13 Expansion, War, and Sectional Crisis

1844–1860

Catching the spirit of the times, a young Walt Whitman asked in 1846: “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico — with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many — what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the new world with a noble race? Be it ours, to achieve that mission!” America’s poet of democracy spoke the language of Manifest Destiny, the ideology of expansion that caused the Mexican War, fueled the subsequent sectional crisis, and led ultimately to the Civil War. America’s territorial ambitions, only partially satisfied with the Mexican land cession following the war, forced a debate over the fate of slavery: Should the territories be free or slave? This central question focused the political crisis of the 1850s and led partisans North and South to attribute to each other tyrannical motives, either to spread a Slave Power conspiracy (if you were a northerner) or to crush constitutional rights to property (if you were a southerner). By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, southern leaders had convinced themselves that only secession from the Union would save their cherished rights.