Introduction

The Schlager Anthology of Westward Expansion presents an essential collection of primary source documents from the period in American history that witnessed the westward expansion of the nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the “two great oceans” as Frederick Douglass described it in his 1869 speech “Our Composite Nationality.” In this speech (excerpted in this anthology), Douglass argued that the greatness of the United States after slavery was abolished in 1865 was its diverse population, a nation made of many ethnicities, races, and religions: a “composite nationality.” The Schlager Anthology of Westward Expansion reveals the many voices, including Douglass’s voice, that comprised this composite nationality and contributed to this seminal period of westward expansion. Well-known documents, such as the 1862 Homestead Act, Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential speech “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and John Gast’s famous 1872 painting American Progress, a visual depiction of westward expansion and the ideology that supported and inspired manifest destiny, are here. Also included, however, are the voices of those less powerful—those who resisted the seemingly inevitable forces of Anglo American expansion across the West, including Indigenous, African American, Asian American, and Mexican peoples who lived through and helped to shape this period.

Chapter 1 (“‘The destinies of nations and of men’”: Conquering the West) opens with a famous sermon by Puritan John Winthrop, who in 1630 at the founding of what would become the United States, declared that his society would be “a city upon a hill” and that the “eyes of all people are upon us.” This is an important document, as it lays the foundation for the manifest destiny ideology that would come to fuel and justify conquest, western expansion, and define an American identity. Following Winthrop’s sermon, Chapter 1 covers the first part of the nineteenth century, including the removal of Indigenous peoples from the Southeastern part of the United States to west of the Mississippi, the Texas Revolution, and the U.S. War with Mexico of 1846–1848. These conquests opened land—land also occupied by Indigenous and Mexican peoples—for Anglo expansion into the West. The words of Cherokee peoples are featured, including Cherokee women who petitioned their tribal leaders in 1817 and 1818 to hold on to Cherokee land, and Cherokee Chief John Ross, who in 1836 to wrote to congress about the deep betrayal he felt after tribal land had been unjustly sold and the policy of removal forced upon his people. Chapter 1 also provides documents addressing the Texas Revolution and the U.S. War with Mexico, including President James K. Polk’s Inaugural Address of 1845, wherein he articulates the ideology of manifest destiny to promote the annexation of Texas to the United States. Finally, Chapter 1 includes an excerpt from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) that ended the U.S. War with Mexico, with Mexico ceding over half of their land to the United States—the Southwest as we know it today.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the pace of settlers moving to the West accelerated. Chapter 2 (“‘From hill to hill and from valley to valley’”: Remaking the West) provides several sources that address the expansion of the U.S. across the West, and the devastating effect this had on Indigenous peoples who were already there. Starting in the 1860s, the federal government began a policy of forced assimilation for Native Americans. This was done by removing them from tribal reservations to individual family allotments and placing Indian children in boarding schools with the stated purpose to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” famously said by Richard H. Pratt in a speech excerpted in the anthology. In addition to Pratt’s speech, photographs of Indian children before and after attending Indian boarding schools are included. These primary sources allow students to contemplate assimilation from the point of view of the federal government’s agent (Pratt) as well those who experienced it (Zitkala-Ša).

Essays from Nez Perce Chief Joseph, Santee Sioux physician Charles Eastman, and Northern Paiute activist and author Sarah Winnemuca Hopkins are also included in this chapter. Sarah Winnemuca Hopkins describes the massacre of her people at the hands of white settlers in Life among the Piutes. She describes how “by this lying of the white settlers the trail began which is marked by the blood of my people from hill to hill and from valley to valley.” Students can read these Native Americans voices to gain insight into what this period in U.S. history meant for Native peoples as they fought to maintain their identity, land, and traditions, even as the federal government and white settlers actively tried to strip those things from them.

Chapter 2 also contains documents addressing the histories of Chinese in the West, African Americans who sought work and refuge in the West, and Mexican Americans, such as famous South Texas curandero Don Pedrito Jaramillo, whose popularity reveals the unique fusion of Mexican and American identities in the borderlands region of the West.

Chapter 3 (“‘Invasion of progress…progress of invasion’”: Extending Conquest Overseas) presents documents addressing the nation’s imperial ambitions in places like Cuba and the Philippines, in many ways inspired by the same ideology that fueled Western expansion across the continent. With cartoons and speeches addressing the Philippine-American War and the Spanish-American War, and Red Cross founder Clara Barton’s writings from Cuba, students will engage with both the voices of those who endorsed U.S. imperialism, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, as well as those who critiqued it, like the Anti-Imperialist League. This chapter also includes the perspective of Latin Americans critical of U.S imperialism. For example, José María Vargas Vila, a Colombian intellectual, described the United States as “hungry for our territory, fixed on conquest,” and he called for his fellow Latin Americans to “admit the invasion of Progress, but stop the progress of Invasion.”

Chapter 4 (“‘Do not get lost on this new trail’”: Remembering and Representing the West), features documents and images, such as a Sacagawea Monument, that give students the opportunity to think critically about how the past is remembered and represented.

Taken together, the documents presented in The Schlager Anthology of Western Expansion reveal an era of American history animated by the ideology of manifest destiny–the belief that Anglo Americans were divinely ordained to spread their society from coast to coast. Readers will encounter the words of those who supported and articulated this ideology, those who used it to their advantage, and those who fought against it to hold onto their homelands and present an alternate idea of what it means to be American.

—Jennifer Koshatka Seman