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a state of society where the industry and culture has advanced to a high level.

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a system where a country tries to get wealth through trade with other countries. It exports more than it imports.

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widespread transfer of plants, animals, metals, and culture between the new world and old world.

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type of labor where an individual is under contract to work without salary to repay a loan in a certain period of time.

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allowed people to be bought or owned forever and this was supported by the USA and european powers.

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english protestants who believed that reforms of church of England were not advanced enough.

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trade between three ports or regions.

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legal system where the spanish crown could determine the status of the indigenous population.

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Province of Maryland, the Colony of Virginia, the Province of Carolina, and the Province of Georgia.

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New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

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Connecticut Colony, the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth Colony, and the Province of New Hampshire, etc.

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machine which turns the energy released by burning fuel into actual motion.

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group of people organized to have political power.

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businesses in the late 18th century that concentrated on production under one roof. The important part was that it was created under one roof with specialized tasks.

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British forced thousands of american men into the navy from ships and did not understand the fact that the Americans had renounced their british citizenship.

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happened in 1803, chief justice John Marshall established the idea of judicial review. This granted the supreme court the power to call laws unconstitutional and not approve all of them.

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water ways made by humans which connect natural bodies of water which are beneficial for early travel.

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Uniform pieces that can be made into bigger quantities to replace other pieces.

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this helped promote moderation and the temperate use of alcohol.

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this warned europe to not interfere with problems in the west hemisphere.

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campaign in hopes to end slavery

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revolutionized long distance communication and worked by transmitting electrical signals over wire in between stations.

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created to let women vote

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they favor a mixed economy with a higher tax system, lowering tariff, and opposed imperialism.

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made by Eli Whitney and helped increase the speed of making cotton.

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promoted protective tariffs, federal funding for improvements, and other measures which strengthened the central government.

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This was the belief in the 19th century that Americans had the right by god to spread across the continent.

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American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a book,[1] and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation.[2] On the left, Indigenous Americans are displaced from their homeland.

Manifest destiny was a cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that White American settlers were destined to expand across North America. It was an early expression of American imperialism in the United States of America.

Historians have emphasized that "manifest destiny" was always contested. Many endorsed the idea, but the large majority of Whigs and many prominent Americans (such as Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant) rejected the concept. Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes, "American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity".

Manifest destiny became one of several major campaign issues during the 1844 presidential election; it was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the Mexican-American War and to negotiate the Oregon boundary dispute. Historian Frederick Merk says manifest destiny always limped along because of its internal limitations and the issue of slavery, and never became a national priority of the United States. By 1843, former U.S. President John Quincy Adams, originally a major supporter of the concept underlying manifest destiny, had changed his mind and repudiated expansionism because it meant the expansion of slavery in Texas.

Newspaper editor John O'Sullivan is generally credited with coining the term manifest destiny in 1845 to describe the essence of this mindset; other historians believe the unsigned editorial titled "Annexation" in which it first appeared was written by journalist and annexation advocate Jane Cazneau.

There was never a set of principles defining manifest destiny; it was always a general idea rather than a specific policy made with a motto. Ill-defined but keenly felt, manifest destiny was an expression of conviction in the morality and value of expansionism that complemented other popular ideas of the era, including American exceptionalism and Romantic nationalism. Andrew Jackson, who spoke of "extending the area of freedom", typified the conflation of America's potential greatness, the nation's budding sense of Romantic self-identity, and its expansion.

John L. O'Sullivan, sketched in 1874, was an influential columnist as a young man, but he is now generally remembered only for his use of the phrase "manifest destiny" to advocate the annexation of Texas and Oregon.

Journalist John L. O'Sullivan was an influential advocate for Jacksonian democracy and a complex character, described by Julian Hawthorne as "always full of grand and world-embracing schemes". O'Sullivan wrote an article in 1839 that, while not using the term "manifest destiny", did predict a "divine destiny" for the United States based upon values such as equality, rights of conscience, and personal enfranchisement "to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man". This destiny was not explicitly territorial, but O'Sullivan predicted that the United States would be one of a "Union of many Republics" sharing those values.

Six years later, in 1845, O'Sullivan wrote another essay titled Annexation in the Democratic Review, in which he first used the phrase manifest destiny. In this article he urged the U.S. to annex the Republic of Texas, not only because Texas desired this, but because it was "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions". Overcoming Whig opposition, Democrats annexed Texas in 1845. O'Sullivan's first usage of the phrase "manifest destiny" attracted little attention.

O'Sullivan's second use of the phrase became extremely influential. On December 27, 1845, in his newspaper the New York Morning News, O'Sullivan addressed the ongoing boundary dispute with Britain. O'Sullivan argued that the United States had the right to claim "the whole of Oregon":

Ironically, O'Sullivan's term became popular only after it was criticized by Whig opponents of the Polk administration. Whigs denounced manifest destiny, arguing, "that the designers and supporters of schemes of conquest, to be carried on by this government, are engaged in treason to our Constitution and Declaration of Rights, giving aid and comfort to the enemies of republicanism, in that they are advocating and preaching the doctrine of the right of conquest". On January 3, 1846, Representative Robert Winthrop ridiculed the concept in Congress, saying "I suppose the right of a manifest destiny to spread will not be admitted to exist in any nation except the universal Yankee nation." Winthrop was the first in a long line of critics who suggested that advocates of manifest destiny were citing "Divine Providence" for justification of actions that were motivated by chauvinism and self-interest. Despite this criticism, expansionists embraced the phrase, which caught on so quickly that its origin was soon forgotten.

A New Map of Texas, Oregon, and California, Samuel Augustus Mitchell, 1846

Historian Frederick Merk wrote in 1963 that the concept of Manifest destiny was born out of "a sense of mission to redeem the Old World by high example ... generated by the potentialities of a new earth for building a new heaven". Merks also states that Manifest destiny was heavily contested concept within the nation:

From the outset Manifest Destiny-vast in program, in its sense of continentalism -was slight in support. It lacked national, sectional, or party following commensurate with its magnitude. The reason was it did not reflect the national spirit. The thesis that it embodied nationalism, found in much historical writing, is backed by little real supporting evidence.

The major ideas of manifest destiny can be traced to the original ideology of the 15th-century decree of the Doctrine of Christian Discover. Historian Nick Estes links the 15th century the catholic churches Doctrine of distinguishing Christians from Non-Christians in the expansion of European nations. Estes and international jurist Tonya Gonnella Frichner further link the doctrine of discovery to Johnson v. McIntosh and frame their arguments on the correlation between Manifest Destiny and Doctrine of Christian Discovery by using the statement made by Chief Justice John Marshall during the case, as he "spelled out the rights of the United states to Indigenous lands" and drew upon the Doctrine of Christian Discovery for his statement. John Marshall ruled on the case that "indigenous peoples possess 'occupancy' rights, meaning their lands could be taken by the powers of 'discovery'". Frichner explains that "The newly formed United States needed to manufacture an American Indian political identity and concept of Indian land that would open the way for united states and westward colonial expansion." In this way, Manifest Destiny was inspired by the original European colonization of the Americas, and it excuses U.S. violence against Indigenous Nations.

Another possible influence is racial predominance, namely the idea that the American Anglo-Saxon race was "separate, innately superior" and "destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity and Christianity to the American continents and the world". Author Reginald Horsman wrote in 1981, this view also held that "inferior races were doomed to subordinate status or extinction." and that this was used to justify "the enslavement of the blacks and the expulsion and possible extermination of the Indians".

Historian William E. Weeks noted in 1996 that three key themes were usually touched upon by advocates of manifest destiny:

the virtue of the American people and their institutions;

the mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the United States;

the destiny under God to do this work.

The origin of the first theme, later known as American exceptionalism, was often traced to America's Puritan heritage, particularly John Winthrop's famous " City upon a Hill" sermon of 1630, in which he called for the establishment of a virtuous community that would be a shining example to the Old World. In his influential 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine echoed this notion, arguing that the American Revolution provided an opportunity to create a new, better society:

We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand...

Many Americans agreed with Paine, and came to believe that the United States' virtue was a result of its special experiment in freedom and democracy. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Monroe, wrote, "it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent." To Americans in the decades that followed their proclaimed freedom for mankind, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, could only be described as the inauguration of "a new time scale" because the world would look back and define history as events that took place before, and after, the Declaration of Independence. It followed that Americans owed to the world an obligation to expand and preserve these beliefs.

Faragher's 1997 analysis of the political polarization between the Democratic Party and the Whig Party is that:

With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which doubled the size of the United States, Thomas Jefferson set the stage for the continental expansion of the United States. Many began to see this as the beginning of a new providential mission: If the United States was successful as a " shining city upon a hill", people in other countries would seek to establish their own democratic republics.

Not all Americans or their political leaders believed that the United States was a divinely favored nation, or thought that it ought to expand. For example, many Whigs opposed territorial expansion based on the Democratic claim that the United States was destined to serve as a virtuous example to the rest of the world, and also had a divine obligation to spread its superordinate political system and a way of life throughout North American continent. Many in the Whig party "were fearful of spreading out too widely", and they "adhered to the concentration of national authority in a limited area". In July 1848, Alexander Stephens denounced President Polk's expansionist interpretation of America's future as "mendacious".

Ulysses S. Grant, served in the war with Mexico and later wrote:

In the mid‑19th century, expansionism, especially southward toward Cuba, also faced opposition from those Americans who were trying to abolish slavery. As more territory was added to the United States in the following decades, "extending the area of freedom" in the minds of southerners also meant extending the institution of slavery. That is why slavery became one of the central issues in the continental expansion of the United States before the Civil War.

Before and during the Civil War both sides claimed that America's destiny was rightfully their own. Lincoln opposed anti-immigrant nativism, and the imperialism of manifest destiny as both unjust and unreasonable. He objected to the Mexican war and believed each of these disordered forms of patriotism threatened the inseparable moral and fraternal bonds of liberty and union that he sought to perpetuate through a patriotic love of country guided by wisdom and critical self-awareness. Lincoln's " Eulogy to Henry Clay", June 6, 1852, provides the most cogent expression of his reflective patriotism.

The phrase "manifest destiny" is most often associated with the territorial expansion of the United States from 1812 to 1867. This era, from the War of 1812 to the acquisition of Alaska in 1867, has been called the "age of manifest destiny". During this time, the United States expanded to the Pacific Ocean-"from sea to shining sea"-largely defining the borders of the continental United States as they are today.

One of the goals of the War of 1812 was to threaten to annex the British colony of Lower Canada as a bargaining chip to force the British to abandon their fortifications in the Northwestern United States and support for the various Native American tribes residing there. The result of this overoptimism was a series of defeats in 1812 in part due to the wide use of poorly-trained state militias rather than regular troops. The American victories at the Battle of Lake Erie and the Battle of the Thames in 1813 ended the Indian raids and removed the main reason for threatening annexation. To end the War of 1812 John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and Albert Gallatin (former treasury secretary and a leading expert on Indians) and the other American diplomats negotiated the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 with Britain. They rejected the British plan to set up an Indian state in U.S. territory south of the Great Lakes. They explained the American policy toward acquisition of Indian lands:

A shocked Henry Goulburn, one of the British negotiators at Ghent, remarked, after coming to understand the American position on taking the Indians' land:

The 19th-century belief that the United States would eventually encompass all of North America is known as "continentalism". An early proponent of this idea, John Quincy Adams became a leading figure in U.S. expansion between the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the Polk administration in the 1840s. In 1811, Adams wrote to his father:

The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs. For the common happiness of them all, for their peace and prosperity, I believe it is indispensable that they should be associated in one federal Union.

Adams did much to further this idea. He orchestrated the Treaty of 1818, which established the Canada-United States border as far west as the Rocky Mountains, and provided for the joint occupation of the region known in American history as the Oregon Country and in British and Canadian history as the New Caledonia and Columbia Districts. He negotiated the Transcontinental Treaty in 1819, transferring Florida from Spain to the United States and extending the U.S. border with Spanish Mexico all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And he formulated the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which warned Europe that the Western Hemisphere was no longer open for European colonization.

The Monroe Doctrine and "manifest destiny" formed a closely related nexus of principles: historian Walter McDougall calls manifest destiny a corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, because while the Monroe Doctrine did not specify expansion, expansion was necessary in order to enforce the doctrine. Concerns in the United States that European powers were seeking to acquire colonies or greater influence in North America led to calls for expansion in order to prevent this. In his influential 1935 study of manifest destiny, done in conjunction with the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations, Albert Weinberg wrote: "the expansionism of the [1830s] arose as a defensive effort to forestall the encroachment of Europe in North America".

Transcontinental Railroad

Manifest destiny played an important role in the development of the transcontinental railroad. The transcontinental railroad system is often used in manifest destiny imagery like John Gast's painting, American Progress where multiple locomotives are seen traveling west. According to academic Dina Gilio-Whitaker, "the transcontinental railroads not only enabled [U.S. control over the continent] but also accelerated it exponentially." Historian Boyd Cothran says that "modern transportation development and abundant resource exploitation gave rise to an appropriation of indigenous land, [and] resources."

Manifest destiny played its most important role in the Oregon boundary dispute between the United States and Britain, when the phrase "manifest destiny" originated. The Anglo-American Convention of 1818 had provided for the joint occupation of the Oregon Country, and thousands of Americans migrated there in the 1840s over the Oregon Trail. The British rejected a proposal by U.S. President John Tyler (in office 1841-1845) to divide the region along the 49th parallel, and instead proposed a boundary line farther south, along the Columbia River, which would have made most of what later became the state of Washington part of their colonies in North America. Advocates of manifest destiny protested and called for the annexation of the entire Oregon Country up to the Alaska line ( 54°40ʹ N). Presidential candidate Polk used this popular outcry to his advantage, and the Democrats called for the annexation of "All Oregon" in the 1844 U.S. presidential election.

American westward expansion is idealized in Emanuel Leutze's famous painting Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1861). The title of the painting, from a 1726 poem by Bishop Berkeley, was a phrase often quoted in the era of manifest destiny, expressing a widely held belief that civilization had steadily moved westward throughout history. (more)

As president, Polk sought compromise and renewed the earlier offer to divide the territory in half along the 49th parallel, to the dismay of the most ardent advocates of manifest destiny. When the British refused the offer, American expansionists responded with slogans such as "The whole of Oregon or none" and "Fifty-four forty or fight", referring to the northern border of the region. (The latter slogan is often mistakenly described as having been a part of the 1844 presidential campaign.) When Polk moved to terminate the joint occupation agreement, the British finally agreed in early 1846 to divide the region along the 49th parallel, leaving the lower Columbia basin as part of the United States. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 formally settled the dispute; Polk's administration succeeded in selling the treaty to Congress because the United States was about to begin the Mexican-American War, and the president and others argued it would be foolish to also fight the British Empire.[citation needed ]

Despite the earlier clamor for "All Oregon", the Oregon Treaty was popular in the United States and was easily ratified by the Senate. The most fervent advocates of manifest destiny had not prevailed along the northern border because, according to Reginald Stuart, "the compass of manifest destiny pointed west and southwest, not north, despite the use of the term 'continentalism'".

In 1869, American historian Frances Fuller Victor published Manifest Destiny in the West in the Overland Monthly, arguing that the efforts of early American fur traders and missionaries presaged American control of Oregon. She concluded the article as follows:

Manifest destiny played an important role in the expansion of Texas and American relationship with Mexico. In 1836, the Republic of Texas declared independence from Mexico and, after the Texas Revolution, sought to join the United States as a new state. This was an idealized process of expansion that had been advocated from Jefferson to O'Sullivan: newly democratic and independent states would request entry into the United States, rather than the United States extending its government over people who did not want it. The annexation of Texas was attacked by anti-slavery spokesmen because it would add another slave state to the Union. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren declined Texas's offer to join the United States in part because the slavery issue threatened to divide the Democratic Party.

Before the election of 1844, Whig candidate Henry Clay and the presumed Democratic candidate, former president, Van Buren, both declared themselves opposed to the annexation of Texas, each hoping to keep the troublesome topic from becoming a campaign issue. This unexpectedly led to Van Buren being dropped by the Democrats in favor of Polk, who favored annexation. Polk tied the Texas annexation question with the Oregon dispute, thus providing a sort of regional compromise on expansion. (Expansionists in the North were more inclined to promote the occupation of Oregon, while Southern expansionists focused primarily on the annexation of Texas.) Although elected by a very slim margin, Polk proceeded as if his victory had been a mandate for expansion.

All of Mexico

American occupation of Mexico City in 1847

We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race-the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.... We are anxious to force free government on all; and I see that it has been urged ... that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the world, and especially over this continent. It is a great mistake.

This debate brought to the forefront one of the contradictions of manifest destiny: on the one hand, while identitarian ideas inherent in manifest destiny suggested that Mexicans, as non-whites, would present a threat to white racial integrity and thus were not qualified to become Americans, the "mission" component of manifest destiny suggested that Mexicans would be improved (or "regenerated", as it was then described) by bringing them into American democracy. Identitarianism was used to promote manifest destiny, but, as in the case of Calhoun and the resistance to the "All Mexico" movement, identitarianism was also used to oppose manifest destiny. Conversely, proponents of annexation of "All Mexico" regarded it as an anti-slavery measure.

Growth from 1840 to 1850

The controversy was eventually ended by the Mexican Cession, which added the territories of Alta California and Nuevo México to the United States, both more sparsely populated than the rest of Mexico. Like the "All Oregon" movement, the "All Mexico" movement quickly abated.

Historian Frederick Merk, in Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (1963), argued that the failure of the "All Oregon" and "All Mexico" movements indicates that manifest destiny had not been as popular as historians have traditionally portrayed it to have been. Merk wrote that, while belief in the beneficent mission of democracy was central to American history, aggressive "continentalism" were aberrations supported by only a minority of Americans, all of them Democrats. Some Democrats were also opposed; the Democrats of Louisiana opposed annexation of Mexico, while those in Mississippi supported it.

These events related to the Mexican-American War and had an effect on the American people living in the Southern Plains at the time. A case study by David Beyreis depicts these effects through the operations of a fur trading and Indian trading business named Bent, St. Vrain and Company during the period. The telling of this company shows that the idea of Manifest Destiny was not unanimously loved by all Americans and did not always benefit Americans. The case study goes on to show that this company could have ceased to exist in the name of territorial expansion.

After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, disagreements over the expansion of slavery made further annexation by conquest too divisive to be official government policy. Some, such as John Quitman, Governor of Mississippi, offered what public support they could. In one memorable case, Quitman simply explained that the state of Mississippi had "lost" its state arsenal, which began showing up in the hands of filibusters. Yet these isolated cases only solidified opposition in the North as many Northerners were increasingly opposed to what they believed to be efforts by Southern slave owners-and their friends in the North-to expand slavery through filibustering. Sarah P. Remond on January 24, 1859, delivered an impassioned speech at Warrington, England, that the connection between filibustering and slave power was clear proof of "the mass of corruption that underlay the whole system of American government". The Wilmot Proviso and the continued " Slave Power" narratives thereafter, indicated the degree to which manifest destiny had become part of the sectional controversy.

Without official government support the most radical advocates of manifest destiny increasingly turned to military filibustering. Originally filibuster had come from the Dutch vrijbuiter and referred to buccaneers in the West Indies that preyed on Spanish commerce. While there had been some filibustering expeditions into Canada in the late 1830s, it was only by mid-century did filibuster become a definitive term. By then, declared the New-York Daily Times "the fever of Fillibusterism is on our country. Her pulse beats like a hammer at the wrist, and there's a very high color on her face." Millard Fillmore's second annual message to Congress, submitted in December 1851, gave double the amount of space to filibustering activities than the brewing sectional conflict. The eagerness of the filibusters, and the public to support them, had an international hue. Clay's son, a diplomat in Portugal, reported that the invasion created a sensation in Lisbon.

Filibuster William Walker, who launched several expeditions to Mexico and Central America, ruled Nicaragua, and was captured by the Royal Navy before being executed in Honduras by the Honduran government.

Although they were illegal, filibustering operations in the late 1840s and early 1850s were romanticized in the United States. The Democratic Party's national platform included a plank that specifically endorsed William Walker's filibustering in Nicaragua. Wealthy American expansionists financed dozens of expeditions, usually based out of New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco. The primary target of manifest destiny's filibusters was Latin America but there were isolated incidents elsewhere. Mexico was a favorite target of organizations devoted to filibustering, like the Knights of the Golden Circle. William Walker got his start as a filibuster in an ill-advised attempt to separate the Mexican states Sonora and Baja California. Narciso López, a near second in fame and success, spent his efforts trying to secure Cuba from the Spanish Empire.

The United States had long been interested in acquiring Cuba from the declining Spanish Empire. As with Texas, Oregon, and California, American policy makers were concerned that Cuba would fall into British hands, which, according to the thinking of the Monroe Doctrine, would constitute a threat to the interests of the United States. Prompted by O'Sullivan, in 1848 President Polk offered to buy Cuba from Spain for $100 million. Polk feared that filibustering would hurt his effort to buy the island, and so he informed the Spanish of an attempt by the Cuban filibuster López to seize Cuba by force and annex it to the United States, foiling the plot. Spain declined to sell the island, which ended Polk's efforts to acquire Cuba. O'Sullivan eventually landed in legal trouble.

Filibustering continued to be a major concern for presidents after Polk. Whigs presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore tried to suppress the expeditions. When the Democrats recaptured the White House in 1852 with the election of Franklin Pierce, a filibustering effort by John A. Quitman to acquire Cuba received the tentative support of the president. Pierce backed off and instead renewed the offer to buy the island, this time for $130 million. When the public learned of the Ostend Manifesto in 1854, which argued that the United States could seize Cuba by force if Spain refused to sell, this effectively killed the effort to acquire the island. The public now linked expansion with slavery; if manifest destiny had once enjoyed widespread popular approval, this was no longer true.

The filibusterism of the era even opened itself up to some mockery among the headlines. In 1854, a San Francisco Newspaper published a satirical poem called "Filibustering Ethics". This poem features two characters, Captain Robb and Farmer Cobb. Captain Robb makes claim to Farmer Cobb's land arguing that Robb deserves the land because he is Anglo-Saxon, has weapons to "blow out" Cobb's brains, and nobody has heard of Cobb so what right does Cobb have to claim the land. Cobb argues that Robb doesn't need his land because Robb already has more land than he knows what to do with. Due to threats of violence, Cobb surrenders his land and leaves grumbling that " might should be the rule of right among enlightened nations."

The Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged 600,000 families to settle the West by giving them land (usually 160 acres) almost free. Over the course of 123 years, 200 million claims were made and over 270 million acres were settled, accounting for 10% of the land in the U.S. They had to live on and improve the land for five years. Before the American Civil War, Southern leaders opposed the Homestead Acts because they feared it would lead to more free states and free territories. After the mass resignation of Southern senators and representatives at the beginning of the war, Congress was subsequently able to pass the Homestead Act.

In some areas, the Homestead Act resulted in the direct removal of Indigenous communities. According to American historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, all five nations of the "Five Civilized Tribes" signed treaties with the Confederacy and initially supported them in hopes of dividing and weakening the U.S. so that they could remain on their land. The United States Army, led by prominent Civil War generals such as William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George Armstrong Custer, waged wars on "non-treaty Indians" who continued to live on land that had already been ceded to the U.S. through treaty. Homesteaders and other settlers soon followed and took possession of the land for farms and mining. Occasionally, white settlers would move ahead of the U.S. Army, into land that had not yet been settled by the United States, causing conflict with the Native people who still resided there. According to Anglo-American historian Julius Wilm, while the U.S. government did not approve of settlers moving ahead of the army, Indian Affairs officials did believe "the move of frontier whites into the proximity of contested territory-be they homesteaders or parties interested in other pursuits-necessitated the removal of Indigenous nations."

Historical territorial expansion of the United States, showing the Alaskan acquisition in an inset in the upper right

The final U.S. territorial expansion of the North American mainland came in 1867 when the U.S. negotiated with the Russian Empire to purchase Alaska. In the aftermath of the Crimean War in the 1850s, Emperor Alexander II of Russia decided to relinquish control of the ailing Russian America (present-day Alaska) on fears that the territory would be easily be taken over by Canada in any future war between Russia and the United Kingdom. Following the end of the Civil War in 1865, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward entered into negotiations with Russian minister Eduard de Stoeckl for the purchase of Alaska. Seward initially offered $5 million to Stoeckl; the two men settled on $7 million and on March 15, 1867, Seward presented a draft treaty to the U.S. Cabinet. Stoeckl's superiors raised several concerns; to induce him to waive them, the final purchase price was increased to $7.2 million and on March 30, the treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate. The transfer ceremony took place in Sitka, Alaska on October 18. Russian and American soldiers paraded in front of the governor's house; the Russian flag was lowered and the American flag raised amid peals of artillery.

The purchase added 586,412 square miles (1,518,800 km ²) of new territory to the United States, an area about twice the size of Texas. Reactions to the purchase in the United States were mostly positive, as many believed the possession of Alaska would serve as a base to expand American trade in Asia. Some opponents labeled the purchase as "Seward's Folly", or "Seward's Icebox", as they contended that the United States had acquired useless land. Nearly all Russian settlers left Alaska in the aftermath of the purchase; Alaska would remain sparsely populated until the Klondike Gold Rush began in 1896. Originally organized as the Department of Alaska, the area was renamed the District of Alaska and the Territory of Alaska before becoming the modern State of Alaska in 1959.

The start of the Klondike Gold Rush brought 200,000 prospectors to Alaska. The gold rush greatly increased the U.S. government's commitment to developing the industrial infrastructure, and in turn attracting new residents to maintain it. The increase in gold seekers brought epidemics and land conflicts between settlers and Indigenous Alaskans. According to Yupik historian Shari Huhndorf, "These changing demographics transformed social relationships between Native and the newcomers and soon led to Jim Crow-like segregation supported by a rapidly expanding territorial government."

In 1905, the Nelson Act was passed, which allowed the Territory of Alaska to open schools outside of incorporated towns and run them outside of the federal Bureau of Education's control. According to historian Carol Barnhardt, the Territory of Alaska opened schools for "white children and children of mixed blood leading a civilized life," while schools for Native children were still run by the Bureau of Education, which operated with the belief that it was important to transform Native Alaskans, along with all Indigenous people in America, into civilized Christians. The U.S. government saw education as the most effective way to achieve this goal. Overall, there was little recognition of the important differences between different groups of Indigenous people. The federal Bureau of Education also extended services such as medical services, cooperative stores, and a ship to supply remote coastal villages, slowly reducing the self-sufficiency of Native communities and allowing the U.S. government to assume more control of the lives of Native Alaskans. The effects of the Alaska Purchase are still felt by Native Alaskans. According to Inuit author Sheila Watt-Cloutier, "The land that is such an important part of our spirit, our culture, and our physical and economic well-being is becoming an often unpredictable and precarious place for us."

Manifest destiny had serious consequences for Native Americans, since continental expansion implicitly meant the occupation and annexation of Native American land, sometimes to expand slavery. This ultimately led to confrontations and wars with several groups of native peoples via Indian removal. The United States continued the European practice of recognizing only limited land rights of Indigenous peoples. In a policy formulated largely by Henry Knox, Secretary of War in the Washington Administration, the U.S. government sought to expand into the west through the purchase of Native American land in treaties. Only the Federal Government could purchase Indian lands and this was done through treaties with tribal leaders. Whether a tribe actually had a decision-making structure capable of making a treaty was a controversial issue. The national policy was for the Indians to join American society and become "civilized", which meant no more wars with neighboring tribes or raids on white settlers or travelers, and a shift from hunting to farming and ranching. Advocates of civilization programs believed that the process of settling native tribes would greatly reduce the amount of land needed by the Native Americans, making more land available for homesteading by white Americans. Thomas Jefferson believed that, while the Indigenous people of America were intellectual equals to whites, they had to assimilate to and live like the whites or inevitably be pushed aside by them.

According to historian Jeffrey Ostler, Jefferson believed that once assimilation was no longer possible, he advocated for the extermination of Indigenous people.[page needed ]

On 27 February 1803, Jefferson wrote in a letter to William Henry Harrison:

Noted by Law Scholar and professor Robert J. Miller, Thomas Jefferson "Understood and utilized the Doctrine of Discovery [aka Manifest destiny] through his political careers and was heavily involved in using the Doctrine against Indian tribes." Jefferson was "often immersed in Indian affairs through his legal and political careers" and "was also well acquainted with the process Virginia governments had historically used to extinguish Indian [land] titles". Jefferson used this knowledge to make the Louisiana purchase in 1803, aided in the construction of the Indian Removal Policy, and laid the ground work for removing Native American tribes further and further into eventual small reservation territories. The idea of "Indian removal" gained traction in the context of manifest destiny and, with Jefferson as one of the main political voices on the subject, accumulated advocates who believed that American Indians would be better off moving away from white settlers. The removal effort was further solidified through policy by Andrew Jackson when he signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. In his First Annual Message to Congress in 1829, Jackson stated with regards to removal:

I suggest for your consideration the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi, and without the limits of any state or territory now formed, to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it, each tribe having a distinct control over the portion designated for its use. There they may be secured in the enjoyment of governments of their own choice, subject to no other control from the United States than such as may be necessary to preserve peace on the frontier and between the several tribes. There the benevolent may endeavor to teach them the arts of civilization, and, by promoting union and harmony among them, to raise up an interesting commonwealth, destined to perpetuate the race and to attest the humanity and justice of this government."

After major exploration and colonization to the western parts of the United States, resources and industry were needed to support such colonies. Colville scholar Dina Gilo-Whitaker outlines how during this process, promises of innovative technologies and abundant resources were made to indigenous people as the settlers effectively began damming rivers, imposing railways, and seeking natural resources and minerals through mining and excavation of Native American lands. According to historians Boyd Cothran and Ned Blackhawk, this influx of trade, industrialization, and development of transportation corridors killed surrounding livestock, caused waterway damage, and created sickness and disease for the Native American peoples living in those regions.

Across The Continent, an 1868 lithograph illustrating the westward expansion of white settlers

Historian Jeffery Ostler comments on some of the general theories about native American population decline due to these environmental factors. He shows that, over the course of this period, there were many forces "of destruction, including enslavement, disease, material deprivation, malnutrition, and social stress."

Following the forced removal of many Indigenous Peoples, Americans increasingly believed that Native American ways of life would eventually disappear as the United States expanded. Humanitarian advocates of removal believed that American Indians would be better off moving away from whites. As historian Reginald Horsman argued in his influential study Race and Manifest Destiny, racial rhetoric increased during the era of manifest destiny. Americans increasingly believed that Native American ways of life would "fade away" as the United States expanded. As an example, this idea was reflected in the work of one of America's first great historians, Francis Parkman, whose landmark book The Conspiracy of Pontiac was published in 1851. Parkman wrote that after the French defeat in the French and Indian War, Indians were "destined to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power, which now rolled westward unchecked and unopposed". Parkman emphasized that the collapse of Indian power in the late 18th century had been swift and was a past event.

Indian removal policies led to the current day reservation system which allocated territories to individual tribes. According to scholar Dina Gilio-Whitaker, "the treaties also created reservations that would confine Native people into smaller territories far smaller than they had for millenia been accustomed to, diminishing their ability to feed themselves." According to author and scholar David Rich Lewis, these reservations had much higher population densities than indigenous homelands. As a result, "the consolidation of native peoples in the 19th century allowed epidemic diseases to rage through their communities." In addition to this "a result of changing subsistence patterns and environments-contributed to an explosion of dietary-related illness like diabetes, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, cirrhosis, obesity, gallbladder disease, hypertension, and heart disease."

In 1859, Reuben Davis, a member of the House of Representatives from Mississippi, articulated one of the most expansive visions of Manifest Destiny on record:

As the Civil War faded into history, the term manifest destiny experienced a brief revival. Protestant missionary Josiah Strong, in his best-seller of 1885, Our Country, argued that the future was devolved upon America since it had perfected the ideals of civil liberty, "a pure spiritual Christianity", and concluded, "My plea is not, Save America for America's sake, but, Save America for the world's sake."

In the 1892 U.S. presidential election, the Republican Party platform proclaimed: "We reaffirm our approval of the Monroe doctrine and believe in the achievement of the manifest destiny of the Republic in its broadest sense." What was meant by "manifest destiny" in this context was not clearly defined, particularly since the Republicans lost the election.

For example, when President William McKinley advocated annexation of the Republic of Hawaii in 1898, he said that "We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny." On the other hand, former President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat who had blocked the annexation of Hawaii during his administration, wrote that McKinley's annexation of the territory was a "perversion of our national destiny". Historians continued that debate; some have interpreted American acquisition of other Pacific island groups in the 1890s as an extension of manifest destiny across the Pacific Ocean. Others have regarded it as the antithesis of manifest destiny and merely imperialism.

Spanish-American War

A cartoon of Uncle Sam seated in restaurant looking at the bill of fare containing "Cuba steak", "Porto Rico pig", the "Philippine Islands" and the "Sandwich Islands" (Hawaii)

In 1898, the United States intervened in the Cuban insurrection and launched the Spanish-American War to force Spain out. According to the terms of the Treaty of Paris, Spain relinquished sovereignty over Cuba and ceded the Philippine Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the United States. The terms of cession for the Philippines involved a payment of the sum of $20 million by the United States to Spain. The treaty was highly contentious and denounced by William Jennings Bryan, who tried to make it a central issue in the 1900 election. He was defeated in landslide by McKinley.

The Teller Amendment, passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate before the war, which proclaimed Cuba "free and independent", forestalled annexation of the island. The Platt Amendment (1902) then established Cuba as a virtual protectorate of the United States.

The acquisition of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the war with Spain marked a new chapter in U.S. history. Traditionally, territories were acquired by the United States for the purpose of becoming new states on equal footing with already existing states. These islands were acquired as colonies rather than prospective states. The process was validated by the Insular Cases. The Supreme Court ruled that full constitutional rights did not automatically extend to all areas under American control.

According to Frederick Merk, these colonial acquisitions marked a break from the original intention of manifest destiny. Previously, "Manifest Destiny had contained a principle so fundamental that a Calhoun and an O'Sullivan could agree on it-that a people not capable of rising to statehood should never be annexed. That was the principle thrown overboard by the imperialism of 1899." Albert J. Beveridge maintained the contrary at his September 25, 1900, speech in the Auditorium, at Chicago. He declared that the current desire for Cuba and the other acquired territories was identical to the views expressed by Washington, Jefferson and Marshall. Moreover, "the sovereignty of the Stars and Stripes can be nothing but a blessing to any people and to any land." The nascent revolutionary government, desirous of independence, resisted the United States in the Philippine-American War in 1899; it won no support from any government anywhere and collapsed when its leader was captured. William Jennings Bryan denounced the war and any form of future overseas expansion, writing, "'Destiny' is not as manifest as it was a few weeks ago."

In 1917, all Puerto Ricans were made full American citizens via the Jones Act, which also provided for a popularly elected legislature and a bill of rights, and authorized the election of a Resident Commissioner who has a voice (but no vote) in Congress. In 1934, the Tydings-McDuffie Act put the Philippines on a path to independence, which was realized in 1946 with the Treaty of Manila. The Guam Organic Act of 1950 established Guam alongside Puerto Rico as an unincorporated unorganized territory of the United States, provided for the structure of the island's civilian government, and granted the people U.S. citizenship.

The belief in an American mission to promote and defend democracy throughout the world, as expounded by Jefferson and his " Empire of Liberty", and continued by Lincoln, Wilson and George W. Bush, continues to have an influence on American political ideology. Under Douglas MacArthur, the Americans "were imbued with a sense of manifest destiny," says historian John Dower.

After the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, the phrase manifest destiny declined in usage, as territorial expansion ceased to be promoted as being a part of America's "destiny". Under President Theodore Roosevelt the role of the United States in the New World was defined, in the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, as being an "international police power" to secure American interests in the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt's corollary contained an explicit rejection of territorial expansion. In the past, manifest destiny had been seen as necessary to enforce the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere, but now expansionism had been replaced by interventionism as a core value associated with the doctrine.

President Wilson continued the policy of interventionism in the Americas, and attempted to redefine both manifest destiny and America's "mission" on a broader, worldwide scale. Wilson led the United States into World War I with the argument that "The world must be made safe for democracy." In his 1920 message to Congress after the war, Wilson stated:

... I think we all realize that the day has come when Democracy is being put upon its final test. The Old World is just now suffering from a wanton rejection of the principle of democracy and a substitution of the principle of autocracy as asserted in the name, but without the authority and sanction, of the multitude. This is the time of all others when Democracy should prove its purity and its spiritual power to prevail. It is surely the manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit prevail.

This was the only time a president had used the phrase "manifest destiny" in his annual address. Wilson's version of manifest destiny was a rejection of expansionism and an endorsement (in principle) of self-determination, emphasizing that the United States had a mission to be a world leader for the cause of democracy. This U.S. vision of itself as the leader of the " Free World" would grow stronger in the 20th century after World War II, although rarely would it be described as "manifest destiny", as Wilson had done.

"Manifest destiny" is sometimes used by critics of U.S. foreign policy to characterize interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere. In this usage, "manifest destiny" is interpreted as the underlying cause of what is denounced by some as " American imperialism". A more positive-sounding phrase devised by scholars at the end of the 20th century is "nation building", and State Department official Karin Von Hippel notes that the U.S. has "been involved in nation-building and promoting democracy since the middle of the 19th century and 'Manifest Destiny'".

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia, Adolf Hitler's Lebensraum was the "Manifest Destiny" for Germany's romanticization and imperial conquest of Eastern Europe. Hitler compared Nazi expansion to American expansion westward, saying, "there's only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins."

Other environmental changes as a result of European settlement were discovered as a result of the pre-industrial era, according to historian Boyd Cothran, "It coincided with a national timber boom and the concurrent near exhaustion of the Great Lakes forests, leading American businesses to clamor for access to the vast timber stands located on many western Indian Reservations."

Biomolecular archaeologist Eric J. Guiry has shown that this deforestation had increasingly negative effects on Great Lakes ecosystems: 'in comparison with the industrial era..."Aquatic disruptions in great lakes have been linked to timber extraction through the loss of ecological resources. "Results show that, in comparison with the industrial era, the nitrogen cycle and trophic structure of the Great Lakes ecosystems remained remarkably stable until the 1830s, despite millennia of Indigenous agricultural and other land management, decades of European settlement, and climatic fluctuations. After this time, increased logging from forestry and agriculture induced soil erosion caused an unprecedented and abrupt bottom-up shift throughout the entire aquatic ecosystem of Lake Ontario."

Some critics argue that manifest destiny claims that because of the special place of American society and the occupation of the western part of the American territory, its historical destiny is to be an exception. This belief leads to imperialist actions, among its consequences are the military invasion of Philippines and Cuba. These measures later took the form of a cultural justification of New Imperialism, and it was concluded that in the history and the present world, the United States has a place and status of "exception in the world". Accordingly, the United States is not accountable to international organizations such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. Therefore, the United States is beyond international treaties and does not have to commit to them.

Some contemporary historians have condemned manifest destiny as an ideology used to justify dispossession and genocide against Native Americans.

Bryan, William Jennings (1899). Republic or Empire?.

Beveridge, Albert J. (1908). The Meaning of the Times and Other Speeches. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Crenshaw, Ollinger (1941). "The Knights of the Golden Circle: The Career of George Bickley". The American Historical Review. 47 (1): 23-50. doi:10.1086/ahr/47.1.23.

Greene, Laurence (2008). The Filibuster. New York: Kessinger Publishing, LLC. p. 384. ISBN 978-1-4366-9531-2.

Fisher, Philip (1985). Hard facts: setting and form in the American novel. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-503528-5.

Fuller, John Douglas Pitts (1936). The movement for the acquisition of all Mexico, 1846-1848. Johns Hopkins Press.

Previously published as Hietala, Thomas R. (1985). Manifest design: anxious aggrandizement in late Jacksonian America. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-1735-1.

May, Robert E. (2004). Manifest Destiny's Underworld. The University of North Carolina Press. p. 448. ISBN 978-0-8078-5581-2.

Ripley, Peter C. (1985). The Black Abolitionist Papers. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. p. 646.

Rossiter, Clinton (1950). "The American Mission". The American Scholar (20): 19-20.

Stuart, Reginald C. (1988). United States expansionism and British North America, 1775-1871. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-1767-4.

Somkin, Fred (1967). Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815-1860. Ithaca, NY.

Strong, Josiah (1885). Our Country. Baker and Taylor Company.

Burge, Daniel J. (2022). A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, (1845-1872). University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-1496228079

Burns, Edward McNall (1957). The American idea of mission: concepts of national purpose and destiny. Rutgers University Press.

Cheathem, Mark R. and Terry Corps, eds. Historical Dictionary of the Jacksonian Era and Manifest Destiny (2nd ed. 2016), 544 pp

Fresonke, Kris (2003). West of Emerson: the design of Manifest Destiny. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23185-6.

Gould, Lewis L. (1980). The Presidency of William McKinley. Regents Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-7006-0206-3.

Hofstadter, Richard (1965). "Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny". The paranoid style in American politics: and other essays. Knopf.

Horsman, Reginald (1981). Race and Manifest Destiny: The origins of American racial Anglo-Saxonism. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-94805-1.

McDonough, Matthew Davitian. Manifestly Uncertain Destiny: The Debate over American Expansionism, 1803-1848. PhD dissertation, Kansas State University, 2011.[ISBN missing ]

Merk, Frederick, and Lois Bannister Merk. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation. New York: Knopf, 1963.[ISBN missing ]

Miller, Christopher (1985). Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau. University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-98302-7.

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Manifest destiny was a cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that White American settlers were destined to expand across North America. It was an early expression of American imperialism in the United States of America. Historians have emphasized that "manifest destiny" was always contested.

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This was a series of measures proposed by Henry Clay, the US Senator, and it was passed by the congress to solve slavery issues. The North and South disagreed on whether slavery should be allowed in new places.

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The Compromise of 1850 was made up of five bills that attempted to resolve disputes over slavery in new territories added to the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846-48). It admitted California as a free state, left Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves whether to be a slave state or a free state, defined a new Texas-New Mexico boundary, and made it easier for slaveowners to recover runways under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

The Compromise of 1850 was the mastermind of Whig senator Henry Clay and Democratic senator Stephan Douglas. Lingering resentment over its provisions contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War.

The Mexican-American War

The Mexican-American War was a result of U.S. President James K. Polk's belief that it was America's " manifest destiny " to spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Following the U.S. Victory, Mexico lost about one-third of its territory including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. A national dispute arose as to whether or not slavery would be permitted in the new Western territories.

Who Was Responsible for The Compromise of 1850?

Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, a leading statesman and member of the Whig Party known as "The Great Compromiser" for his work on the Missouri Compromise, was the primary creator of the Missouri Compromise. Fearful of the growing divide between North and South over the issue of slavery, he hoped to avoid civil war by enacting a compromise.

Famed orator and Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, while opposed to the extension of slavery, also saw the compromise of 1850 as a way of averting national discord, and disappointed his abolitionist supporters by siding with Clay.

When Clay, facing health problems, grew too ill to argue his case before the senate, his cause was taken up by Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, an ardent proponent of states' rights when it came to deciding the issue of slavery.

John C. Calhoun, a former vice president-turned senator from South Carolina, sought the expansion of slavery into new territories, but in an 1850 speech to the Senate, wrote: "I have, senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion."

When the full compromise failed to pass, Douglas split the omnibus bill into individual bills, which permitted congressmen to either vote or abstain on each topic. The untimely death of President Zachary Taylor and ascendancy of pro-compromise Vice President Millard Fillmore to the White House helped contribute to the passage of each bill. Calhoun died in 1850 and Clay and Webster two years later, making their roles in the Compromise of 1850 one of their last acts as statesmen.

Main Points of The Compromise of 1850

The Compromise of 1850 was made up of five separate bills that made the following main points:

Permitted slavery in Washington, D.C., but outlawed the slave trade

Added California to the Union as a "free state"

Established Utah and New Mexico as territories that could decide via popular sovereignty if they would permit slavery

Defined new boundaries for the state of Texas following the Mexican-American War, removing its claims to parts of New Mexico but awarding the state $10 million in compensation

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required citizens to assist in apprehending runaway slaves and denied enslaved people a right to trial by jury.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

The first Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress in 1793 and authorized local governments to seize and return people who had escaped slavery to their owners while imposing penalties on anyone who had attempted to help them gain their freedom. The Act encountered fierce resistance from abolitionists, many of whom who felt it was tantamount to kidnapping.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 compelled all citizens to assist in the capture of runaway slaves and denied enslaved people the right to a jury trial. It also placed control of individual cases in the hands of federal commissioners, who were paid more for returning a suspected slave than for freeing them, leading many to argue the law was biased in favor of Southern slaveholders.

Outrage over the new law only increased traffic along the Underground Railroad during the 1850s. Northern states avoided enforcing the law and by 1860, the number of runaways successfully returned to slaveholders hovered around just 330.

Both Acts were repealed by Congress on June 28, 1864, following the outbreak of the Civil War, the event proponents of the Compromise of 1850 had hoped to avoid.

HISTORY Vault: Unknown Civil War

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Compromise of 1850 - Summary, Significance & Facts

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The Compromise of 1850 was made up of five bills that attempted to resolve disputes over slavery in new territories added to the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846-48). It admitted California as a free state, left Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves, defined a new Texas-New Mexico boundary, and made it easier for slaveowners to recover runway slaves.

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This was passed by congress on May 30, 1854. It allowed people in Kansas and Nebraska to decide if they want slavery in their borders. This served to cancel the Missouri Compromise which was meant to prohibit slavery.

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Kansas-Nebraska Act - Definition, Date & Significance | HISTORY

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The Kansas-Nebraska Act was an 1854 bill that allowed settlers of Kansas and Nebraska to decide whether slavery would be allowed within their state’s borders. The conflicts that arose between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in the aftermath of the act’s passage led to the period of violence known as Bleeding Kansas, and contributed to unrest that led to the American Civil War (1861-65).

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People in a territory should decide their stance on slavery.

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this act meant that slaves should be returned to their owners even if they are moved to a free state/in a free state.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Fugitive Slave Acts, in U.S. history, statutes passed by Congress in 1793 and 1850 (and repealed in 1864) that provided for the seizure and return of runaway slaves who escaped from one state into another or into a federal territory. The 1793 law enforced Article IV, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution in authorizing any federal district judge or circuit court judge, or any state magistrate, to decide finally and without a jury trial the status of an alleged fugitive slave.

The measure met with strong opposition in the Northern states, some of which enacted personal-liberty laws to hamper the execution of the federal law; these laws provided that fugitives who appealed an original decision against them were entitled to a jury trial. As early as 1810 individual dissatisfaction with the law of 1793 had taken the form of systematic assistance rendered to Black slaves escaping from the South to New England or Canada-via the Underground Railroad.

The demand from the South for more effective legislation resulted in enactment of a second Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Under this law fugitives could not testify on their own behalf, nor were they permitted a trial by jury. Heavy penalties were imposed upon federal marshals who refused to enforce the law or from whom a fugitive escaped; penalties were also imposed on individuals who helped slaves to escape. Finally, under the 1850 act, special commissioners were to have concurrent jurisdiction with the U.S. courts in enforcing the law. The severity of the 1850 measure led to abuses and defeated its purpose. The number of abolitionists increased, the operations of the Underground Railroad became more efficient, and new personal-liberty laws were enacted in many Northern states. These state laws were among the grievances officially referred to by South Carolina in December 1860 as justification for its secession from the Union. Attempts to carry into effect the law of 1850 aroused much bitterness and probably had as much to do with inciting sectional hostility as did the controversy over slavery in the territories.

For some time during the American Civil War, the Fugitive Slave Acts were considered to still hold in the case of Blacks fleeing from masters in border states that were loyal to the Union government. It was not until June 28, 1864, that the acts were repealed.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Fugitive Slave Acts | Definition & History

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Fugitive Slave Acts, in U.S. history, statutes passed by Congress in 1793 and 1850 (repealed in 1864) that provided for the seizure and return of runaway slaves who escaped from one state into another or into federal territory. Learn more about the Fugitive Slave Acts in this article.

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This was the support of a specific region of the nation rather than the US in general.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

sectionalism, an exaggerated devotion to the interests of a region over those of a country as a whole. Throughout American history, tension has existed between several regions, but the competing views of the institution of slavery held by Northerners and Southerners was the preeminent sectional split and the defining political issue in the United States from the founding of the country until the American Civil War.

Sectional rivalry between New England and the West

As American settlers spread westward during the 18th and 19th centuries, New Englanders felt threatened by the West, which siphoned off many of their region's most capable and vigorous labourers. Moreover, an expanding railroad network made it possible for Western agriculturalists to produce wool and grain that undersold the products of the poor New England hill country. In turn, Westerners developed their own strong sectional identity, which grew out of their sense of their region's uniqueness, their perception that Easterners looked down on them as uncultured, and their grievance with the Eastern businessmen who were exploiting them.

Early North-South sectional struggles over slavery

Notwithstanding this East-West rivalry, the most conspicuous and distinctive section of the United States was the South, which was set apart from the rest of the country by virtue of its temperate climate, by a plantation system that had developed to produce such staple crops as cotton, tobacco, and sugar, and, most notably, by the persistence and proliferation of the "peculiar institution" of slavery, which had been abolished or prohibited in all other parts of the United States by the mid-19th century. Still, most white Southerners were not directly involved in slavery. In 1850, for example, of a total white population of about 6,000,000 in the slave states, only about 350,000 were slaveholders, and about half that number held 4 or fewer enslaved persons each. Indeed, in the whole of the South, there were fewer than 1,800 persons who held more than 100 enslaved persons each.

Nevertheless, the interests of this small slaveholding planter class were paramount in the region, from colonial times to the Declaration of Independence on to the framing of the Constitution and through the national struggle over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the new lands of the West. In the constitutional debate over how to allocate representation in the Congress of the new republic, Southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention demanded that enslaved persons be counted in the total population of their states, which would be used to determine representation in the House of Representatives-despite the fact that enslaved persons were denied the right to vote. Although there was significant opposition to slavery among Northern delegates, in the interest of solidifying a national government, a compromise was reached whereby an enslaved person was to be counted as three-fifths of an individual in determining a state's population. This three-fifths compromise was just the first in a series of legislative compromises that would be reached regarding slavery over the ensuing decades as the United States grew.

The Missouri Compromise

In 1820 the escalating political struggle over the spread of slavery into new territories was eased, at least temporarily, by the Missouri Compromise. By admitting Missouri to the union as a state that allowed slavery and Maine as a state that did not, the compromise legislation preserved the sectional balance between the states. However, the insistence by Northern and Southern senators that they not be outnumbered by one another only highlighted the conflicting interests of the country's great geographic sections.

Despite their opposition to slavery, however, few Northerners made serious efforts to eradicate it nationally during the first decades of the 19th century. Tellingly, in 1831, when abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison started his newspaper The Liberator, calling for the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people, he had only a tiny following. But as the country expanded and its sections became more closely entwined, sectional differences over the issue of slavery became visible in institutions across American society. During the 1840s, attitudes toward slavery caused splits in major national religious denominations, including the Methodists and Presbyterians. In politics, the Whig Party, once an alliance of Northern and Western conservative business interests with Southern planters, divided sectionally and, following the 1852 election, virtually disappeared.

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The Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the formation of the Republican Party

In 1850, sectional passions were inflamed when California applied to enter the union as a state that prohibited slavery. Compromise legislation-originally championed by Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky but ultimately guided to passage by Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois-averted a likely civil war by bundling admission of California as a free state with a new, more aggressive Fugitive Slave Act, which provided for the seizure and return of people who escaped enslavement ( see Compromise of 1850). Although the Missouri Compromise had excluded slavery from that part of the Louisiana Purchase (except Missouri) north of the 36°30′ parallel, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, sponsored by Douglas, provided for the territorial organization of Kansas and Nebraska under the principle of popular sovereignty, according to which the people of territories would decide for themselves whether to enter the union as states permitting or prohibiting slavery. Some Northerners responded by organizing an antislavery political party, called the Republican Party in most places.

Bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott decision, and the Harpers Ferry Raid

In the mid-1850s a virtual civil war broke out in Kansas, where rival state legislatures-one proslavery, the other antislavery-both claimed legitimacy. Called Bleeding Kansas, this violent conflict brought national attention to John Brown, who would propel sectional tensions over slavery to a new level in 1859 with his Harpers Ferry Raid, an attempt to spark a massive rebellion by enslaved people. Before Brown's raid, in 1857 the Supreme Court of the United States had added fuel to the fire of sectionalism with its ruling in the Dred Scott case, regarding an enslaved person who claimed freedom on the ground that he had been taken to live in free territory. The court's ruling-that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and that, because Black Americans were not citizens, they had no right to bring suit before the court-was acclaimed in the South but condemned and repudiated throughout the North. For many Americans, the Dred Scott decision confirmed their belief that compromise had been exhausted as a solution to the problem of slavery.

The election of 1860

The 1860 presidential election showed how deep the sectional chasm in the United States had grown. The Republican Party was not a national party but rather a party of the North. The name of its presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, an ardent opponent of slavery, would not even appear on the ballot in 10 states that permitted slavery. On the other hand, as the election approached, the country's only truly national party, the Democratic Party, splintered. Douglas entered the party's national convention in April as the front-runner for its presidential nomination, but he was seen as no friend of the South, and, when the convention refused to adopt the so-called Alabama Platform, delegates from eight Southern states left the convention and nominated their own candidate, Kentuckian John C. Breckinridge, a holder of enslaved people. Douglas became the candidate of the Northern Democrats. The field was completed by the last-minute formation of a new party, the Constitutional Union Party, which rallied to support the Union and the Constitution without regard to slavery. John Bell was its candidate.

When all of the ballots were counted, Lincoln was found to have captured only about 40 percent of the popular vote. However, he won all of the Northern states except New Jersey and tallied enough electoral votes to claim victory. The ultimate outcome of the election and the country's long sectionalist struggle would be secession and civil war.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Sectionalism | Definition, History, Examples, Civil War, & Facts

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sectionalism, an exaggerated devotion to the interests of a region over those of a country as a whole. Throughout American history, tension has existed between several regions, but the competing views of the institution of slavery held by Northerners and Southerners was the preeminent sectional split and the defining political issue in the United States from the founding of the country until the American Civil War.

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This is when a state tries to leave the nation it was part of in the past.

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secession, in U.S. history, the withdrawal of 11 slave states (states in which slaveholding was legal) from the Union during 1860-61 following the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. Secession precipitated the American Civil War.

Secession had a long history in the United States-but as a threat rather than as an actual dissolution of the Union. Pro-secessionists found philosophical justification for altering or abolishing a government and instituting a new one in the Declaration of Independence. More specifically, those who held that the Union was simply a compact among the states argued that states could secede from that compact just as they had earlier acceded to it.

While never counseling secession, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had clearly enunciated the states' rights-compact doctrine in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Their political opponents, New England Federalists, briefly considered withdrawing from the Union at the Hartford Convention in 1814. The Mississippi question elicited hints of secession from proslavery states, but the famous Missouri Compromise (1820) temporarily quieted the agitation. South Carolinians, however, went to the very brink of secession in the 1830s over the tariff question.

From the 1840s to 1860, Southerners frequently threatened to withdraw from the Union as antislavery sentiment in the North grew stronger. The Compromise of 1850 eased some of the sectional strife, but the problem of permitting or prohibiting slavery in the western territories continued to inflame opinion on both sides throughout the 1850s.

The Republican Party formed during this decade around the idea that the territories should remain free; i.e., slaveholding should not be permitted in them. Southerners vowed that the election of a Republican president in 1860 would make secession a certainty. When the Democratic Party disintegrated in 1860 over the slavery-extension question, Lincoln was elected as the first Republican president.

On December 20, 1860, a special convention called in South Carolina unanimously passed an ordinance of secession. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana followed in January, and Texas voted to secede on February 1, 1861-still more than a month before Lincoln was actually inaugurated. Pres. James Buchanan denied the right of secession, but he also denied the right of the federal government to use force against the seceded states.

Lincoln waited a month after his inauguration before deciding to send provisions to Fort Sumter in the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina. On April 12, 1861, Confederate guns opened fire on the fort, and the Civil War began. Forced now to make a choice between the Union and the Confederacy, the states of the Upper South- Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee-voted to secede.

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Secession | History, Definition, Crisis, & Facts

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Secession, the withdrawal of 11 slave states (states in which slaveholding was legal) from the Union during 1860-61 following the election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States. The secessionist states formed the Confederate States of America. Secession precipitated the American Civil War.

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This was the group of states that stood for anti slavery, which was the Northern half of the country.

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On November 6, 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States -- an event that outraged southern states. The Republican party had run on an anti-slavery platform, and many southerners felt that there was no longer a place for them in the Union. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded. By Febrary 1, 1861, six more states -- Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas -- had split from the Union. The seceded states created the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi Senator, as their provisional president.

In his inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861, Lincoln proclaimed that it was his duty to maintain the Union. He also declared that he had no intention of ending slavery where it existed, or of repealing the Fugitive Slave Law -- a position that horrified African Americans and their white allies. Lincoln's statement, however, did not satisfy the Confederacy, and on April 12 they attacked Fort Sumter, a federal stronghold in Charleston, South Carolina. Federal troops returned the fire. The Civil War had begun.

Immediately following the attack, four more states -- Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee -- severed their ties with the Union. To retain the loyalty of the remaining border states -- Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri -- President Lincoln insisted that the war was not about slavery or black rights; it was a war to preserve the Union. His words were not simply aimed at the loyal southern states, however -- most white northerners were not interested in fighting to free slaves or in giving rights to black people. For this reason, the government turned away African American voluteers who rushed to enlist. Lincoln upheld the laws barring blacks from the army, proving to northern whites that their race privilege would not be threatened.

There was an exception, however. African Americans had been working aboard naval vessels for years, and there was no reason that they should continue. Black sailors were therefore accepted into the U.S. Navy from the beginning of the war. Still, many African Americans wanted to join the fighting and continued to put pressure on federal authorities. Even if Lincoln was not ready to admit it, blacks knew that this was a war against slavery. Some, however, rejected the idea of fighting to preserve a Union that had rejected them and which did not give them the rights of citizens.

The federal government had a harder time deciding what to do about escaping slaves. Because there was no consistent federal policy regarding fugitives, individual commanders made their own decisions. Some put them to work for the Union forces; others wanted to return them to their owners. Finally, on August 6, 1861, fugitive slaves were declared to be "contraband of war" if their labor had been used to aid the Confederacy in any way. And if found to be contraband, they were declared free.

As the northern army pushed southward, thousands of fugitives fled across Union lines. Neither the federal authorities nor the army were prepared for the flood of people, and many of the refugees suffered as a result. Though the government attempted to provide them with confiscated land, there was not enough to go around. Many fugitives were put into crowded camps, where starvation and disease led to a high death rate. Northern citizens, black and white alike, stepped in to fill the gap. They organized relief societies and provided aid. They also organized schools to teach the freedmen, women, and children to read and write, thus giving an education to thousands of African Americans throughout the war.

Though "contraband" slaves had been declared free, Lincoln continued to insist that this was a war to save the Union, not to free slaves. But by 1862, Lincoln was considering emancipation as a necessary step toward winning the war. The South was using enslaved people to aid the war effort. Black men and women were forced to build fortifications, work as blacksmiths, nurses, boatmen, and laundresses, and to work in factories, hospitals, and armories. In the meantime, the North was refusing to accept the services of black volunteers and freed slaves, the very people who most wanted to defeat the slaveholders. In addition, several governments in Europe were considering recognizing the Confederacy and intervening against the Union. If Lincoln declared this a war to free the slaves, European public opinion would overwhelmingly back the North.

On July 22, 1862, Lincoln showed a draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. It proposed to emancipate the slaves in all rebel areas on January 1, 1863. Secretary of State William H. Seward agreed with the proposal, but cautioned Lincoln to wait until the Union had a major victory before formally issuing the proclamation. Lincoln's chance came after the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in September of 1862. He issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22. The proclamation warned the Confederate states to surrender by January 1, 1863, or their slaves would be freed.

Some people were critical of the proclamation for only freeing some of the slaves. Others, including Frederick Douglass, were jubilant. Douglass felt that it was the beginning of the end of slavery, and that it would act as a "moral bombshell" to the Confederacy. Yet he and others feared that Lincoln would give in to pressure from northern conservatives, and would fail to keep his promise. Despite the opposition, however, the president remained firm. On January 1, 1863, he issued the final Emancipation Proclamation. With it he officially freed all slaves within the states or parts of states that were in rebellion and not in Union hands. This left one million slaves in Union territory still in bondage.

Throughout the North, African Americans and their white allies were exhuberant. They packed churches and meeting halls and celebrated the news. In the South, most slaves did not hear of the proclamation for months. But the purpose of the Civil War had now changed. The North was not only fighting to preserve the Union, it was fighting to end slavery.

Throughout this time, northern black men had continued to pressure the army to enlist them. A few individual commanders in the field had taken steps to recruit southern African Americans into their forces. But it was only after Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation that the federal army would officially accept black soldiers into its ranks.

African American men rushed to enlist. This time they were accepted into all-black units. The first of these was the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored Regiment, led by white officer Robert Gould Shaw. Their heroism in combat put to rest worries over the willingness of black soldiers to fight. Soon other regiments were being formed, and in May 1863 the War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops.

Black recruiters, many of them abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, brought in troops from throughout the North. Douglass proclaimed, "I urge you to fly to arms and smite with death the power that would bury the government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave." Others, such as Harriet Tubman, recruited in the South. On March 6, 1863, the Secretary of War was informed that "seven hundred and fifty blacks who were waiting for an opportunity to join the Union Army had been rescued from slavery under the leadership of Harriet Ross Tubman...." By the end of the war more than 186,000 black soldiers had joined the Union army; 93,000 from the Confederate states, 40,000 from the border slave states, and 53,000 from the free states.

Black soldiers faced discrimination as well as segregation. The army was extremely reluctant to commission black officers -- only one hundred gained commissions during the war. African American soldiers were also given substandard supplies and rations. Probably the worst form of discrimination was the pay differential. At the beginning of black enlistment, it was assumed that blacks would be kept out of direct combat, and the men were paid as laborers rather than as soldiers. Black soldiers therefore received $7 per month, plus a $3 clothing allowance, while white soldiers received $13 per month, plus $3.50 for clothes.

Black troops strongly resisted this treatment. The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment served a year without pay rather than accept the unfair wages. Many blacks refused to enlist because of the discriminatory pay. Finally, in 1864, the War Department sanctioned equal wages for black soldiers.

In the South, most slaveholders were convinced that their slaves would remain loyal to them. Some did, but the vast majority crossed Union lines as soon as Northern troops entered their vicinity. A Confederate general stated in 1862 that North Carolina was losing approximately a million dollars every week because of the fleeing slaves.

Numbers of white southerners also refused to support the Confederacy. From the beginning, there were factions who vehemently disagreed with secession and remained loyal to the Union. Many poor southern whites became disillusioned during the course of the war. Wealthy planters had been granted exemptions from military service early on. This became especially inflammatory when the South instituted the draft in 1862 and the exemptions remained in place. It became clear to many poor southern whites that the war was being waged by the rich planters and the poor were fighting it. In addition, the common people were hit hard by wartime scarcity. By 1863, there was a food shortage. Riots and strikes occurred as inflation soared and people became desperate.

There were also northerners who resisted the war effort. Some were pacifists. Others were white men who resented the fact that the army was drafting them at the same time it excluded blacks. And there were whites who refused to fight once black soldiers were admitted. The North was also hit by economic depression, and enraged white people rioted against African Americans, who they accused of stealing their jobs.

Finally, on April 18, 1865, the Civil War ended with the surrender of the Confederate army. 617,000 Americans had died in the war, approximately the same number as in all of America's other wars combined. Thousands had been injured. The southern landscape was devastated.

A new chapter in American history opened as the Thirteenth Amendment, passed in January of 1865, was implemented. It abolished slavery in the United States, and now, with the end of the war, four million African Americans were free. Thousands of former slaves travelled throughout the south, visiting or searching for loved ones from whom they had become separated. Harriet Jacobs was one who returned to her old home. Former slaveholders faced the bewildering fact of emancipation with everything from concern to rage to despair.

Men and women -- black and white and in the North and South -- now began the work of rebuilding the shattered union and of creating a new social order. This period would be called Reconstruction. It would hold many promises and many tragic disappointments. It was the beginning of a long, painful struggle, far longer and more difficult than anyone could realize. It was the beginning of a struggle that is not yet finished.

As part of Reconstruction, two new amendments were added to the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in June 1865, granted citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in February of 1869, guaranteed that no American would be denied the right to vote on the basis of race. For many African Americans, however, this right would be short-lived. Following Reconstruction, they would be denied their legal right to vote in many states until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But all of this was yet to come. The Americans of 1865 were standing at the point between one era and another. What they knew was that slavery was dead. With that 250 year legacy behind them, they faced the future.

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On November 6, 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States -- an event that outraged southern states. The Republican party had run on an anti-slavery platform, and many southerners felt that there was no longer a place for them in the Union. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded.

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This was the group of states which were trying to seperate over the issue of slavery, which was the southern half of the country.

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Confederate States of America - Wikipedia

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The Confederate States of America ( CSA or C.S.), commonly referred to as the Confederacy, was an unrecognized country in North America that existed from 1861 to 1865.

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This freed all slaves and abolished slavery in the United States.

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This granted citizenship to all people and this included enslaved people.

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This gave African American men the right to vote. It was passed by congress in February 1869 and it was ratified in February, 1870.

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countries trade and industry are privatly controlled for profit

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railroad owner who built the railway which connected Chicago and New York. He started the trend of steel rails which made railroads safer and more economical.

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Cornelius Vanderbilt (May 27, 1794 - January 4, 1877), also known informally as "Commodore Vanderbilt", was an American business magnate and philanthropist who built his wealth in railroads and shipping. Born poor and having only a mediocre education, Vanderbilt used perseverance, intelligence, and luck to work his way into leadership positions in the inland water trade and invest in the rapidly growing railroad industry.

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had a long hardworking process of making steel. He worked on "Vertical Integration" to improve efficiency by controlling product quality

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Created an oil empire and in 1870 he organized the Standard Oil Company. He controlled 95% of reneferies in the USA

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Table of Contents

1. John D. Rockefeller: Early Years and Family

2. John D. Rockefeller: Standard Oil

3. John D. Rockefeller: Philanthropy and Final Years

John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), founder of the Standard Oil Company, became one of the world's wealthiest men and a major philanthropist. Born into modest circumstances in upstate New York, he entered the then-fledgling oil business in 1863 by investing in a Cleveland, Ohio refinery. In 1870, he established Standard Oil, which by the early 1880s controlled some 90 percent of U.S. refineries and pipelines. Critics accused Rockefeller of engaging in unethical practices, such as predatory pricing and colluding with railroads to eliminate his competitors in order to gain a monopoly in the industry. In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court found Standard Oil in violation of anti-trust laws and ordered it to dissolve. During his life Rockefeller donated more than $500 million to various philanthropic causes.

John D. Rockefeller: Early Years and Family

John Davison Rockefeller, the son of a traveling salesman, was born on July 8, 1839, in Richford, New York. Industrious even as a boy, the future oil magnate earned money by raising turkeys, selling candy and doing jobs for neighbors. In 1853, the Rockefeller family moved to the Cleveland, Ohio, area, where John attended high school before briefly studied bookkeeping at a commercial college.

Did you know? One of the charitable organizations established by John D. Rockefeller, Sr. was the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, founded in 1909. Less than 20 years after its creation, the Commission had achieved its primary goals, the successful eradication of hookworm disease across the southern United States.

In 1855, at age 16, he found work as an office clerk at a Cleveland commission firm that bought, sold and shipped grain, coal and other commodities. (He considered September 26, the day he started the position and entered the business world, so significant that as an adult he commemorated this "job day" with an annual celebration.) In 1859, Rockefeller and a partner established their own commission firm. That same year, America's first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania. In 1863, Rockefeller and several partners entered the booming new oil industry by investing in a Cleveland refinery.

In 1864, Rockefeller married Laura Celestia "Cettie" Spelman (1839-1915), an Ohio native whose father was a prosperous merchant, politician and abolitionist active in the Underground Railroad. (Laura Rockefeller became the namesake of Spelman College, the historically black women's college in Atlanta, Georgia, that her husband helped finance.) The Rockefellers went on to have five children, four daughters (three of whom survived to adulthood) and one son: John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Edith Rockefeller McCormick, Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong, Alta Rockefeller Prentice and Alice Rockefeller, who died when she was 13 months old.

John D. Rockefeller: Standard Oil

In 1865, Rockefeller borrowed money to buy out some of his partners and take control of the refinery, which had become the largest in Cleveland. Over the next few years, he acquired new partners and expanded his business interests in the growing oil industry. At the time, kerosene, derived from petroleum and used in lamps, was becoming an economic staple. In 1870, Rockefeller formed the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, along with his younger brother William (1841-1922), Henry Flagler (1830-1913) and a group of other men. John Rockefeller was its president and largest shareholder.

Standard Oil gained a monopoly in the oil industry by buying rival refineries and developing companies for distributing and marketing its products around the globe. In 1882, these various companies were combined into the Standard Oil Trust, which would control some 90 percent of the nation's refineries and pipelines. In order to exploit economies of scale, Standard Oil did everything from build its own oil barrels to employ scientists to figure out new uses for petroleum by-products.

Rockefeller's enormous wealth and success made him a target of muckraking journalists, reform politicians and others who viewed him as a symbol of corporate greed and criticized the methods with which he'd built his empire. As The New York Times reported in 1937: "He was accused of crushing out competition, getting rich on rebates from railroads, bribing men to spy on competing companies, of making secret agreements, of coercing rivals to join the Standard Oil Company under threat of being forced out of business, building up enormous fortunes on the ruins of other men, and so on."
READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About John D. Rockefeller
In 1890, the U.S. Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, the first federal legislation prohibiting trusts and combinations that restrained trade. Two years later, the Ohio Supreme Court dissolved the Standard Oil Trust; however, the businesses within the trust soon became part of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which functioned as a holding company. In 1911, after years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Standard Oil of New Jersey was in violation of anti-trust laws and forced it to dismantle (it was broken up into more than 30 individual companies).

John D. Rockefeller: Philanthropy and Final Years

Rockefeller retired from day-to-day business operations of Standard Oil in the mid-1890s. Inspired in part by fellow Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), who made a vast fortune in the steel industry then became a philanthropist and gave away the bulk of his money, Rockefeller donated more than half a billion dollars to various educational, religious and scientific causes through the Rockefeller Foundation. Among his activities, he funded the establishment of the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University).

In his personal life, Rockefeller was devoutly religious, a temperance advocate and an avid golfer. His goal was to reach the age of 100; however, he died at 97 on May 23, 1937, at The Casements, his winter home in Ormond Beach, Florida. (Rockefeller owned multiple residences, including a home in New York City, an estate in Lakewood, New Jersey and an estate called Kykuit, old Dutch for "lookout," set on 3,000 acres near Tarrytown, New York.) He was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland.

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John D. Rockefeller - Biography, Facts & Children | HISTORY

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John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), founder of the Standard Oil Company, became one of the world's wealthiest men as America's first billionaire and a major philanthropist.

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banker who financed the reorganization of banks and railroads. He bought out Carnegie and started the US Steel Corporation

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John Pierpont Morgan Sr. (April 17, 1837 - March 31, 1913) was an American financier and investment banker who dominated corporate finance on Wall Street throughout the Gilded Age. As the head of the banking firm that ultimately became known as J.P. Morgan and Co., he was the driving force behind the wave of industrial consolidation in the United States spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Over the course of his career on Wall Street, Morgan spearheaded the formation of several prominent multinational corporations including U.S. Steel, International Harvester and General Electric which subsequently fell under his supervision. He and his partners also held controlling interests in numerous other American businesses including Aetna, Western Union, Pullman Car Company and 21 railroads. Due to the extent of his dominance over U.S. finance, Morgan exercised enormous influence over the nation's policies and the market forces underlying its economy. During the Panic of 1907, he organized a coalition of financiers that saved the American monetary system from collapse.

As the Progressive Era's leading financier, Morgan's dedication to efficiency and modernization helped transform the shape of the American economy. Adrian Wooldridge characterized Morgan as America's "greatest banker". Morgan died in Rome, Italy, in his sleep in 1913 at the age of 75, leaving his fortune and business to his son, John Pierpont Morgan Jr. Biographer Ron Chernow estimated his fortune at $80million (equivalent to $2.4billion in 2022).

His father Junius Spencer Morgan guided his son's early career and established the Morgan banking house with offices in London, New York, Philadelphia, and Paris.

Morgan was born on April 17, 1837, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-1890) and Juliet Pierpont (1816-1884) of the influential Morgan family. His father, Junius, was a partner at Howe Mather & Co., the largest dry goods wholesaler in Hartford. His mother Juliet was the daughter of the poet John Pierpont.

Morgan preferred to be called "Pierpont", as opposed to "John". He had a varied education due in part to his father's plans. In 1847, when Morgan was ten years old, his grandfather John Morgan died and left a large fortune to Junius Spencer Morgan, who soon became a senior partner at the rechristened Mather Morgan & Co. In the fall of 1848, the young Morgan transferred to the Hartford Public School, then to the Episcopal Academy in Cheshire, Connecticut, where he boarded with the principal.

In September 1851, he passed the entrance exam for The English High School of Boston, which specialized in mathematics for careers in commerce. In April 1852, rheumatic fever struck Morgan, an illness whose symptoms became more common as his life progressed and left him in such pain that he could not walk. Junius sent him to the Azores to recover. He convalesced there for almost a year, then returned to Boston to resume his studies.

After graduation, his father sent him to Bellerive, a school in the Swiss village of La Tour-de-Peilz, where he gained fluency in French. His father then sent him to the University of Göttingen to improve his German. He attained passable fluency and a degree in art history within six months, completing his studies in 1857.

J.S. Morgan & Co.: 1858-1871

Early view (c. 1855) of 229, 225 and 219 Madison Avenue before the street was paved

After studying at Göttingen and thus completing his education, Morgan went to London in August 1857 to join his father, now a partner in the merchant banking firm George Peabody & Co.. For the next fourteen years, he worked as his father's American representative in a series of affiliate banking houses, learning the trade and lifestyle of a bank partner: Duncan, Sherman & Company (1858-60), his own firm J. Pierpont Morgan & Co. (1860-64), and finally Dabney Morgan (1864-72).

Morgan quickly moved on to New York City to begin work at Duncan Sherman as a junior clerk. Through his father's reputation and his position as the obvious successor to the Peabody house, he was quickly among the most sought-after young men on Wall Street and enjoyed the company of many of New York's leading citizens.

Morgan had a great deal of independence in both his investment decisions and lifestyle, owing partly to his father's faith in Morgan's austere religious discipline. "Remember," J.S. Morgan wrote his son, "that there is an Eye above that is ever upon you and that for every act, word, and deed you will one day be called to give account." He adopted a serious, energetic approach to his work and was praised by his father's friends for his work ethic and capacity for business.

At the time Morgan entered the firm, Peabody & Co. was struggling in the wake of the Panic of 1857, a rash of business failures which dramatically hurt investor confidence in American securities. Peabody & Co., whose business was focused on American trade and enterprise, was particularly threatened; a few of its American correspondents were forced to suspend operations. The house's creditors, including Baring Brothers, demanded payment; Peabody defied them, daring his rivals to put him out of business, and turned to the Bank of England for a loan in November 1857. Morgan himself expressed surprise that the famed Barings house was not more accommodating. The loan secured the house's survival and the London office was stabilized, but Duncan Sherman came under criticism on Wall Street, and the Mercantile Agency recommended its dissolution. J. P. Morgan urged his father to stand by Duncan Sherman in the face of "outrageous" reports "of Browns & Barings getting the credit for what they never did."

While at Duncan Sherman, Morgan gained early experience in the financing and reorganization of railroads, including the major Ohio & Mississippi and Illinois Central lines, for which he personally negotiated the loans. Most of his work involved collecting and transmitting interest and dividend payments, executing orders on the New York Stock Exchange, and conducting credit checks on mercantile houses doing business with Peabody & Co.

Starting in early January 1859, Morgan spent several months in the South to visit the firm's correspondents in Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana and to improve his knowledge of the cotton trade. He briefly visited Cuba, where he developed a lifelong taste for Cuban cigars. Most of his time in the South was spent in New Orleans, a leading cotton export hub. He received a stern warning from Duncan Sherman when he conducted an unauthorized trade of coffee at a profit, which he considered his first totally independent transaction. Later that summer, he visited his father in London. They discussed the prospects of Morgan going into business for himself, and Morgan courted Amelia Sturges, whom he later married.

As the American Civil War began, business slowed, delaying Morgan's efforts to open his own office. He opened J. Pierpont Morgan & Company some time between April and July 1861, conducting operations out of a one-room office at 53 Exchange Place. As he anticipated, most of his business was for his father and consistent with the work he had managed at Duncan Sherman. Morgan avoided serving during the war by paying a substitute $300 to take his place.

In 1862, Morgan made his cousin, James Goodwin, a partner. The firm received a serious boost when Morgan's father succeeded George Peabody as head of the London office. J.S. Morgan transferred all of the London office's remaining commercial credit and securities accounts from Duncan Sherman, and by the end of 1862, J. Pierpont Morgan & Co. was considered one of the stronger private banking houses on Wall Street.

The Civil War radically altered Morgan's focus by virtually eliminating his cotton business and drastically reducing iron imports for American railroads in favor of securities and foreign exchange operations. The Morgans, trading through J. P.'s New York office, made a large profit in the purchase and sale of Union bonds, especially after the Battle of Antietam turned the war in the Union's favor. Morgan also profited in gold after specie payments were suspended in 1862; its price was largely pegged to the possibility of a Union victory. In October 1863, he and Edward B. Ketchum transferred $1.15 million (equivalent to $20,287,000 in 2021) in gold to England, forcing a price spike and allowing both men to sell their holdings at a large profit. Critics have long considered the deal a speculative effort to corner the American gold market and evidence of Morgan's insensitivity to the nation's financial situation, although the economic consequences were ultimately minor.

Hall Carbine Affair

In August 1861, Morgan lent $20,000 (equivalent to $483,140 in 2021) to Simon Stevens, a well-connected New York City attorney and former secretary to Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens used the money to purchase five thousand carbines for resale to General John C. Frémont, commander of the Department of the West. The carbines in question were developed by John H. Hall and manufactured by Simeon North, purchased by the U.S. government, and resold to arms dealer Arthur M. Eastman for $3.50 apiece in June 1861 (equivalent to $114 in 2022). After the Union defeat at Bull Run placed a premium on arms, Stevens used the Morgan loan to purchase the rifles from Eastman at $11.50 apiece and immediately resold them to Frémont, a longtime acquaintance, at $22 each.

Morgan photographed c. 1870

During the loan's thirty-eight day duration, Morgan held title to the carbines and assumed responsibility for having their barrels replaced with spirally grooved ones before shipment to Frémont. Stevens approached Morgan for another loan, which Morgan refused, instead asking Stevens for the $20,000 on the original loan and attempting to remove himself from the transaction. On September 14, Morgan received $55,000 from the Army for the carbines, deducted the face value of the loan plus expenses and interest, and passed the remainder to Stevens.

By September, when Morgan received payment, the deal was already controversial. Military officials felt Frémont had overpaid, and an 1863 House of Representatives report indicted the profiteers as "worse than traitors in arms." Though Morgan was neither criticized nor censured during contemporary investigations, his name remained connected with the Hall Carbine Affair for many years.

Debate over Morgan's knowledge and involvement became a cause célèbre within his lifetime, attracting a wide range of commentary; debate over his involvement and knowledge has persisted long after his death. Interest in Morgan's role in the affair was rekindled in 1910 with the publication of Gustavus Myers' History of the Great American Fortunes. Myers claimed the rifles were more likely to blow the rifleman's thumb off than they were to cause any damage to the enemy. An earlier version of the carbine rifle was known to be subject to this problem. R. Gordon Wasson, later the head of public relations for J.P. Morgan & Co., argued that there was no evidence Morgan knew that he was participating in a scheme to profit. Vincent Carosso, author of an academic history of the Morgan house, concurs that Stevens "used Morgan's name" to cover his greed and that "none of the evidence suggested that Morgan himself had been a party to the shabby contract or had participated in its profits," though he "failed to exercise the care and caution that he had demonstrated two years earlier in the New Orleans coffee deal." Matthew Josephson, who popularized the term "robber baron," asserted that Morgan certainly did know of the scheme, because he had presented the government with a bill for $58,175 before he delivered the remaining rifles that were being held as collateral. Reviewing the evidence, Charles Morris also concluded that it was "implausible" that Morgan did not know about the source of his profits.

From 1864 to 1872, he was a member of the firm of Dabney, Morgan, & Co. In 1869, He wrested control of the Albany and Susquehanna Railroad from Jay Gould and Jim Fisk.

Drexel Morgan & Co.: 1871-1895

In 1871, at the behest of J.S. Morgan, the Philadelphia financier Anthony Joseph Drexel became J. P.'s mentor. They formed Drexel Morgan & Co. This new merchant banking partnership, based in New York, served as an agent for European investment in the United States and assumed the leading role in financing America's railroads and stabilizing and revitalizing American securities markets. The firm created a national capital market for industrial companies, which had previously existed only for railroads and canals. Drexel Morgan also played an important role in government finance. To restore investor confidence, Drexel Morgan underwrote the pay of the entire U.S. Army in 1877 and bailed out the U.S. government during the Panic of 1895. The foundation of Drexel Morgan and their partnership with Anthony Drexel also established Morgan family offices in London (J.S. Morgan), Philadelphia, New York City (Dabney Morgan), and Paris (Drexel Harjes), which would subsequently become J.P. Morgan & Co.

After his father's death in 1890, Morgan took control of J. S. Morgan & Co.

Bond of the New Jersey Junction Railroad Company, issued 30. June 1886, reverse side with signatures of John Pierpont Morgan and Harris C. Fahnestock as trustees

In his ascent to power, Morgan focused on America's largest business enterprises: railroads. He led the syndicate that broke the government-financing privileges of Jay Cooke and developed and financed a national railroad empire by reorganization and consolidation. He raised large sums in Europe. Rather than participating solely as a financier, he actively managed and reorganized the railroad corporations, increasing efficiency and acting as an early pioneer in the practice of private equity investing, a process that became known as "Morganization".

In 1883, Morgan successfully marketed a large part of William H. Vanderbilt's New York Central holdings. In 1885, he reorganized the New York, West Shore & Buffalo Railroad and leased it to the New York Central. In 1886, he reorganized the Philadelphia & Reading, and in 1888, the Chesapeake & Ohio.

In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act. Morgan set up industry conferences in 1889 and 1890 which paved the way for a wave of consolidations in the early 20th century. In an unprecedented move, he brought together railroad presidents to follow the new laws and write agreements for the maintenance of "public, reasonable, uniform and stable rates". The first of their kind, the conferences created a community of interest among competing lines, paving the way for the great consolidations of the early 20th century.

Morgan also financed street railways, especially in New York City.

J.P. Morgan & Company: 1895-1913

After the death of Anthony Drexel, the firm was renamed J. P. Morgan & Company in 1895, retaining close ties with Drexel & Company of Philadelphia; Morgan, Harjes & Company of Paris; and J.S. Morgan & Company (after 1910 Morgan, Grenfell & Company) of London. By 1900 it was one of the world's most powerful banking houses, focused primarily on reorganizations and consolidations.

Morgan had many partners over the years, such as George Walbridge Perkins, but always remained firmly in charge. His international reputation as a financier began to draw investors to the businesses that he took over.

At the depths of the Panic of 1893, around 1895, the U.S. Treasury nearly depleted its gold reserves. Morgan put forward a plan for the federal government to buy gold from his and European banks, but it was declined in favor of a plan to sell government bonds directly to the general public. Morgan demanded a meeting with President Grover Cleveland, where he claimed the United States government could default that day if action was not taken.

Morgan came up with a plan to use an old civil war statute that allowed Morgan and the Rothschilds to sell 3.5 million ounces of gold directly to the U.S. Treasury in exchange for a 30-year bond issue. The episode saved the Treasury but hurt Cleveland's standing with the populist agrarian wing of the Democratic Party, ensuring his political career was over. In the 1896 United States presidential election, bankers came under a withering attack from William Jennings Bryan, and Morgan was among many who donated heavily to Republican William McKinley.

In 1900, the inventor Nikola Tesla convinced Morgan he could build a trans-Atlantic wireless communication system based on his theories of Earth and atmospheric electrical conduction (eventually sited at Wardenclyffe) that would outperform the short range radio wave-based wireless telegraph system then being demonstrated by Guglielmo Marconi. In what may have been a philanthropic investment, Morgan gave Tesla $150,000 (equivalent to $5,276,400 in 2022) to build the system and Tesla offered him a 51% control of the patents. Almost as soon as the letter of agreement was signed Tesla decided to scale up the facility to include his ideas of terrestrial wireless power transmission to make what he thought was a more competitive system. Morgan refused to give Tesla any further money towards the project and, with Tesla unable to secure further investment capital, Wardenclyffe's development stalled and the site was abandoned by 1906.

Portrait of J. P. Morgan; Cutthroat Capitalist -Oil on canvas by Fedor Encke, 1903

The Northern Pacific Railway went bankrupt in the Panic of 1893. The bankruptcy wiped out the railroad's bondholders, leaving it free of debt, and a complex financial battle for its control ensued. In 1901, a compromise was reached between Morgan, New York financier E. H. Harriman and Minnesota railroad builder James J. Hill. To reduce competition in the Midwest, they created the Northern Securities Company to merge three of the region's most important railways: the Northern Pacific Railway, the Great Northern Railway, and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. The parties ran into unexpected opposition from President Theodore Roosevelt, who considered the merger bad for consumers and a violation of the seldom-enforced Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In 1902, Roosevelt ordered Attorney General Philander Knox to sue to break it up. In 1904, the Supreme Court dissolved the Northern Security company; though Morgan did not lose money, his all-powerful political reputation suffered.

In 1900, Morgan began talks to purchase Andrew Carnegie's steel business and merge it with several other steel, coal, mining and shipping firms. After financing the creation of the Federal Steel Company, Morgan merged it with the Carnegie Steel Company and several other steel and iron businesses (including William Edenbirn's Consolidated Steel and Wire Company) in 1901, forming the United States Steel Corporation. U.S. Steel was the world's first billion-dollar company, with an authorized capitalization of $1.4 billion, much larger than any other industrial firm and comparable in size to the largest railroads.

U.S. Steel's goals were to achieve greater economies of scale, reduce transportation and resource costs, expand product lines, and improve distribution to allow the United States to compete globally with the United Kingdom and Germany. U.S. Steel president Charles M. Schwab and others claimed the company's size would enable it to be more aggressive and effective in pursuing distant international markets. Critics regarded U.S. Steel as a monopoly, as it sought to dominate not only steel but the construction of bridges, ships, railroad cars, rails, wire, nails, and many other products. With U.S. Steel, Morgan captured two-thirds of the steel market, and Schwab was confident that the company would soon hold a 75% market share. However, its market share dropped. In 1903, Schwab resigned to form Bethlehem Steel, which became the second largest U.S. steel producer.

U.S. Steel also faced criticism for its labor policies. U.S. Steel was non-union and used aggressive tactics to identify and root out pro-union "troublemakers." The lawyers and bankers who had organized the merger, including Morgan, were more concerned with long-range profits, stability, good public relations, and avoiding trouble. His views generally prevailed, and the result was a "paternalistic" labor policy.

Morgan suffered a rare business defeat in 1902 when he attempted to build and operate a line on the London Underground. Transit magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes thwarted Morgan's effort to obtain parliamentary authority to build the Piccadilly, City and North East London Railway, a subway line that would have competed with "tube" lines controlled by Yerkes. Morgan called Yerkes' coup "the greatest rascality and conspiracy I ever heard of".

International Mercantile Marine and RMS Titanic: 1902-1913

In 1902, J.P. Morgan & Co. financed the formation of International Mercantile Marine Co. (IMMC), an Atlantic shipping company which absorbed several major American and British lines in an attempt to monopolize the shipping trade. Morgan hoped to dominate transatlantic shipping through interlocking directorates and contractual arrangements with the railroads, but that proved impossible because of the unscheduled nature of sea transport, American antitrust legislation, and an agreement with the British government.

Morgan had a private suite and promenade deck on the RMS Titanic and scheduled to sail on the ill-fated maiden voyage of the ship, which was owned by an IMMC subsidiary, White Star Line, but those plans were later changed. The ship's famous sinking was a financial disaster for IMMC. Analysis of financial records shows that IMMC was over-leveraged and suffered from inadequate cash flow causing it to default on bond interest payments.

In response to the sinking, Morgan purportedly said:

Monetary losses amount to nothing in life. It is the loss of life that counts. It is that frightful death.

Morgan's overpowering role in the American economy was demonstrated in this political cartoon

The Panic of 1907 was a financial crisis that almost crippled the American economy. Major New York banks were on the verge of bankruptcy and there was no mechanism to rescue them, until Morgan stepped in to help resolve the crisis. To ease the crisis, Secretary of the Treasury George B. Cortelyou earmarked $35 million of federal money to deposit in New York banks. Morgan then met with the nation's leading financiers in his New York mansion, where he forced them to devise a plan to meet the crisis. James Stillman, president of the National City Bank, also played a central role. Morgan organized a team of bank and trust executives which redirected money between banks, secured further international lines of credit, and bought up the plummeting stocks of healthy corporations.

A delicate issue arose regarding the brokerage firm of Moore and Schley, which was deeply invested in the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI). Moore and Schley had used over $6 million of TCI stock as collateral for loans to Wall Street banks, which the firm now could not pay. If Moore and Schley failed, it could precipitate a larger crisis. Thus, Morgan proposed merging the TCI with U.S. Steel, one of its chief competitors.

U.S. Steel president Elbert Gary agreed, but was concerned that antitrust implications could obstruct the merger. Morgan sent Gary to see President Theodore Roosevelt, who promised legal immunity for the deal. U.S. Steel thereupon paid $30 million for the TCI stock and Moore and Schley was saved. The announcement had an immediate effect; by November 7, 1907, the panic was over.

The crisis underscored the need for a powerful oversight mechanism, and in 1913, banking and political leaders, led by Senator Nelson Aldrich, devised a plan that resulted in the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

"I Like a Little Competition"-J. P. Morgan, pen and ink by Art Young, relating to the answer Morgan gave to the Pujo Committee in 1912, when asked whether he disliked competition.

While conservatives hailed Morgan for civic responsibility, strengthening the national economy, and devotion to the arts and religion, critics of banking and consolidation viewed him as one of the leading figures in the system they rejected. They attacked Morgan for the terms of his 1895 loan of gold to the U.S. Treasury. Many, including writer Upton Sinclair, attacked him for his handling of the Panic of 1907. They also blamed him for the financial ills of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.

In December 1912, Morgan testified before the Pujo Committee, a subcommittee of the House Banking and Currency committee. The committee ultimately concluded that a small number of financial leaders was exercising considerable control over many industries. The partners of J.P. Morgan & Co. and directors of First National and National City Bank controlled aggregate resources of $22.245 billion, which Louis Brandeis compared to the value of all the property in the twenty-two states west of the Mississippi River.

Investigation by historian James Lide discovered that through parts of its business, JPMorgan Chase accepted thousands of slaves as collateral on loans made to plantation owners in the early 19th century, and that it ended up owning several hundred slaves. The banks in question, Citizens' Bank and Canal Bank, both now part of JPMorgan, served plantations from the 1830s until the American Civil War, and sometimes took ownership of slaves when the plantation owners defaulted on loans. JPMorgan estimated that between 1831 and 1865, the two banks accepted approximately 13,000 slaves as collateral and ended up owning about 1,250 slaves. An apology was made in compliance with a rule requiring companies to detail past dealings with the slave trade when doing business with the city of Chicago.

From 1890 to 1913, 42 major corporations were organized or their securities were underwritten, in whole or part, by J.P. Morgan and Company.

J. P. Morgan walking alongside his son in the last known photograph of the two together (ca. 1913)

In October 1861, Morgan married Amelia "Memi" Sturges (1835-1862) at her home on 5 East Fourteenth Street. He had courted her for two years, and when they married, Memi was already seriously ill with tuberculosis. Morgan had to carry her to the drawing room for a small private ceremony and afterwards to the carriage which took them to the pier. They travelled to Algiers, where he hoped the warm climate would restore their health, but it did not, and she died in Nice in February 1862, four months and ten days after their marriage.

He then married Frances Louisa "Fanny" Tracy (1842-1924), on May 31, 1865. They had four children:

Morgan was self-conscious about his rosacea and hated being photographed without permission.

Morgan often had a tremendous physical effect on people; one man said that a visit from Morgan left him feeling "as if a gale had blown through the house." He was physically large with massive shoulders, piercing eyes, and a purple nose. He was known to dislike publicity and hated being photographed without his permission; as a result of his self-consciousness of his rosacea, all of his professional portraits were retouched. His deformed nose was due to a disease called rhinophyma, which can result from rosacea. As the deformity worsens, pits, nodules, fissures, lobulations, and pedunculation contort the nose. This condition inspired the crude taunt "Johnny Morgan's nasal organ has a purple hue." Surgeons could have shaved away the rhinophymous growth of sebaceous tissue during Morgan's lifetime, but as a child he suffered from infantile seizures, and Morgan's son-in-law, Herbert L. Satterlee, has speculated that he did not seek surgery for his nose because he feared the seizures would return.

His social and professional self-confidence were too well established to be undermined by this affliction. It appeared as if he dared people to meet him squarely and not shrink from the sight, asserting the force of his character over the ugliness of his face.

Morgan smoked dozens of cigars per day and favored large Havana cigars dubbed Hercules' Clubs by observers.

Morgan was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church, and by 1890 was one of its most influential leaders. He was a founding member of the Church Club of New York, an Episcopal private member's club in Manhattan. Morgan was appointed as one of the first laymen on the committee that created the 1892 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, where he petitioned for the creation of a special limited collectible printing that he later financed. In 1910, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church established a commission, proposed by Bishop Charles Brent, to implement a world conference of churches to address their differences in their " faith and order." Morgan was so impressed by the proposal for such a conference that he contributed $100,000 (equivalent to $2,125,100 in 2021) to finance the commission's work.

The Morgan Library & Museum

His house at 219 Madison Avenue was originally built in 1853 by John Jay Phelps and purchased by Morgan in 1882. It became the first electrically lit private residence in New York. His interest in the new technology was a result of his financing Thomas Alva Edison's Edison Electric Illuminating Company in 1878. It was there that a reception of 1,000 people was held for the marriage of Juliet Morgan and William Pierson Hamilton on April 12, 1894, where they were given a favorite clock of Morgan's. Morgan also owned the "Cragston" estate, located in Highland Falls, New York. His son, of the same name, was the owner of East Island in Glen Cove, New York.

J. P. Morgan spent three months of every year in London and owned two houses there. His 'town' house, 13 Prince's Gate was inherited from his father and was later expanded by the acquisition of the neighbouring Number 14 to house his growing art collection. After his death the merged houses were offered to the US government for use as the residence of the US Ambassador, from 1929 to 1955. His other property was Dover House, Putney, which was later demolished and developed into the Dover House Estate.

Morgan was a member of the Union Club in New York City. When a friend, Erie Railroad president John King, was blackballed, Morgan resigned and organized the Metropolitan Club of New York. He donated the land on 5th Avenue and 60th Street at a cost of $125,000, and commanded Stanford White to "...build me a club fit for gentlemen, forget the expense..." He invited King in as a charter member and served as club president from 1891 to 1900.

Morgan was a benefactor of the Morgan Library and Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, Groton School, Harvard University (especially its medical school), Trinity College, the Lying-in Hospital of the City of New York, and the New York trade schools.

J. P. Morgan's yacht Corsair II, later bought by the U.S. Government and renamed the USS Gloucester to serve in the Spanish-American War. Photograph by J. S. Johnston

Morgan was the Commodore of the New York Yacht Club (NYYC) and was present at a board meeting on October 27, 1898, to discuss the construction of a new clubhouse. Morgan offered to acquire a 75-by-100-foot (23 by 30 m) plot on 44th Street in midtown Manhattan if the NYYC raised its annual membership dues from $25 to $50 and the new clubhouse occupied the entire site. The NYYC's board accepted his offer, and Morgan bought the lots the next day for $148,000 and donated to the club.

NYYC members hosted an informal housewarming party on January 29, 1901, giving Morgan a trophy in gratitude of his purchase of the site.

An avid yachtsman, Morgan owned several large yachts, the first being the Corsair, built by William Cramp & Sons for Charles J. Osborn (1837-1885) and launched on May 26, 1880. Charles J. Osborn was Jay Gould's private banker. Morgan bought the yacht in 1882. The well-known quote, "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it" is commonly attributed to Morgan in response to a question about the cost of maintaining a yacht, although the story is unconfirmed. A similarly unconfirmed legend attributes the quote to his son, J. P. Morgan Jr., in connection with the launching of the son's yacht Corsair IV at Bath Iron Works in 1930.

Morgan was a collector of books, pictures, paintings, clocks and other art objects, many loaned or given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (of which he was president and a major force in its establishment), and many housed in his London house and in his private library on 36th Street, near Madison Avenue in New York City.

For a number of years the British artist and art critic Roger Fry worked for the museum, and in effect for Morgan, as a collector.

His son, J. P. Morgan Jr., made the Pierpont Morgan Library a public institution in 1924 as a memorial to his father, and appointed Belle da Costa Greene, his father's private librarian, as its first director.

By the turn of the century, Morgan had become one of America's most important collectors of gems and had assembled the most important gem collection in the U.S. as well as of American gemstones (over 1,000 pieces). Tiffany & Co. assembled his first collection under their Chief Gemologist, George Frederick Kunz. The collection was exhibited at the World's Fair in Paris in 1889. The exhibit won two golden awards and drew the attention of important scholars, lapidaries, and the general public.

George Frederick Kunz continued to build a second, even finer, collection which was exhibited in Paris in 1900. These collections have been donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where they were known as the Morgan-Tiffany and the Morgan-Bement collections. In 1911 Kunz named a newly found gem after his best customer morganite.

Photography

U.S. gemstones from the Morgan collection

Morgan was a patron to photographer Edward S. Curtis, offering Curtis $75,000 in 1906 (equivalent to $1,730,560 in 2021) to create a series on the American Indians. Curtis eventually published a 20-volume work entitled The North American Indian. Curtis also produced a motion picture, In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), which was restored in 1974 and re-released as In the Land of the War Canoes. Curtis was also famous for a 1911 magic lantern slide show The Indian Picture Opera which used his photos and original musical compositions by composer Henry F. Gilbert.

Morgan died while traveling abroad on March 31, 1913, in his sleep at the Grand Hotel Plaza in Rome, Italy. His body was brought back to America aboard the SS France, a French Line passenger ship. Flags on Wall Street flew at half-staff, and in an honor usually reserved for heads of state, the stock market closed for two hours when his body passed through New York City. His body was brought to lie in his home and adjacent library the first night of arrival in New York City. His remains were interred in the Cedar Hill Cemetery in his birthplace of Hartford, Connecticut. His son, John Pierpont "Jack" Morgan Jr., inherited the banking business. His estate was worth $68.3 million ($1.39 billion in today's dollars based on CPI, or $25.2 billion based on share of GDP), of which about $30 million represented his share in the New York and Philadelphia banks. The value of his art collection was estimated at $50 million.

His son, J. P. Morgan Jr., took over the business at his father's death, but he was never as influential. The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act forced the dissolution of the House of Morgan into three entities:

The gemstone morganite was named in his honor.

The Cragston Dependencies, associated with his estate, Cragston (at Highlands, New York), was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

He bequeathed his mansion and large book collections to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

John Pierpont Morgan memorial in Cedar Hill Cemetery

A contemporary literary biography of Morgan is used as an allegory for the financial environment in America after World War I in the second volume, Nineteen Nineteen, of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy.

Morgan appears as a character in Caleb Carr's novel The Alienist,[99] in E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime,[100] in Steven S. Drachman's novel The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh,[101] in Graham Moore's novel The Last Days of Night,[102] and in Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray's novel The Personal Librarian.[103]

Morgan is believed to have been the model for Walter Parks Thatcher (played by George Coulouris), guardian of the young Citizen Kane (film directed by Orson Welles) with whom he has a tense relationship-Kane blaming Thatcher for destroying his childhood.[104]

According to Phil Orbanes, former vice president of Parker Brothers, the Rich Uncle Pennybags of the American version of the board game Monopoly is modeled after J. P. Morgan.[105] The family of the illustrator Daniel Fox, who in 1936 created the mascot for the game, have credited J. P. Morgan as being the inspiration for the character.[106]

Morgan's career is highlighted in episodes three and four of the History Channel's The Men Who Built America.[107]

"My Name Is Morgan (But It Ain't J.P.)" - 1906 popular song released as an Edison cylinder recording, with words by Will A. Mahoney, music by Halsey K. Mohr, and sung by Bob Roberts. Originally released as a "coon song" but revised over the years, a poor man named Morgan tells his girlfriend not to mistake him for a rich man.[108][109]

The villain of Street Fighter 6 is an elderly upper-class banker that uses a variety of aliases, all of which have the initials "JP." He claims to have lived for over one hundred years, empowered by his business association with M. Bison

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19. ^ "Harriman Gets Chicago Lines.: Terminal Transfer Company's Stock Reported in Control of Eastern Man. Details of the Deal. Charity Ball for Benefit of Nursery and Childs' Hospital a Success. General New York News". Chicago Tribune. January 30, 1901. p. 5. ProQuest 173095798.

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Brands, H.W. (2010). American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900. New York: Anchor Books.

Burgan, Michael (2007). J. Pierpont Morgan: Industrialist and Financier. Capstone.

Carosso, Vincent P. (1987). The Morgans: Private International Bankers, 1854-1913. Harvard Univ. Press. p. 888. ISBN 978-0-674-58729-8.

Chernow, Ron (2001). The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance. ISBN 0-8021-3829-2.

Clark, John J.; Clark, Margaret T. (1997). "The International Mercantile Marine Company: A Financial Analysis". American Neptune. 57 (2): 137-154.

Garraty, John A. (1960). "The United States Steel Corporation Versus Labor: the Early Years". Labor History. 1 (1): 3-38. doi:10.1080/00236566008583839.

Gross, Michael (2009). Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum. New York: Broadway Books. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-7679-2488-7. OCLC 244417339.

Hein, David; Shattuck, Gardiner H. Jr. (2005). The Episcopalians. Westport: Praeger.

Morris, Charles (2006). The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy. New York: Holt Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-8050-8134-3.

Rottenberg, Dan (2006). The Man Who Made Wall Street: Anthony J. Drexel and the Rise of Modern Finance. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 98. ISBN 9780812219661.

Satterlee, Herbert L. (1939). J. Pierpont Morgan. New York: The Macmillan Company., written by Morgan's son-in-law

Bryman, Jeremy. J. P. Morgan: Banker to a Growing Nation. Morgan Reynolds Publishing (2001) ISBN 1-883846-60-9, for middle schools

Wheeler, George, Pierpont Morgan and Friends: the Anatomy of a Myth, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1973. ISBN 0136761488

Carosso, Vincent P. Investment Banking in America: A History Harvard University Press (1970)

De Long, Bradford. "Did JP Morgan's Men Add Value?: An Economist's Perspective on Financial Capitalism," in Peter Temin, ed., Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information (1991) pp. 205-36; shows firms with a Morgan partner on their board had higher stock prices (relative to book value) than their competitors

Forbes, John Douglas. J. P. Morgan Jr. 1867-1943 (1981). 262 pp. biography of his son

Fraser, Steve. Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life HarperCollins (2005)

Garraty, John A. Right-Hand Man: The Life of George W. Perkins. (1960) ISBN 978-0-313-20186-8; Perkins was a top aide 1900-1910

Geisst; Charles R. Wall Street: A History from Its Beginnings to the Fall of Enron. Oxford University Press. 2004.

Giedeman, Daniel C. "J. P. Morgan, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and Industrial Finance-Constraints in the Early Twentieth Century", Essays in Economic and Business History, 2004 22: 111-126

Hannah, Leslie. "J. P. Morgan in London and New York before 1914," Business History Review 85 (Spring 2011) 113-50

Keys, C.M. (January 1908). "The Builders I: The House of Morgan". The World's Work. Vol. 15, no. 2. pp. 9779-9704.

Moody, John. The Masters of Capital: A Chronicle of Wall Street (1921)

Baker, Ray Stannard (October 1901). "J. Pierpont Morgan". McClure's Magazine. Vol. 17, no. 6. pp. 507-518., a biographical magazine article

Brands, H.W. (1999). Masters of Enterprise: Giants of American Business from John Jacob Astor and J. P. Morgan to Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey., including a short biography of Morgan

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John Pierpont Morgan Sr. (April 17, 1837 - March 31, 1913) was an American financier and investment banker who dominated corporate finance on Wall Street throughout the Gilded Age. As the head of the banking firm that ultimately became known as J.P.

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Wealthy business owners who left a positive impact on the USA

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An article about Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt and their influsence on the Industrial Age

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business owners who used negative tactics

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Robber baron (industrialist) - Wikipedia

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The term robber baron derives from the Raubritter ( robber knights), the medieval German lords who charged nominally illegal tolls (unauthorized by the Holy Roman Emperor) on the primitive roads crossing their lands or larger tolls along the Rhine river - all without adding anything of value, but instead lining their pockets at the cost of the common good ( rent seeking).

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organized workers who used collective bargaining to improve conditions where they worked

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moving across the country where immigrants and slaves moved to urban centers

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Period between the Civil War and WWI when the American economy grew and people used monopolies to gain great wealth

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idea that the wealthy were originally superior and deserving

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Social Darwinism | Definition, Uses, & Facts

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Social Darwinism is a theory developed in the 19th century that human groups and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the theory, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited while the strong grew i…

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idea saying that wealthy Americans had the responsibility to spend their money to help people and for the good of others

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When writers wanted to reveal corruption in large platforms like the government and other businesses.

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campaign to allow female voters

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prevention of law of alcohol

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belief that US should refrain from involving in overseas policies and wars

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policy where a strong nation wants to dominate other countries politically, socially, and economically

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captain in the Navy who was a supporter of Imperialism

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belief that all countries should have equal access to all of the ports to open trade in China

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political orientation of people maintaining strong military force and being prepared to aggressively defend or promote national interests.

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ideology that talks about people's membership in a nation

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made in 1919 to promote world peace and cooperation but weakened by the US not wanting to join.

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resolution to WWI that blamed germany since it destroyed germany's millitary

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when African Americans moved from the South to the industrial centers of the Northeast and midwest

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message from germany to Mexico shared by the british which made mexico want to invade the US to keep the US occupied in exchange for german support in Mexico.

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the practice of letting investors buy stocks for fractions of its price and borrow the rest at high interest rates

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tax on imports

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relief, recovery, and reform

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American military strategy in WWII to claim access into the pacific and led to the defeat of Japan.

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this was the death of six million jews and others by the Nazis

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this was a military alliance between usa and western europe

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this was the belief that if one country was communist, it's neighbors would be as well.

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this was created by president lbj to improve social welfare safety net in america

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globally centered groups who try to solve world problems

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The offices of the United Nations in Geneva (Switzerland), which is the city that hosts the highest number of international organizations in the world[1]

An international organization, also known as an intergovernmental organization or an international institution, is an organization that is established by a treaty or other type of instrument governed by international law and possesses its own legal personality, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, International Union for Conservation of Nature, and NATO. International organizations are composed of primarily member states, but may also include other entities, such as other international organizations, firms, and nongovernmental organizations. Additionally, entities (including states) may hold observer status. An alternative definition is that an international organization is a stable set of norms and rules meant to govern the behavior of states and other actors in the international system.

Notable examples include the United Nations (UN), Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Council of Europe (COE), International Labour Organization (ILO), International Criminal Court, and International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL).

Scottish law professor James Lorimer has been credited with coining the term "international organization" in a 1871 article in the Revue de Droit International et de Legislation Compare. Lorimer use the term frequently in his two-volume Institutes of the Law of Nations (1883, 1884). Other early uses of the term were by law professor Walther Schucking in works published in 1907, 1908 and 1909, and by political science professor Paul S. Reinsch in 1911. In 1935, Pitman B. Potter defined international organization as "an association or union of nations established or recognized by them for the purpose of realizing a common end". He distinguished between bilateral and multilateral organizations on one end and customary or conventional organizations on the other end. In his 1922 book An Introduction to the Study of International Organization, Potter argued that international organization was distinct from " international intercourse" (all relations between states), "international law" (which lacks enforcement) and world government.

International Organizations are sometimes referred to as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), to clarify the distinction from international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), which are non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that operate internationally. These include international nonprofit organizations such as the World Organization of the Scout Movement, International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières, as well as lobby groups that represent the interests of multinational corporations.

IGOs are established by a treaty that acts as a charter creating the group. Treaties are formed when lawful representatives (governments) of several states go through a ratification process, providing the IGO with an international legal personality. Intergovernmental organizations are an important aspect of public international law.

Intergovernmental organizations in a legal sense should be distinguished from simple groupings or coalitions of states, such as the G7 or the Quartet. Such groups or associations have not been founded by a constituent document and exist only as task groups. Intergovernmental organizations must also be distinguished from treaties. Many treaties (such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade before the establishment of the World Trade Organization) do not establish an independent secretariat and instead rely on the parties for their administration, for example by setting up a joint committee. Other treaties have established an administrative apparatus which was not deemed to have been granted binding legal authority. The broader concept wherein relations among three or more states are organized according to certain principles they hold in common is multilateralism.

Intergovernmental organizations differ in function, membership, and membership criteria. They have various goals and scopes, often outlined in the treaty or charter. Some IGOs developed to fulfill a need for a neutral forum for debate or negotiation to resolve disputes. Others developed to carry out mutual interests with unified aims to preserve peace through conflict resolution and better international relations, promote international cooperation on matters such as environmental protection, to promote human rights, to promote social development (education, health care), to render humanitarian aid, and to economic development. Some are more general in scope (the United Nations) while others may have subject-specific missions (such as INTERPOL or the International Telecommunication Union and other standards organizations). Common types include:

Worldwide or global organizations - generally open to nations worldwide as long as certain criteria are met: This category includes the United Nations (UN) and its specialized agencies, the World Health Organization, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It also includes globally operating intergovernmental organizations that are not an agency of the UN, including for example: the Hague Conference on Private International Law, an operating intergovernmental organization based in The Hague that pursues the progressive unification of private international law; the International Criminal Court that adjudicates crimes defined under the Rome Statute; and the CGIAR (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research), a global partnership that unites intergovernmental organizations engaged in research for a food-secured future.

Cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious, or historical organizations - open to members based on some cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious, or historical link. Examples include the Commonwealth of Nations, Arab League, Organisation internationale de la Francophonie , Community of Portuguese Language Countries, Organization of Turkic States, International Organization of Turkic Culture, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Economic organizations - based on macro-economic policy goals: Some are dedicated to free trade and reduction of trade barriers, e.g. World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund. Others are focused on international development. International cartels, such as OPEC, also exist. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was founded as an economic-policy-focused organization. An example of a recently formed economic IGO is the Bank of the South.

Educational organizations - centered around tertiary-level study. EUCLID University was chartered as a university and umbrella organization dedicated to sustainable development in signatory countries. The United Nations has founded multiple universities, notably the United Nations University and the University for Peace, for research and education around issues relevant to the UN, such as peace and sustainable development. The United Nations also has a dedicated training arm: the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).

Health and Population Organizations - based on common perceived health and population goals. These are formed to address those challenges collectively, for example, the intergovernmental partnership for population and development Partners in Population and Development.

Regional organizations - open to members from a particular continent or other specific region of the world. This category includes the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CLACS), Council of Europe (CoE), European Union (EU), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), Energy Community, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), African Union (AU), Organization of American States (OAS), Association of Caribbean States (ACS), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Islamic Development Bank, Union of South American Nations, Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD), Pacific Islands Forum, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization (AALCO) and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).

Regional organizations

In regional organizations like the European Union, African Union, NATO, ASEAN and Mercosur, there are restrictions on membership due to factors such as geography or political regimes. To enter the European Union (EU), the states require different criteria; member states need to be European, liberal-democratic political system, and be a capitalist economy.

The oldest regional organization is the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, created in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna.

There are several different reasons a state may choose membership in an intergovernmental organization. But there are also reasons membership may be rejected.

Reasons for participation:

Economic rewards: In the case of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), membership in the free trade agreement benefits the parties' economies. For example, Mexican companies are given better access to U.S. markets due to their membership. External actors can also contribute to economic rewards and fuel the attractiveness of IGOs - notably for developing countries. For example, external donor funding from the European Union to IGOs in the Global South.

Political influence: Smaller countries, such as Portugal and Belgium, who do not carry much political clout on the international stage, are given a substantial increase in influence through membership in IGOs such as the European Union. Also for countries with more influence such as France and Germany, IGOs are beneficial as the nation increases influence in the smaller countries' internal affairs and expanding other nations dependence on themselves, so to preserve allegiance.

Security: Membership in an IGO such as NATO gives security benefits to member countries. This provides an arena where political differences can be resolved.

Democracy: It has been noted that member countries experience a greater degree of democracy and those democracies survive longer.

Reasons for rejecting membership:

Loss of sovereignty: Membership often comes with a loss of state sovereignty as treaties are signed that require co-operation on the part of all member states.

Insufficient benefits: Often membership does not bring about substantial enough benefit to warrant membership in the organization.

Attractive external options: Bilateral co-operation with external actors or competing IGOs may provide more attractive (external) policy options for member states. Thus, powerful external actors may undermine existing IGOs.

Intergovernmental organizations are provided with privileges and immunities that are intended to ensure their independent and effective functioning. They are specified in the treaties that give rise to the organization (such as the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations and the Agreement on the Privileges and Immunities of the International Criminal Court), which are normally supplemented by further multinational agreements and national regulations (for example the International Organizations Immunities Act in the United States). The organizations are thereby immune from the jurisdiction of national courts. Certain privileges and immunities are also specified in the Vienna Convention on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations of a Universal Character of 1975,. which however has so far not been signed by 35 states and is thus not yet in force (status: 2022).

Rather than by national jurisdiction, legal accountability is intended to be ensured by legal mechanisms that are internal to the intergovernmental organization itself and access to administrative tribunals. In the course of many court cases where private parties tried to pursue claims against international organizations, there has been a gradual realization that alternative means of dispute settlement are required as states have fundamental human rights obligations to provide plaintiffs with access to court in view of their right to a fair trial. Otherwise, the organizations' immunities may be put in question in national and international courts. Some organizations hold proceedings before tribunals relating to their organization to be confidential, and in some instances have threatened disciplinary action should an employee disclose any of the relevant information. Such confidentiality has been criticized as a lack of transparency.

The immunities also extend to employment law. In this regard, immunity from national jurisdiction necessitates that reasonable alternative means are available to effectively protect employees' rights; in this context, a first instance Dutch court considered an estimated duration of proceedings before the Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organization of 15 years to be too long. An international organization does not pay taxes, is difficult to prosecute in court and is not obliged to provide information to any parliament.

The United Nations focuses on five main areas: "maintaining peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, supporting sustainable development, and upholding international law". UN agencies, such as UN Relief and Works Agency, are generally regarded as international organizations in their own right. Additionally, the United Nations has Specialized Agencies, which are organizations within the United Nations System that have their member states (often nearly identical to the UN Member States) and are governed independently by them; examples include international organizations that predate the UN, such as the International Telecommunication Union, and the Universal Postal Union, as well as organizations that were created after the UN such as the World Health Organization (which was made up of regional organizations such as PAHO that predated the UN). A few UN special agencies are very centralized in policy and decision-making, but some are decentralized; for example, the country-based projects or missions' directors and managers can decide what they want to do in the fields.

The UN agencies have a variety of tasks based on their specialization and their interests. The UN agencies provide different kinds of assistance to low-income countries and middle-income countries, and this assistance would be a good resource for developmental projects in developing countries. The UN has to protect against any kind of human rights violation, and in the UN system, some specialized agencies, like ILO and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ( UNHCR), work in the human rights' protection fields. The UN agency, ILO, is trying to end any kind of discrimination in the work field and child labor; after that, this agency promotes fundamental labor rights and to get safe and secure for the laborers.

An early prominent example of an international organization is the Congress of Vienna of 1814-1815, which was an international diplomatic conference to reconstitute the European political order after the downfall of the French Emperor Napoleon. States then became the main decision makers who preferred to maintain their sovereignty as of 1648 at the Westphalian treaty that closed the 30 Years' War in Europe.

The first and oldest international organization-being established employing a treaty, and creating a permanent secretariat, with a global membership-was the International Telecommunication Union (founded in 1865). The first general international organization-addressing a variety of issues-was the League of Nations, founded on 10 January 1920 with a principal mission of maintaining world peace after World War I. The United Nations followed this model after World War II. This was signed on 26 June 1945, in San Francisco, at the conclusion of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, and came into force on 24 October 1945. Currently, the UN is the main IGO with its arms such as the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the General Assembly (UNGA), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Secretariat (UNSA), the Trusteeship Council (UNTC) and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Other IGOs include Regional Councils like ICES and the Mediterranean Science Commission (CIESM), and continental blocks like the European Union (EU), African Union (AU), East African Community (EAC), and Multi- National Companies (MNCs) like SHELL.

Expansion and growth

Held and McGrew counted thousands of IGOs worldwide in 2002 and this number continues to rise. This may be attributed to globalization, which increases and encourages the co-operation among and within states and which has also provided easier means for IGO growth as a result of increased international relations. This is seen economically, politically, militarily, as well as on the domestic level. Economically, IGOs gain material and non-material resources for economic prosperity. IGOs also provide more political stability within the state and among differing states. Military alliances are also formed by establishing common standards in order to ensure security of the members to ward off outside threats. Lastly, the formation has encouraged autocratic states to develop into democracies in order to form an effective and internal government.

Some estimates indicate that the number of IGOs in the world has increased from less than 100 in 1949 to about 350 in 2000.

Barnett, Michael and Finnemore, M. 2004. Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics. Cornell University Press.

Hurd, Ian. 2018. International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Lall, Ranjit. 2017. "Beyond Institutional Design: Explaining the Performance of International Organizations." International Organization 53: 699-732.

Lall, Ranjit. 2023. Making International Institutions Work: The Politics of Performance. Cambridge University Press.

Lavelle, Kathryn C. (2020): The Challenges of Multilateralism. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300230451.

Muntschick, Johannes, ed. (2022): Regionalism in Africa and External Partners. Uneven Relationships and (Un)Intended Effects. Cham: Palgrave. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-10702-3.

Claude, Inis L. Jr. (1964) [1959]. Swords into Plowshares: The problems and progress of international organization (3rd ed.). New York: Random House. OCLC 559717722.

Datasets:

Pevehouse, Jon C.W., Timothy Nordstron, Roseanne W McManus, Anne Spencer Jamison, "Tracking Organizations in the World: The Correlates of War IGO Version 3.0 datasets", Journal of Peace Research.

Roger, Charles., Sam Rowan, "The New Terrain of Global Governance: Mapping Membership in Informal International Organizations.", Journal of Conflict Resolution, 67 (6): 281-310.

Lundgren, Magnus; Squatrito, Theresa; Sommerer, Thomas; Tallberg, Jonas (2023). "Introducing the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset (IPOD)". The Review of International Organizations.

Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Mette (2021-03). "What kills international organisations? When and why international organisations terminate". European Journal of International Relations. 27 (1).

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An international organization, also known as an intergovernmental organization or an international institution, is an organization that is established by a treaty or other type of instrument governed by international law and possesses its own legal personality, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, International Union for Conservation of Nature, and NATO.

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this was named by Churchill. it was a metaphorical demarcation between communism and democracy in Europe.

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Theory stating that if a country uses nuclear weapons other countries will use them as well, ending the world.

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this was a Supreme Court Case that ended the segregation of schools.

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this exists to solve the worlds political problems

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this was a military alliance between countries in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

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powerful weapon first used in hiroshima

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this created the World Bank and IMF to solve the world’s economic problems.

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Theory which states that communism must be prevented from spreading to other countries and that the USA needs to use military force to stop it.

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this was more powerful than atomic bombs. it was capable of destroying cities and countries.

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economic policies of President Ronald Reagan about tax cuts, reduced government regulation, and a belief that stimulating economic growth among the wealthy would benefit the entire economy.

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advocating for social/economic equality, government intervention in the economy, and progressive social values.

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favors limited government intervention, traditional values, and free market approaches to issues.

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led by conservatives, for conservative policies and seeking to influence American politics based religious principles.

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theory that benefits provided to businesses will come down to the rest of the population through job creation and economic growth

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central bank controls money supply influencing economic activity by managing stability

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Experts call for review of the montary policy

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KABUL (SW) - A number of experts believe the current monetary policy of keeping value of the afghani high with no impacts on the prices in the market is of no use to the public. Although the value of...

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government actions related to taxing and spending to achieve economic goals such as full employment and stable prices.

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advocates minimal government interference in the marketplace which allows natural market forces to determine means of production

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increases of price of good overtime

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eliminating government restrictions with the goal of fostering competition and economic efficiency.

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use of violence to create panic for political, religious, or ideological matters

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process of interdependence along countries, economies, and cultures through trade and exchange

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the total value of all goods and services in a country's borders in a specific time period