Temat: 1. From the establishment of colonies in the North...

The Great War for Empire 1754-1763, known as The French and Indian War or as European called it The Seven Years War became one of the turning points of American History. Although it involved revelry and then struggle between Britain and France, however its outcomes directly affected future of British colonies and their inhabitants. As a result of the War the British were given Canada and the territory west of the Appalachians all the way to the Mississippi. With the area of the British Empire more than doubled, the problems of governing it were very serious. The war had left the British government with serious burden of debt so the British King and parliamentary leaders began a program of imperial reform.
1.Regular troops were now to be stationed permanently in the colonies, and the colonists were to assist in provision and maintenance of them. And, by the Stamp Act of 1765, the colonists were required to pay a tax on every legal document, every newspaper, almanac, or pamphlet. These policies threatened, in some degree, the welfare of almost all Americans. The long - term effect would be to confine the enterprising spirit of the colonists and condemned them to a fixed or even a declining standard of living. The tax fell upon all Americans, of whatever region, colony or class. In particular it hit merchants and lawyers, tavernkeepers, and printers. The Virginia House of Burgesses sounded a “trumpet of sedition” that aroused Americans almost everywhere. They resolved that the only taxes payable in the colony were those that they themselves approved. The riots, petitions and boycotts of English goods made the English Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act in 1766. However, the next year Parliament tried different kind of taxation. It imposed the so-called Thownshend duties on colonial imports of glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. Meanwhile the British government had set up a board of customs commissioners in Boston to stop the smuggling there. Then the government sent troops to protect the commissioners from workingmen whom Samuel Adams had organized as the Sons of Liberty. On the night of March 5, 1770 British soldiers fired into the crowd of protesters in front of custom house killing five of them (later known as the Boston Massacre).
As a result of protests and boycotts, after three years, Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except the tea tax 1773 that gave East India Company the right to sell tea directly to America without paying any of the usual fees except the tea tax while American merchants had to pay heavy duty buying tea supplies from England. The merchants feared that they would be driven out of business undertook widely spread action of preventing a giant monopoly from landing its cargoes in colonial ports (by dumping them into the sea). The action called “Tea Party” was immediately punished by the Parliment with four Coercive Acts in 1774. These closed port of Boston, reduced the colony’s powers of self-government, permitted the British troops to quarter in the colonist’s barns and houses. The limitation of colonial liberties and rights of self-governing became the main cause of coming American rebellion against motherland of England. The above historical evidence shows explicitly that the outcomes of the Seven Years war had significant influence on the events that soon advanced the creation of American States.

Louisiana Purchase

Louisiana, France’s largest colony in the New World, defined the wastern United States border along the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico to present-day Minnesota. It had been ceded to Spain in 1763 at the end of the Seven Year’s War. Jefferson shared with other Americans the believe that the United States was destined to expand its “empire of liberty.” Since the first days of American independence, Louisiana had held a special place in the young nation’s expansionist dreams. By 1800, hundreds of thousends of Americans in search of land had trekked into the rich Mississippi and Ohio valleys to settle, intruding on Indian Lands. Down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to New Orleans they floated their farm goods for export. Thus, whoever controlled the port of New Orleans had a hand on the throat of the American economy. As long as Spain owned Louisiana, Americans did not fear.
Rumors of the transfer of Louisiana to Napoleonic France proved true in 1802, and France threatened to rebuild its empire in the New World. The acquisition, claimed Jefferson, “works most sorely” on the United States. “Every Eye in the United States,” Jefferson wrote to the American Minister in Paris Robert R. Livingston, “is now focused on the affairs of Louisiana.” Fears intensified even more in October 1802, when Spanish officials, on the Eve of ceding control to the French, violated the Pinckney’s Treaty by denying Americans the privilege of storing their products at New orleans prior to transshipment to foreign markets. Westerns farmers and eastern merchants complained for closing the port and talked war. To relieve the pressure for war and to prevent westerners from joining Federalists in opposition to his administration, Jefferson simultaneously prepared for war and accelerated talks with the French. In January 1803 he sent James Monroe to France to join Robert Livingston in negotiating to buy New Orleans. Arriving in Paris in April, Monroe was astonished to learn that France had already offered to sell all 827,000 squere miles of Louisiana to the United States for $15 million. On April 30 Monroe and Livingston signed a treaty to purchase a territory, whose borders were undefined and whose land was uncharted.
The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the nation and opened the way for westward expansion across the continent. The acquisition was single most popular achievement of Jefferson's ’residency. It promised fulfillment of his dream of a continental nation reaching to the Pacific coast, “with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation.” It offered to resolve Indian-settler conflict on the frontier by providing land to which eastern tribes, North and South, could be removed. It also enabled western farmers and eastern merchants to float their goods freely down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and trade them oversees extending American economy.

The American Civil War – in the name of maintaining the Union

Secession dramatically changed the nature of the political crisis confronting Americans in the winter of 1860-1861. Political sectionalism had developed around the problem of extending slavery into western territories. This question, of course, involved the larger issue of slavery’s future in the nation. But national unity replaced slavery as the central problem of the day when secession threatened the continued existence of the United States as a single nation. Southerners took their states out of the Union, formed Confederate States of America, and prepared to use military force to defend their new nation. During the war southerners proudly called themselves “rebels" even while insisting that they were not in rebellion. On the contrary, they claimed they were merely defending the constitutional exercise of their states’ rights. To emphasize this view they began, after the war was over, to call it the “War between the States.” From the North point of view, southerners were engaged in treason and revolt when they seceded and created the Confederacy. The official name given the conflict of 1861-1865 by the Union Government was the “War of the Rebellion.” The great struggle was and is most commonly known as the “American Civil War.”
Although the purpose of the struggle from the North’s point of view was to preserve the Union, the nature , size, and duration of the conflict had many other Far-reaching results. By ending slavery, the war began an enormous social revolution in American life. Union victory strengthened the authority of the central government . It also stimulated and intensified loyalty to the national Union; after the war the Supreme Court declared that the Union was “indestructible.”