America, 1840–1895: Expansion and Consolidation

How this unit works

This is your Paper 1 Section A period study (option 1A/A): 40 marks, about 60 minutes, six questions, no SPaG marks. Questions 1–3 are built on two short written interpretations and are worth 16 of the 40 marks, so you must know where people disagreed, not only what happened. The question methods themselves are covered in the Exam Skills section — this unit supplies the knowledge.

Two named developments organise everything: expansion to the west and consolidation of the United States as a nation. The unit runs two stories in parallel — the settlement of the Plains and the destruction of Plains Indian society on one side, and the slavery crisis, the Civil War and Reconstruction on the other. They are not separate stories. Westward expansion is what turned the argument over slavery into a war, and the Civil War is what produced the laws that settled the Plains. Answers that treat them as two unrelated topics lose the best marks available.

A note on evidence

This option was mythologised while it was happening, and the evidence problems are themselves examinable — they are what interpretation questions turn on.

Timeline: the events you must place

Learn to place these in order before you learn the detail — the sections below explain them. Dates in the exam earn AO1 marks only when they are attached to why the event mattered.

Part one — expansion, 1840–1851

Part two — conflict, 1854–1877

Part three — consolidation, 1862–1895

Key people

Key vocabulary

These terms are used throughout the unit without being re-defined. Learn them — they are the specialist vocabulary that strengthens every answer.

Chapter 1 — Land, belief and the pull west

This chapter explains why hundreds of thousands of people crossed two thousand miles of difficult country to reach places they had never seen — and who was already living on the land in between. Its most important structural fact: the land migrants crossed was not empty, and the policy that made crossing it possible was a policy of separation that mass migration destroyed.

1.1 A continent misread

Travelling west from the Mississippi, a migrant crossed four very different regions:

1. The Mississippi valley and eastern prairie — well watered, wooded in places, already farmed successfully.
2. The Great Plains — an enormous grassland belt from Texas to Canada, roughly the 98th meridian to the Rockies. Almost treeless, extreme temperatures, rainfall generally under twenty inches a year and unreliable, and grass with a root mat so dense a wooden plough could not cut it.
3. The Rocky Mountains — crossable by wagon only at a few passes, of which South Pass (Wyoming) was the crucial one.
4. Beyond the Rockies — desert and the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevada, and then the fertile valleys of Oregon and California.

The “Great American Desert”. Stephen Long's expedition of 1820 reported the Plains almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and the label appeared on maps for decades. The label was wrong — the Plains are semi-arid grassland with deep, fertile soil — and it was also reasonable: with the technology of 1840 (wooden ploughs, no fencing material, no way to reach deep water, no suitable wheat) they genuinely could not be farmed. The land did not change; the technology did (see 3.4). Because the Plains were believed worthless, migrants crossed them rather than settling them, and the government could cheaply designate them permanent Indian country (see 1.5).

Manifest Destiny. The journalist John L. O'Sullivan popularised the phrase in 1845 — that it was the nation's destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence. It combined three claims: religious (expansion was God's plan), political (American democracy was a superior system whose spread benefited humanity) and racial (Anglo-Saxon Americans were entitled to land held by peoples they regarded as inferior — Native Americans and Mexicans). The racial claim is not a modern reading imposed on the period; it was stated explicitly at the time, and leaving it out misrepresents what the idea meant.

What it justified: the annexation of Texas (1845), the Oregon boundary settlement with Britain (1846), and the Mexican–American War (1846–48) with the Mexican Cession (1848) — the land that became California, Nevada, Utah and more. In roughly five years the United States acquired the territory that completed its span to the Pacific — and in doing so created the crisis over whether that territory would be slave or free (see 2.4).

1.2 Who went west, and why

Push factors — reasons to leave: the depression of 1837 (bank failures, collapsed prices, debtors losing farms — the single most important push of the 1840s); expensive and exhausted land in the east, with farms divided between sons until too small; disease and overcrowding in eastern cities; religious persecution (see 1.3); and European famine and upheaval in the 1840s, which pushed Irish and German immigrants onwards west.

Pull factors — reasons to go: reportedly fertile, free land in Oregon's Willamette valley (the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 offered substantial acreages); promotional literature — government reports, newspapers, guidebooks and letters home that advertised the West enthusiastically and often dishonestly; Manifest Destiny as a cultural expectation; and gold from 1848.

The journey west was a timing calculation. The Oregon Trail ran roughly 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri; ox wagons made 15–20 miles a day, so the journey took four to six months. Trains had to leave in April or May — late enough for Plains grass to feed the oxen, early enough to cross the mountains before snow closed the passes. Outfitting a family cost several hundred dollars — more than a labourer earned in a year — so the very poorest could not go. Families travelled in wagon trains, often electing officers and agreeing written rules.

The miners' migration was entirely different in character. Gold was found at Sutter's Mill, California, in January 1848; in 1849 perhaps 80,000 people arrived (the Forty-Niners), with totals over the following years running into the hundreds of thousands — estimates. Camp life was chaotic: young, male, transient, armed populations; no established law, so vigilance committees administered rough justice; extreme prices; claim jumping. Discrimination was severe — a Foreign Miners' Tax targeted Mexican and Chinese miners, and Chinese miners faced violence and legal exclusion.

The consequence that matters most: California's population grew so fast that it demanded statehood almost immediately — which detonated the free-or-slave question and produced the Compromise of 1850 (see 2.4). The farmers built the West; the miners populated it suddenly — and sudden population forced political questions before anyone was ready. Individuals moved for their own reasons and the government followed them, which is why the Permanent Indian Frontier could not hold (see 1.5).

1.3 Migration as escape: the Mormons

Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830 in New York State and founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Persecution arose from four compounding causes: religious difference (new scripture and a living prophet struck other Christians as blasphemy); economic separateness (Mormons traded among themselves, pooled resources and prospered, provoking resentment); political bloc voting (Mormons voted as their leadership directed, which could decide every local election — the grievance that most often turned resentment into violence); and polygamy, taught privately from the 1840s and announced publicly in 1852, which mainstream opinion regarded with horror.

The pattern of expulsion. The Church moved from New York to Ohio, then Missouri — where the governor's 1838 order said Mormons must be driven out or exterminated, and a massacre followed at Haun's Mill — then Illinois, where they built Nauvoo into one of the state's largest cities, with its own militia and charter. After Smith ordered the destruction of a hostile press, he was arrested and held at Carthage, Illinois; on 27 June 1844 a mob stormed the jail and shot him and his brother. No one was convicted. The murder proved the law would not protect them — the immediate cause of the decision to leave the United States entirely.

Brigham Young, Smith's successor and an organiser of unusual ability, concluded the Church could only survive somewhere nobody else wanted — beyond the Rockies, in territory then belonging to Mexico. The trek of 1846–47 is distinguished by its organisation:

• Nauvoo was evacuated from February 1846, in winter, under threat.
• The migration was organised into companies of hundreds and fifties with appointed captains and defined duties.
• Winter Quarters on the Missouri housed several thousand through 1846–47 in dugouts and cabins; hundreds died of exposure, malnutrition and disease (estimates).
• Way stations were established along the route, with crops planted by advance parties for those following.
• A pioneer company of around 150 entered the Salt Lake valley in July 1847. Later companies followed for years — including handcart companies of poorer converts from Britain and Scandinavia, two of which were caught by early snow in 1856 with heavy loss of life.

Why the Salt Lake valley? It was arid, remote, and nobody wanted it — which was precisely the point. The settlement's achievement was agricultural and administrative: irrigation water was owned communally and allocated by the Church — the single most important decision, making farming possible on dry land and preventing the first arrivals monopolising the water; Salt Lake City was laid out on a grid with land allocated by family need, not sold; fencing, canals and public buildings were built by cooperative labour; and missionary work in Europe brought converts in large numbers.

The political consequence: the Mexican Cession of 1848 transferred the territory to the United States — the Mormons had left the country, and the country followed them. Young petitioned for a very large state called Deseret; Congress instead created the smaller Utah Territory in 1850 with Young as governor. A territory is governed under federal authority — and that is the collision course (see 2.6).

1.4 The Plains Indians' way of life

The horse changed everything. Horses were brought by the Spanish and spread north from the seventeenth century. Mounted hunters could follow the herds, kill efficiently and move camp quickly — so Plains nomadism as it existed in 1840 was roughly two centuries old, an adaptation to new technology rather than an unchanged ancient way of life. Saying so is a mark of understanding.

The buffalo economy. Herds numbered in the tens of millions before the 1860s (estimates vary widely). Almost every part was used: meat — fresh, dried, or pounded into pemmican that kept for months; hides for tipi covers, clothing and containers; bones for tools; horns for cups; sinew for thread and bowstrings; stomachs for water carriers; hooves for glue; and dung — dried buffalo chips — for fuel on a treeless plain.

Social organisation and belief:

• The band — a few dozen to a few hundred people — was the working unit, joining larger gatherings seasonally.
• Chiefs led by influence, not command — authority rested on reputation, generosity and success. A chief could persuade but not compel. This made treaty-making fail: a chief who signed bound only those who chose to follow him, which whites consistently misread as bad faith (see 2.1).
• Warrior societies kept order in camp and organised raids; councils of respected men discussed decisions.
• Women did the skinning, curing, tipi-making and camp-moving, owned the tipi and its contents, and had real authority within it — labour that white observers undervalued.
• Land could not be owned. It was held in common by all living things; selling it made no more sense than selling the sky. This is the deepest incompatibility in the whole unit, because the entire American land system rested on individual title.
• Belief centred on the Great Spirit and spirits in the natural world; visions interpreted by medicine men; the Sun Dance; the sacred circle; and sacred places — above all the Black Hills, which is what makes 1874–76 so serious (see 3.6).
• Warfare aimed at horses, honour, revenge and territory — not conquest or annihilation. Counting coup (touching a living enemy and escaping) ranked above killing. Plains forces could win a battle and disperse afterwards, to the incomprehension of American commanders.

Two ways of life, side by side. Every feature of Plains life was an adaptation to the buffalo and the grassland — this is what a society looks like when it must move to eat. Set against settler society, the incompatibility is structural:

1.5 Government policy before conflict

The starting position. Native nations were treated as sovereign nations and dealt with by treaty, ratified by the Senate — the same procedure used with foreign states. That form persisted throughout the period, which meant every seizure of land had to be dressed as an agreement (see 2.1).

Removal. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorised exchanging eastern Native lands for territory west of the Mississippi — in practice, under coercion. The best-known case is the Cherokee, who had adopted written laws, a constitution, a written language and farming — and whose adoption of American ways made no difference. Despite a Supreme Court ruling in their favour, they were removed in 1838–39 on the Trail of Tears; thousands died — commonly given as around four thousand of some sixteen thousand, figures disputed. The lesson that governs everything afterwards: legal rights, treaties and even Supreme Court judgments did not protect Native land when settlers wanted it. Assimilation was tried by the Cherokee and did not save them — remember that when assimilation becomes federal policy fifty years later (see 3.5).

The Permanent Indian Frontier. From the 1830s–40s, land west of a line along the borders of Missouri and Arkansas was designated permanent Indian country, into which removed eastern nations were placed alongside peoples already there. On 1840 assumptions the logic was coherent: the Plains were the “Great American Desert” (see 1.1); white settlement would never want them; so the two peoples could be permanently separated, with a line of forts to enforce it.

Why it collapsed — four reasons:

1. The Plains stopped being a barrier and became a corridor. From the 1840s tens of thousands crossed annually on the trails. A policy of separation cannot survive when the separated space is a highway.
2. Migration damaged the land it crossed. Trains consumed grass and timber, fouled water, and their livestock competed with the buffalo, whose herds began splitting into northern and southern groups. Migrants also brought cholera and smallpox, which killed very large numbers of Plains people in the 1830s–40s.
3. Territorial acquisition removed the point. After the 1848 Mexican Cession and the Oregon settlement, American territory lay on both sides of Indian country. A permanent frontier is meaningless when your own land lies beyond it.
4. Gold accelerated everything. The 1849 rush turned a steady flow into a flood, and later strikes drew miners directly into Native territory rather than through it.

The shift to concentration. The response was not to abandon separation but to shrink it: tribes assigned to defined areas with corridors between them for roads, forts and migration. That is concentration, and its first great expression is the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 (see 2.1). The change is from a boundary to an enclosure — and every later policy (small reservations, allotment) continues in the same direction: the space allowed to Native peoples gets smaller and the control tighter.

Chapter 2 — Conflict across America

Between 1851 and 1877 the United States fought two wars at once: a war on the Plains against peoples whose land it was taking, and a war against itself over slavery. The chapter's organising insight is that these were connected, not parallel — the expansion that produced the first made the second unavoidable, because every acre acquired had to be designated free or slave.

2.1 The end of separation: Fort Laramie, 1851

Why a treaty was needed. By 1851 the trails carried tens of thousands of migrants annually across designated Indian country. Grass and timber were consumed, water fouled, buffalo disturbed, disease spread; some nations charged tolls or raided trains. The government wanted safe passage, roads and forts. Representatives of several nations — Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow and others, in very large numbers — met US commissioners near Fort Laramie (Wyoming).

What was agreed on paper:

• Each nation was allotted a defined territory with stated boundaries.
• The nations would allow safe passage along the trails and permit roads and forts.
• The nations would keep the peace with one another and with the United States.
• The United States would protect the nations from American citizens who broke the terms.
• Annuities — annual payments in goods and money — initially agreed for fifty years.

What each side thought it had agreed — the heart of the section. The American understanding: a binding contract with sovereign nations, transferring rights of passage in exchange for payment and protection, with fixed boundaries. The Native understanding faced real difficulties, not evasions: land could not be owned or sold (see 1.4), so agreeing where one hunted was not agreeing to confinement; chiefs could not bind their people — the commissioners insisted on designating head chiefs to sign for whole nations, which was not how authority worked; the boundaries cut across hunting ranges that moved with the herds, and across the territories of nations at war; and translation was inadequate, rendering concepts — sovereignty, boundary, title — that had no equivalents.

Why concentration failed — five structural reasons:

1. The corridors could not be kept to — migrants left the trails and the government had no means of policing them.
2. The buffalo did not respect the boundaries — a people whose economy followed the herds could not stay inside a rectangle.
3. Annuities were unreliable and used as leverage — payments late, short or spoiled; agents frequently corrupt; and Congress unilaterally cut the fifty-year term to fifteen. A treaty whose terms one party can alter afterwards is not a treaty — a specific, documentable grievance.
4. The United States did not protect Native peoples from its own citizens as promised. When settlers or miners entered Native land, the response was almost never to remove them.
5. Gold made it worse — strikes drew miners into treaty territory (Colorado, 1858–59; later the Black Hills), and each time the government sought a new treaty ceding the land rather than enforcing the old one.

2.2 The Plains wars, 1862–67

Three episodes, and they are three different kinds of event. Merging them into one blur is the commonest weakness in answers on this topic.

Little Crow's War, Minnesota, 1862 — a settler-driven crisis

The Dakota Sioux had ceded most of their land in the 1850s for a narrow reservation and annuities. By 1862 the land had been further reduced; the annuity was late (federal money and attention were consumed by the Civil War); crops had failed and people were starving; traders refused credit — one is reported to have said that if the Dakota were hungry they could eat grass. In August 1862, after four young men killed settlers in a dispute, the Dakota under Little Crow — who argued against war and then led it — attacked agencies, farms and settlements. Settler deaths are commonly estimated at several hundred; the war lasted about six weeks.

Consequences: the Dakota were expelled from Minnesota and their reservation abolished. Around 300 men were sentenced to death after very rapid trials; Lincoln personally reviewed the cases and reduced the number to 38, hanged at Mankato in December 1862 — the largest mass execution in American history. Refugees fled west, spreading the news and hardening attitudes among nations that had not been involved. The trigger was hunger caused by administrative failure, not a clash of warrior cultures.

The Sand Creek Massacre, Colorado, November 1864 — a militia atrocity

The Colorado gold rush of 1858–59 flooded land guaranteed to the Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1851; an 1861 treaty confined them to a much smaller area at Sand Creek which could not support them. Raiding, settler panic and exaggerated press reports followed. Black Kettle, a Southern Cheyenne chief who consistently sought peace, camped at Sand Creek under an assurance of protection, flying a United States flag and a white flag. On 29 November 1864 Colonel John Chivington attacked with around 700 Colorado volunteer militia while most men of fighting age were away hunting. Estimates of the dead range from around 150 to over 200 (disputed); the majority were women, children and old men. Bodies were mutilated and body parts displayed in Denver.

Consequences: a congressional inquiry condemned it as a gross and wanton outrage — important, because it shows the act was regarded as atrocious by contemporary American standards, not only modern ones — yet Chivington was never prosecuted, having left the army. The massacre destroyed the peace faction among the Cheyenne and Arapaho: the argument that cooperation brought protection had been refuted in the most direct way possible. War spread across the central Plains; Black Kettle survived, only to be killed four years later at the Washita.

Fetterman's Trap, Wyoming, December 1866 — a military defeat

The Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields ran directly through Lakota hunting grounds guaranteed in 1851, and the army built forts along it, including Fort Phil Kearny. Red Cloud warned this meant war, and fought a sustained campaign — Red Cloud's War. On 21 December 1866, Captain William Fetterman — who had reportedly boasted that with 80 men he could ride through the whole Sioux nation — led a relief detachment of 80 out of the fort. A small decoy party (Crazy Horse is traditionally named among them) drew them over a ridge into a waiting force. All 81, including Fetterman, were killed — the worst army defeat on the Plains to that date.

Consequences: shock in the east, and the second Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868: the United States abandoned the Bozeman Trail forts and recognised the Great Sioux Reservation — including the Black Hills — as Lakota land. Red Cloud's War is the only war of the period in which Native forces achieved their stated objective. But the defeat also hardened army opinion in favour of winter campaigns against villages — a method that necessarily meant attacking camps containing women and children, the direct line from 1866 to the Washita and the campaigns of 1876 (see 3.6).

2.3 A country with two economies

All population figures are approximate census-based totals and should be given as such.

Slavery: the institution that made the two sections incompatible. The cotton gin (1790s) had transformed slavery from a declining institution into an expanding and enormously valuable one — slavery was not dying out; it was growing. Enslaved people were property in law: bought, sold, mortgaged and inherited, with families routinely separated by sale; the system rested on violence, literacy was illegal in many states, and testimony against a white person was inadmissible. The capital value of enslaved people was enormous — greater, by some calculations, than the value of all American railroads and factories combined — which explains why compromise was so difficult: abolition meant the destruction of the South's principal form of wealth. And although most white Southerners owned no enslaved people, the system set the whole social hierarchy — poor whites' status depended on there being a group beneath them, which is why non-slaveholders fought to defend it.

Resistance and abolitionism. Enslaved people resisted continuously — slowed work, broken tools, escape, and occasionally revolt: Nat Turner's rebellion (Virginia, 1831) most alarmed white Southerners and produced harsher slave codes. The Underground Railroad helped escapees north; Harriet Tubman, who had escaped herself, returned repeatedly to lead others out. William Lloyd Garrison began The Liberator in 1831, demanding immediate abolition; Frederick Douglass became the movement's most powerful voice; Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) made slavery a moral question in Northern households. Meanwhile Southern writers hardened from defending slavery as a necessary evil to defending it as a positive good — itself evidence of how central the institution had become.

2.4 The road to secession

The Missouri Compromise, 1820. Missouri entered as a slave state, Maine as a free state — keeping the Senate balanced — and slavery was prohibited in the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory north of latitude 36°30′. It worked for thirty years by drawing a line across the map, which is why destroying it in 1854 was so explosive.

The Compromise of 1850. The Mexican Cession and the gold rush forced the question: California demanded statehood immediately. The package: California entered free; Utah and New Mexico would decide by popular sovereignty; the slave trade (not slavery) was abolished in Washington DC; and a much stronger Fugitive Slave Act required citizens and officials in free states to assist in capturing escapees. The Fugitive Slave Act backfired. It brought slavery into Northern towns as a legal obligation; rescues and resistance followed, and Uncle Tom's Cabin was written directly in response. The measure designed to reassure the South did more than anything else to turn Northern indifference into hostility.

The Kansas–Nebraska Act, 1854. Senator Stephen Douglas wanted a northern transcontinental railroad, which required organising the territory it would cross; to win Southern votes his bill applied popular sovereignty to Kansas and Nebraska — north of the 36°30′ line, repealing the Missouri Compromise. The consequences were immediate: “Bleeding Kansas” — pro- and anti-slavery settlers poured in to control the vote, Missourians crossed to vote illegally, rival governments formed, the free-soil town of Lawrence was sacked in 1856 and days later John Brown and his followers killed five pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie; several hundred died over the following years (estimates). Kansas showed that popular sovereignty meant a fight, not a vote. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 specifically to oppose slavery's extension — a sectional party with almost no Southern support, meaning a president could now be elected without a single Southern vote. Violence even reached Congress: Senator Charles Sumner was beaten unconscious at his desk in 1856, and his assailant was celebrated in the South.

The Dred Scott decision, 1857. Scott, an enslaved man, sued for freedom having lived in free territory. The Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent could not be citizens; that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in any territory; and therefore that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional all along. The decision destroyed the legal basis of every compromise ever reached — if Congress could not exclude slavery from a territory, no political settlement was possible.

John Brown at Harpers Ferry, 1859. Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, intending to arm a slave insurrection; it failed, and he was hanged in December 1859. The significance is entirely in the reaction, which ran in opposite directions: in the North many (far from all) treated him as a martyr — church bells tolled at his execution; in the South it confirmed the deepest fear, that Northerners would arm enslaved people — and Brown had received money from Northern supporters, making the fear specific. After Harpers Ferry, secessionists could argue plausibly that the North was an enemy.

The election of 1860 and secession. The Democratic Party split; Lincoln won with around 40 per cent of the popular vote and a clear electoral-college majority, carrying no Southern state — his name did not even appear on most Southern ballots. South Carolina seceded in December 1860, followed by six more before his inauguration; they formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861 under Jefferson Davis — Mississippi planter, former senator and Secretary of War. Four more states seceded after Fort Sumter (April 1861): eleven in total. The stated justification was states' rights — and the right principally asserted was the right to maintain slavery and carry it into the territories. Several secession declarations say so explicitly.

2.5 What the war did to civilians

The specification asks for the social and economic impact on civilian populations — not a campaign history, and this section deliberately gives none. The scale first: the war ran April 1861 to April 1865. Military deaths are commonly estimated at around 620,000, with more recent research suggesting nearer 750,000 — contested reconstructions from incomplete records — and roughly two-thirds died of disease rather than combat. In a population of around thirty-one million, that reached into almost every family.

The North — richer, and changed:

• Industry boomed on government contracts for weapons, uniforms, food and railway equipment; agriculture expanded and mechanised. But inflation outran wages, so real living standards for wage-earners fell.
• The war permanently expanded the federal government's economic role: the first federal income tax, a national paper currency (the greenback) and a national banking system.
• With the Southern senators gone, Congress passed the measures the South had blocked — the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railroad Act, both 1862 (see 3.2, 3.3). One of the most direct connections between the two halves of this unit.
• Conscription from 1863, with a $300 commutation fee or a paid substitute — far beyond a labourer's means, producing the bitter phrase “a rich man's war and a poor man's fight”.
• The New York draft riots, July 1863 — the worst civil disorder of the century. Crowds, largely Irish immigrant workers fearing conscription and labour competition, attacked draft offices and then Black New Yorkers, lynching several and burning an orphanage for Black children. The toll is usually given as around 120, with higher estimates; no reliable count exists. Troops came from Gettysburg to restore order.
• Women took on factory, office, teaching and nursing work; Clara Barton organised battlefield nursing and later founded the American Red Cross. Civil liberties were restricted: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, and thousands were detained without trial.

The South — far more severe, and the exam rewards knowing why:

• The Union naval blockade cut off imports and exports: cotton exports collapsed, and the South could not buy manufactured goods, medicine or salt.
• Inflation was extreme — the Confederacy printed money, and prices rose by several thousand per cent (approximate); by 1865 the currency was nearly worthless. Bread riots broke out, most famously in Richmond, April 1863, where women broke into shops demanding food.
• Railways and infrastructure were destroyed and could not be repaired; the war was fought on Southern soil, so farms, livestock and equipment were destroyed or requisitioned by both armies.
• Confederate conscription came earlier and harsher, and the exemption for men owning twenty or more enslaved people produced the same class resentment in sharper form. A very large proportion of Southern white men of military age served, so labour and family life were disrupted far more deeply.
• Sherman's March to the Sea (late 1864), Atlanta to Savannah, deliberately destroyed the economic capacity to sustain war — railways torn up and twisted, crops and mills burned, livestock taken — aimed at property and morale rather than civilian lives, explicitly to make the South feel the war.

Enslaved and freed people — the largest social change of all:

• The Emancipation Proclamation (effective 1 January 1863) declared enslaved people in areas still in rebellion to be free. It freed nobody directly on the day — it applied only where the Union had no control — but it changed the war's purpose, made Union armies instruments of liberation as they advanced, and made European recognition of the Confederacy politically impossible.
• Enslaved people freed themselves in very large numbers by escaping to Union lines — hundreds of thousands, whose labour and intelligence had real military value.
• Around 180,000 Black soldiers served in the Union army (tens of thousands more in the navy), paid less than white soldiers until 1864; captured Black soldiers in some cases faced murder rather than imprisonment.
• Displacement was severe — refugee camps around Union armies suffered high mortality. Full legal abolition came with the 13th Amendment, ratified December 1865 (see 3.1).

2.6 The Mormons and federal authority

Why conflict came. By the 1850s Utah was an anomaly: church and government were the same thing — Brigham Young was both territorial governor and Church president, church courts settled disputes, and federal officials found they had no real authority (several left reporting the territory in rebellion). Polygamy, announced publicly in 1852, was politically toxic — the Republican platform of 1856 denounced polygamy and slavery together as the “twin relics of barbarism”. Add economic separateness, and a community memory of being driven from four states with their prophet murdered unpunished: the Mormons expected federal hostility, not protection.

The Utah War, 1857–58. President Buchanan sent a new non-Mormon governor with around 2,500 troops — without informing Young, who learned of the approaching army through his own channels and concluded this was the expulsion of Nauvoo repeated on a national scale. He declared martial law and ordered delay without bloodshed: burning grass and supply trains, driving off livestock, blocking passes, forcing the army to winter short of the valley. He prepared to burn Salt Lake City and move the population south rather than surrender it — and tens of thousands did move in 1858 before the settlement.

Mountain Meadows, September 1857. In this atmosphere — martial law, an approaching army, preaching that recalled every past persecution — the Baker–Fancher party, emigrants from Arkansas bound for California, passed through southern Utah. They were besieged at Mountain Meadows by local Mormon militia, some of whom had recruited Paiute allies and disguised themselves as Native Americans. After several days the militia approached under a flag of truce, promised safe passage, persuaded the emigrants to disarm — and then killed them. Around 120 people died; seventeen young children, judged too young to give evidence, were spared (figures vary slightly).

Aftermath. The Utah War ended without a battle in 1858: Young accepted a new governor and a federal pardon; federal authority was formally established and Mormon control in practice continued. John D. Lee — a local militia leader and adopted son of Young — was eventually tried and executed by firing squad at Mountain Meadows in 1877, the only person ever convicted; many regarded him as a scapegoat. The federal campaign against polygamy continued for decades: the Morrill Act (1862) criminalised it, the Edmunds Act (1882) disqualified polygamists from voting and office, and the Edmunds–Tucker Act (1887) disincorporated the Church and seized its property. The Church renounced polygamy in 1890, and Utah became a state in 1896 — outside this option's dates, but the resolution the story is heading towards.

Chapter 3 — Consolidation: forging the nation

The Civil War settled that the United States was one nation. This chapter covers what that nation did with its victory: it tried and failed to remake the South, gave away the Plains to anyone who would farm them, built a railroad across the continent, and destroyed the last independent Native societies inside its borders. All four are the same process — the extension of federal authority and a national economy across a continent.

3.1 Reconstruction and the limits of victory

The problem in 1865. The South was defeated, occupied and economically destroyed. Four million people had been freed with no land, money, education or legal protection. And nobody had decided the central question: were the Southern states returning as they had been, or was the South to be remade?

The legal transformation — three amendments:

• 13th Amendment (December 1865) — abolished slavery throughout the United States.
• 14th Amendment (1868) — citizenship for everyone born in the United States; no state may deny due process or equal protection of the laws. The most important constitutional change of the century: for the first time, federal protection applied against state governments.
• 15th Amendment (1870) — the vote may not be denied on grounds of race, colour or previous condition of servitude.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 declared all persons born in the United States citizens with equal rights to contract, sue, testify and hold property. President Andrew Johnson vetoed it and Congress passed it over his veto — the first major bill in American history to become law that way. Johnson favoured rapid, lenient restoration with freed people's status left to the states — and Southern legislatures immediately passed Black Codes restricting freed people's movement, work, testimony and property, providing for the arrest of the “idle” and their hire to employers. The Black Codes recreated slavery's conditions under another name, and Congress reacted.

Radical Reconstruction, from 1867. The Reconstruction Acts divided the South into five military districts under army command, requiring new state constitutions with Black male suffrage and ratification of the 14th Amendment before readmission. The Freedmen's Bureau (from 1865) distributed relief, supervised labour contracts and — its greatest achievement — established schools and colleges across the South with the churches; Black literacy rose substantially. Black Southerners voted and held office in large numbers: around two thousand held public office, including sixteen congressmen and two US senators from Mississippi.

Southern resistance. The Ku Klux Klan (founded 1866) and similar organisations used terror against Black voters, officeholders and teachers: beatings, arson, the destruction of schools and churches, and murder — organised political violence, not random crime, as episodes like the killing of dozens of Black militiamen at Colfax, Louisiana (1873) demonstrate. The federal Enforcement Acts of 1870–71 made such conspiracies federal crimes and, with troops and prosecutions, suppressed the Klan by the mid-1870s. Federal power worked when it was applied — the crucial point for the interpretation debate. Economic coercion was equally effective: freed people who voted or organised were evicted, denied credit or refused work.

The failure that mattered most: land. Freed people wanted land; Sherman's wartime order setting aside coastal land produced the phrase “forty acres and a mule” — and Johnson reversed it, returning the land to its former owners. What emerged instead was sharecropping: working someone else's plot for a share of the crop, taking supplies on credit at high interest, with debt accumulating year on year. Legally free, economically bound — tied to land they did not own, doing the same work in the same fields for the same families.

The end. Northern commitment faded: a severe depression from 1873, corruption scandals, and exhaustion with enforcement. The disputed election of 1876 was settled by the Compromise of 1877: Hayes became president and the remaining federal troops were withdrawn from the South. Southern states then progressively disenfranchised Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation, and imposed segregation. The 14th and 15th Amendments were nullified in practice for most of a century — but never repealed, which is why they became the legal foundation of the civil rights movement much later.

3.2 Settling the Plains by law

Why the government wanted the Plains settled: to establish American possession and make the land productive; to create states — and so taxpayers, voters and representation; to relieve eastern land pressure; and to supply the railroads with customers, since a railroad across an empty plain earns nothing (see 3.3).

The Homestead Act, 1862. Any citizen (or immigrant intending to become one) who was head of a family or over 21 — including women who were widowed, single or heads of household, and freed people — could claim 160 acres of surveyed public land for a small filing fee, live on it, build a dwelling and cultivate it for five years, and receive the title free (or buy outright after six months at a set price). Later laws tried to fix the central problem that 160 acres was too little on dry land: the Timber Culture Act (1873) offered a further 160 acres for planting trees (it largely failed — trees would not grow); the Desert Land Act (1877) offered larger acreages cheaply on condition of irrigation; the Timber and Stone Act (1878) sold land unfit for farming. Fraud was widespread — companies used employees and hired claimants to acquire land far beyond the laws' intentions.

Who went: eastern farmers and their sons priced out at home; immigrants in very large numbers — Germans, Scandinavians, Czechs, Irish — actively recruited by railroad companies and state immigration boards advertising across Europe; single women, a significant minority of claimants, unusual for property law of the period; and the Exodusters — from 1879, thousands of Black Southerners (tens of thousands over the following years, estimates vary) migrated to Kansas, escaping the collapse of Reconstruction, violence and sharecropping, promoted by Benjamin “Pap” Singleton among others. The Exodusters are the clearest example of the two halves of this story meeting: the failure of Reconstruction became a cause of westward migration.

The gap between statute and viability — the point the exam will test:

• 160 acres was too small for land receiving under twenty inches of rain a year — the figure was set with the well-watered east in mind; a family needed several times that.
• The best land went first — much of it to railroads and speculators rather than homesteaders.
• Capital was needed — plough, team, well, fencing, seed and a year's food. The Act gave away land, not the means to farm it.
• The failure rate was very high — commonly cited as around half of claims or more abandoned before the five years were up (varies by region and period; give it as an estimate).
• Success often depended on what the Act did not supply: a railroad nearby, a run of wet years, a second income, or family already established.

3.3 Railroads as nation-builders

The Pacific Railroad Act, 1862 — passed in the same session as the Homestead Act, for the same reason: the Southern senators who had wanted a southern route were gone. It chartered the Union Pacific (building west from Omaha) and the Central Pacific (east from Sacramento), paid in two currencies: government loans per mile (higher in the mountains) and land grants — alternate sections in a broad belt along the route, totalling tens of millions of acres over successive Acts (totals vary with what is counted). The companies sold that land to settlers, which is why they advertised so energetically in Europe.

Building it. The Union Pacific employed Irish immigrants and war veterans; the Central Pacific workforce was overwhelmingly Chinese — tens of thousands, doing the most dangerous work through the Sierra Nevada, blasting tunnels on cliff faces, for lower pay than white workers. Casualties among them were high and were not systematically recorded. The lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah, on 10 May 1869, marked by a golden spike — and no Chinese workers appear in the famous photograph, which is itself worth noticing. The Crédit Mobilier scandal (exposed 1872–73) — insiders charging the railroad inflated construction prices and distributing shares to congressmen — was the largest financial scandal of the era, good evidence of how closely government and railroad interests were entwined.

Six consequences, running in different directions:

1. Markets — the most important. Before the railroad a Plains farmer could not sell a crop; the railroad turned subsistence into commercial agriculture, the precondition of everything in 3.4.
2. Towns — settlements grew where the railroad stopped; companies laid out townsites and sold plots. The map of the Plains was drawn by railroad surveyors.
3. Migration — journeys of four to six months by wagon took under a week.
4. National integration — standardised time zones for railroad schedules, a national market in goods, prices and news. Consolidation in its most literal form.
5. The cattle industry — created by the railroad (below).
6. Destruction — it carried buffalo hunters west and hides east, split the herds, and brought the settlers who fenced the land. The railroad is the mechanism by which the buffalo economy was destroyed (see 3.5).

The cattle industry. Texas longhorns worth a few dollars locally were worth far more in eastern cities; the answer was the long drive to a railhead. Cow towns grew where trail met rail — Abilene from 1867, then Dodge City and Wichita — with stockyards, saloons and a reputation for disorder heavily exaggerated by later fiction. The Chisholm Trail and other routes carried millions of cattle north through the late 1860s and 1870s (figures vary). Ranching spread onto the northern Plains as the buffalo were removed and Native nations confined, using the open range. Cowboys were young, poorly paid and worked dangerous hours — and around a quarter to a third were Black or Mexican (estimates), a fact almost entirely absent from later popular depictions. The boom ended fast: overstocking exhausted the grass, homesteaders fenced the range with barbed wire, quarantine laws restricted Texas cattle over tick fever, and the winter of 1886–87 — the “Great Die-Up” after a drought summer — killed a very large proportion of the northern herds. Ranching afterwards was fenced, smaller and businesslike.

3.4 Making a living on the Plains

The specification asks for farming problems and solutions. Learn them as pairs with limits — the before-and-after contrast is what Question 5 rewards.

Women's work on the Plains was essential and unusually heavy: cooking on chips, hauling water, making clothes, keeping poultry and a garden, preserving food, nursing, teaching, and field work at harvest. Many also filed homestead claims in their own right (see 3.2). Letters and diaries record isolation as the worst hardship — the phrase “prairie madness” was used at the time.

3.5 Reservations and the assault on culture

The small reservations policy. After the wars of the 1860s, policy moved from concentration to small reservations — much smaller areas, usually on poor land, movement off them requiring permission — formalised by the peace commission of 1867–68, the Medicine Lodge Treaty (1867) for the southern Plains and the second Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) for the Lakota. The logic: confinement (so railroads, settlers and cattle could have everything else), government rations (since the land could not support hunting), and instruction in farming, Christianity and English. Grant's “Peace Policy” from 1869 placed agencies under church nomination, on the theory that religious men would be less corrupt.

Why the reservations failed on their own terms:

• The land was chosen because nobody else wanted it — arid, infertile, often unsuited to the farming Native people were required to adopt.
• Rations were inadequate, late and stolen — agents poorly paid and often corrupt, contractors supplying short weight and rotten goods. Hunger was normal on reservations, and it is the direct cause of several later conflicts.
• The system destroyed the basis of authority — an agent controlling rations could make and unmake leaders, collapsing the influence-based leadership described in 1.4.
• Boundaries were reduced repeatedly whenever the land became valuable.

The destruction of the buffalo — the decisive development of the whole chapter. Several drivers, not a single policy: railroads split the herd and carried hunters west and hides east; a commercial market appeared when an early-1870s tanning process made buffalo hide usable for industrial belting — professional hunters then killed on an industrial scale, taking hides and tongues and leaving the carcasses; modern rifles let a single hunter kill dozens from a stand; cattle competed for grass and spread disease; and army officers, including General Sheridan, encouraged the slaughter explicitly, arguing that destroying the buffalo destroyed Plains independence. Whether this amounted to official policy is disputed — there was no formal extermination programme — but the encouragement is documented and the effect was understood at the time. The scale: herds estimated in the tens of millions in the 1860s were reduced to a few hundred wild animals by the mid-1880s; the southern herd was effectively gone by around 1878, the northern by the mid-1880s. All figures are estimates. The consequence was total — everything in Plains life rested on the buffalo, and when it went, independence went with it: nations that had defeated the US Army a decade earlier had to come to an agency for flour.

Assimilation — the shift in attitudes. White thinking moved through three positions: separation (a permanent frontier), concentration and confinement (defined areas out of the way), and finally assimilation — destroy the culture and absorb the people. Assimilation was pursued by reformers who regarded themselves as friends of the Indian: their argument was that Native people would be destroyed unless they became Americans, so culture, land tenure and religion had to be changed. Good intentions produced a policy of cultural destruction — treating the reformers as straightforwardly malicious misses what was happening. The instruments: boarding schools — the first federal off-reservation school opened at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879 under Richard Henry Pratt, whose stated principle was to kill the Indian and save the man; children were taken (sometimes with parental agreement, sometimes without), their hair cut, their languages forbidden, English names and European clothing imposed — conditions were often harsh, disease killed many, and children are buried at the schools. Also: bans on the Sun Dance and other ceremonies, agency control of movement and rations, and allotment (see 3.6).

3.6 The frontier closes

The Black Hills. The 1868 treaty recognised the Black Hills — sacred to the Lakota — as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, closed to whites. In 1874 an army expedition under Custer confirmed gold there, and miners poured in. The government first tried to keep them out, then tried to buy the Hills — and when the Lakota refused to sell, it changed the terms: in late 1875 all Lakota were ordered to report to agencies by the end of January 1876, in midwinter, or be treated as hostile. The order was impossible to comply with and was intended to be.

The Battle of the Little Big Horn, June 1876. A very large gathering of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho — drawn together partly by Sitting Bull's vision of soldiers falling into camp, with Crazy Horse among the war leaders — camped in the valley of the Little Big Horn, Montana. Three army columns converged; Custer, commanding the 7th Cavalry, found the camp, attacked without waiting for the others, divided his regiment into three, and had underestimated the camp's size very badly. Custer and every man of the five companies under his immediate command — around 210 — were killed; the other detachments were besieged and survived.

Why a Native victory accelerated Native defeat — the analytical heart of the section:

1. The news reached the east during the centennial celebrations of 1876; national fury made a decisive campaign politically overwhelming.
2. Congress attached conditions to Lakota rations, requiring surrender of the Black Hills and the Powder River country as the price of being fed. The land guaranteed in 1868 was taken by legislation, not by battle.
3. The army pursued relentlessly through the winter, attacking camps and destroying supplies; encumbered bands could not keep moving.
4. The great gathering dispersed, as such gatherings always did once the hunting and grass gave out — so the victors could be defeated in detail.
5. Crazy Horse surrendered in 1877 and was killed shortly afterwards; Sitting Bull went to Canada and returned in 1881.

The Dawes Act, 1887 — cultural policy by land law. Reservation land was divided into individual allotments — typically 160 acres to a head of family — held in trust for 25 years, after which the owner received full title and citizenship; “surplus” land left over was sold to white settlers. Its effects were the opposite of its stated purpose: Native landholding fell from around 138 million acres in 1887 to around 48 million by 1934 — a loss of roughly two-thirds (standard approximate figures). It attacked communal ownership deliberately; allotments were often unfarmable, and allottees lacked tools, capital and training; and it broke up the reservation as a social unit, dispersing families onto separate plots.

Wounded Knee, December 1890. The Ghost Dance — originating with the Paiute prophet Wovoka — taught that faithful dancing would restore the buffalo, bring back the dead and remove the whites, peacefully in most versions. It spread rapidly across hungry, hopeless reservations, and agents panicked. Sitting Bull was killed on 15 December 1890 during an arrest attempt. A band under Big Foot, moving to seek protection, was intercepted by the 7th Cavalry and camped at Wounded Knee Creek. On 29 December 1890, during the disarming of the camp, firing began — the sequence is disputed — and troops with rapid-fire guns fired into the camp. Estimates of Lakota dead range from around 150 to 300 or more, a large proportion women and children (disputed; many were buried in a mass grave). Around 25 soldiers died, some to their own crossfire. Twenty Medals of Honor were awarded, which has been contested ever since. Wounded Knee is conventionally treated as the end of armed Native resistance on the Plains.

The closing of the frontier. The 1890 census reported that a frontier line could no longer be said to exist. Frederick Jackson Turner's “frontier thesis” (1893) argued that the frontier experience had formed American democracy and character. It is an interpretation, not a fact — written entirely from the settler's point of view, treating the land as empty — and identifying it as such is worth marks. For Native peoples the closing meant there was nowhere left: confinement was permanent, and reservations were being reduced by allotment. Population had fallen catastrophically — commonly estimated at around 250,000 within the present United States by 1890, against far higher pre-contact figures that vary enormously and remain under research.

Pulling it together, 1840–1895

Change over time

Judgement bank: frames for likely essays

Argument frames, not model answers. Each pairs a line of argument with its strongest counter and a judgement criterion (see the Exam Skills toolkit for the criteria).

Interpretation workbench: the four debates

Questions 1–3 draw two written interpretations from these debates — 16 of the section's 40 marks. For each: both positions, and what each omits, which is the material a top-band answer uses.

Quick self-test

Cover the answers and check yourself. Each answer names the section where the full evidence lives.