Position:Home>History> American History Help Please!?

Hhaa, just read my AP essay!. It's about sectional tensions due to the Mexican Cession!.

In 1845, the annexation of Texas and Polk’s indomitable expansionist policy would precipitate the Mexican War in the following year!. Although it was a clear acknowledgement to manifest destiny and overall American desires, the war and its aftermath was marred by increasingly sectional tensions over how to properly organize the Mexican cession!. The north and west alike had a free-soil policy in mind, while the South wanted to push its pro-slavery agenda!. This conflict of interests is most evident in the South’s reasons for war, the Wilmot Proviso and the effects of the Compromise of 1850!.
The South’s primary desire for Mexican land, as well as Texas, was to protect itself from the densely populated North and gain access to a distant market to further their own sectional economy!. Texas represented at least four new states that were pro-slavery!. These new slave states would give the south a majority in the Senate and protect them from the North’s domination of the House of Representatives in Congress!. The Compromise of 1820 had robbed them of their senate majority once before and Texas provided them the opportunity to realize that goal!. also by the compromise of 1820, the South had no land to move onto once the pre-Mexican war territory was populated by plantations and yeomen farmers!. The only viable option was to move west and ensure slave territory for future generations!. This goal Is made more apparent with the Ostend Manifesto and the movement by pro-southern forces to capture Cuba without the knowledge of the north!. IT wasn’t until the information was leaked to the press that the attempts halted!. It is then clear that the South had national interests out of mind and were prepared to achieve their own goals behind closed doors!.
The North and West shared the same agenda concerning Mexican Cessions and territory: to ensure small white farmers opportunity to buy land!. Before the Mexican War’s end, free-soilers moved to pass the Wilmot Proviso that would ban slavery in the Mexican cession!. The allowance of slavery meant large plantations would soon sporut as the South moved west!. It was these plantations that the West despised because it meant less land for small, white settlers!. The North agreed and was also motivated by its larger abolitionist presence!. The failure of the Wilmot Proviso caused the formation of the Free-Soiler party; one of the very first entirely sectional and single platform parties!. It absorbed members of the Liberty Party and showed the strength of North and Western opposition to slavery!. To quell the tide of sectional tensions because of the Mexican cession, the nation once again called upon Henry Clay!.
Although the Compromise of 1850 attempted to remedy sectional issues, the trouble with which it was passed and its fugitive slave act display the increasingly unyielding nature of sectionalism!. The Compromise of 1850 could not be passed as a single document and the length of time it took to pass is referred to as “the Great Debate”!. This exemplifies the nature of the sectional agenda over national unity!. Each piece of the Compromise had to be passed separately and it is no doubt both sides hoped parts favoring their needs passed while others did not!. It took the death of President Taylor and rise of the moderate Millard Fillmore to see the Compromise pass!. Even after its passage, its fugitive slave act did not settle well in the north!. Northerners increasingly fought the Southern posses, helped escaped slaves reach Canada and wrote antislavery literature such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”!. The South responded in kind by publishing pro-slavery literature and banded close together as Northerners attacked their way of life!.
The Mexican War was fought under the guise of American Nationalism for sectional reasons!. The West wanted cheap, available land!. The South wanted protection, plantation land ripe for slavery and to compete with the North that experienced the full thrust of the Market Revolution, evident in the attempted, but truncated Gadsden Purchase and Southern Transcontinental Railroad!. The North grew even more weary of the “slave power” as abolitionism increased!. IT is not without reason to claim the Mexican War was one of the primary causes of the Civil War!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

---

---