[].attributes.subject
3.3 Sharecropping Emerges     Early 1870s

# data[].attributes.body
After the abolition of slavery, southern planters needed to find a new labor system. From this emerged sharecropping, which would quickly become a new form of servitude, changing the environment of the South.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
America's Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War

# data[].attributes.body
The Fourteenth Amendment declared that everyone born or naturalized in the United States was a citizen and that every citizen deserved due process. This would lead to the South becoming a more equal environment.

# data[].attributes.body
To escape persecution in the South many African Americans migrated to states in the North and Midwest. In these places they developed African American communities.

# data[].attributes.body
The end of slavery led to mixed feelings from Americans. Some welcomed it as a necessary change, while others fervently opposed it. These feelings caused an enviornment of hatred in the South which continued into the 20th century. This enviornment would be caused primarily by the Klu Klux Klan which burned black owned builidings, and flogged and murdered freedmen.

# data[].attributes.body
In the Compromise of 1877 the Democrats agreed to let Republican Rutherford B. Hayes become President in exchange for military withdrwal from the South and the building of a Southern Transcontinental railroad. This railroad changed the eviornment of the South by making transportation more accessible.

# data[].attributes.body
The end of reconstruction came in 1877 with the Supreme Court striking down Reconstruction laws. These deciscions would forever change the South because they repealed the laws protecting black citizens.

# data[].attributes.body
After the Civil War the Southern economy changed. Although it remained a dominantly agriculture based economy, successful textile mills did emerge. This was part of Henry W. Grady's vision of th "New South." This idea wasa never accomplished to the extent that Grady had hoped, but did change the enviornment of the South.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Could the American South be remade as an industrial economy like the North?

# data[].attributes.body
The Panic of 1873 was caused by overspeculation of financers and overbuilding by the railroad industry. It caused many laborers to be jobless and homeless which led to many Americans to move to the Western United States.

# data[].attributes.headline
Concluding Question: To what extent, and it what ways, did Reconstruction alter relationships between the states and federal government, and lead to debates over new definitions of citizenship for minority groups?

# data[].attributes.subject
Concluding Question: To what extent, and it what ways, did Reconstruction alter relationships between the states and federal government, and lead to debates over new definitions of citizenship for minority groups?

# data[].attributes.body
Reconstruction caused debates over who should vote and what rights freed slaves should have. This led to the fourteenth ammendment which gave every male citizen the right to vote. These debates did not lead to equal rights for women though. Reconstruction caused the relationship between the state and federal governments to change also. The federal government became more powerful.

# data[].attributes.body
All pictures sourced from Padlet.

Newman, John J., and John M. Schmalbach. United States History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination. Amsco School Publications, 2018.

# data[].attributes.body
Well Done! I am impressed with the depth of your discussion on all three parts of this assignment.

Part 1: 75/75
Part 2: 75/75
Part 3: 75/75
Overall Appearance/Citations: 25/25