1. During 1815, the tendency of rising land prices and declining fertility of the soil in the old regions often motivated people to acquire new territories and settle the western lands. Since the text book stated that most of the settlers who populated the West were farmers from the seaboard states. Farmers or planters usually made for the lower and flatter areas. In general, pioneers sought out the kind of terrain and soil with which they were already familiar. Therefore, they upland favored western hill country. During that period isolated homesteads required a high degree of self-sufficiency. Each person has their own responsibility clearly. Pioneers conquered more land for plantation, yet, they found it extremely difficult to accomplish …show more content…
The lore of the West describes life as romantic, heroic, and idyllic. This is not an accurate portrayal. James Fenimore Cooper, the first greatest American novelist, published a series of novel. He depicted a character, Natty Bumppo, who became the prototype for the western hero of popular fiction. (Divine et al, 261). He fostered this mythic view of the West in his stories of the frontier, Thus, Americans who remained in the East often ignored the frontier farmers and imagined the West as the land that was untamed wilderness inhabited by Indians. Also has solitary white “pathfinders”, who were the foreigners learned to live in harmony with nature. Which was incorrect indeed. While settlers moving to western lands, they also brought their churches, schools, notions of community uplift, Puritan ideals of hard work and self-denial, and respect for law and government with them. (Divine et al, 260) 3. Both rulers of north and south disagreeing on the problem that the Missouri should be a free state or a slave state. When this problem came before Congress in early 1819, sectional started to fear and anxieties. Many Northerners detested southern control of the presidency and the fact that the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, by which every five slaves were counted as three persons in figuring the state’s population. (Divine et al, 270) Which gave the South’s free population more chance to vote. The South feared for the future of what it regarded as a necessary balance
The North always looked at the South with antipathy and kept trying to abolish slavery, but the South didn’t like the North interfering and wanted to continue the use of slavery. The Missouri compromise was another issue between the North and the South. Missouri was a territory state, and it opted to be in the Union in 1818. There was a proposal to ban Slavery in Missouri, even though there were more than 2000 slaves living there, in desperation, Missouri asked for help from the South. Maine was another territory that had petitioned to enter the union, so in 1820 a compromise was set and Missouri was allowed to stay a slave state, and Maine was declared a free state.
During the middle to late 1800's, thousands upon thousands of Americans, as well as foreigners, flocked to the mid-western part of the United States. They flocked to this area hoping to gain free or cheap land promised to them by the United States Government. Most of the "pioneers" left cities and factory jobs to venture out into the American prairies and become farmers. They left their homes, not only because the land was either free or cheap, but also because they wanted to leave the hardships of city life. However, as most would find out, prairie life had its' share of hardships, that far out-reached the hardships of city life. Among these hardships were the death of siblings and friends due to starvation and/or hard work. Pioneers also had to face the stresses and burdens of trying to make a living off of the land. Along with these stress's, they had to worry about how to make money off of the land. All of these hardships, as well as others,
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
Many Northerners were opposed to the idea. Northerners in Congress refused to pass the bill. Northerners proposed that Missouri be slave and that no more slaves were to be brought in and all slave children would be free at the age of 25, so Missouri would become a Free State.
Additionally, the majority of states had conflicts between slavery in their territory, one of them dealt with missouri. Missouri applied for admission into the Union as a slave state; this became a problem because missouri ruined the balance for free slaves and slave states. The northern states wanted to ban slavery from occurring in missouri because the unbalanced situation it put towards the other states. In response, the southern states declared how congress doesn’t have the power to ban slavery in missouri. However, Henry Clay offers a solution, the missouri compromise of 1820. Missouri admitted as slave state and Maine becomes a free slave state. Slavery is banned in Louisiana creating a 36 30 line in missouri’s southern border; this maintained the balance in the U.S senate.
Southerners believed that if outnumbered to free states in Congress, laws would be passed to abolish slavery in the South, thus causing economic downfall in the South.
Therefore, in 1787, two delegates by the names of Roger Sherman and James Wilson introduced the Three Fifths compromise in the Philadelphia Convention. The Three Fifths compromise states that a slave be counted as three-fifths of a person. Therefore, the population of the southern states equaled the population of the northern states. Now that the populations were balanced, the south and the north sent the same amount of representatives to The House of Representatives. Pro-slavery southerners felt as if the north still had an advantage, but it was actually the south that had the advantage in the Senate and The House of Rep...
Furthermore, the creation of The Constitution caused much debate between the elite and democratic states because they thought that if the Government got all of the power, they would lose their rights. The conflict between the North and South played a major role in the development of this document. The North felt that representation in Congress should be based on the number of total people and South felt that it should be based on number of whites. However, The Three Fifths Compromise settled this when it was said a slave will count as 3/5 of a free person of representatives and taxation. Article one section two of the Constitution defines how the population will be counted, obviously there was a strong opposition to this by Southern states like Virginia because their economy was based on slave labor and they had a bigger population because of it.
However, with regard to representation between Northern and Southern states there is a much clearer winner and loser. Southern states argued that slaves should count as part of the population as it would greatly increase the representation, but those opposed expressed why “if they have no share in government, why is the number of members in the assembly, to be increase on their account?” (Brutus). The compromise created
...ere alarmed that the adding up of only one slave state would change the stability of control to the South.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a debatable decision for the north and the south. A decision towards whether or not Missouri should come in as a slave state. In congress, those on the side of the north, found out that Missouri was going to be placed as a slave state and were dramatically upset. They were upset due to the fact that it would cause an unbalance. During the 1800’s there were an equivalent of eleven slave states and eleven free states. Naturally, ...
The relationship between history and myth in the story of the West go hand and hand with each other for the most part. Why? The myth of the West came around just as the history of the West was happening. So a lot of history was often though of as myth and a lot myths were often thought of as actual history. For example, Buffalo Bill was extremely important to the West because he was mythical and historical figure at the same time. There were myths about him that were actually true and there were also myths about him that were made up he made them true. Author Lee Clark Mitchell states in his book, that some writers who wrote westerns such as Stephen Crane confronted "the intersection of history and fiction, fact and legend, without in the end appealing to either at the expense of the other." Also, "refusing to acknowledge that legends are more interesting than history (art, that is, surpassing life); Crane's stories at the same time resist any simple equation of the legendary with the fact itself (art matching life)" (Mitchell).
Since the beginning of their new nation, the United States had many differences between the Northern and Southern states. During the Constitutional Convention they disagreed on how to determine their representation in the house based on population; the Southerners wanted to count their slaves and the Northerners did not, which lead to the three-fifths compromise. Later in the Convention there were concessions given to the South, which left the Northerners feeling uneasy, such as: a guarantee that the slave trade would not be interfered with by Congress until 1808 and slave owners were given the right to recover refugee slaves from anywhere in the United States. While many Northern delegates were disappointed with the rights given to the South, they felt it was necessary for the good of the Nation. This was necessary to form a strong central government and union between the states.
In 1819, America consisted of 22 states which were equally distributed among Free states and Slave states. Missouri requested to be declared a slave
Missourians wanted to be a slave state but couldn’t get the votes unless they outlawed slavery. In 1820, two years after Missouri applied for state ship, Henry Clay came up with the Missouri Compromise. The compromise stated that Missouri could enter the Union as a slave state if Maine enters as a free state. This allowed the number of free and slave states two continue to be equal. Then the Southern and Northern states agreed that all states that joined the Union would be free if they were north of the latitude 36o 30’ except for Missouri.