The expansion of the USA and Canada

Detail

Two young countries that grew huge

• Canada and the USA were born at the end of the eighteenth century. At birth both were only a small part of their present size.
• Over the next hundred years they grew to their present shape. The growth came not from one war but from buying, winning and taking land, piece by piece.
• Three big pieces built the USA:
• Louisiana Purchase from France (1803) — the USA paid $15 million. The treaty was signed on 2 May 1803 but back-dated to 30 April. [2]
  • The land was about 828,000 square miles (2,144,520 sq km) — under three cents an acre, and it doubled the size of the USA. [2]
  • It ran from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Gulf of Mexico up to British America (Canada). Most of it had never been surveyed, so the treaty could not even give exact borders. [3]
• Alaska bought from Russia — the deal was signed on the night of 29–30 March 1867 by US Secretary of State William H. Seward and the Russian minister Eduard de Stoeckl, for $7.2 million. People mocked it as "Seward's Folly". [4]
  • It added 586,412 square miles. The Senate approved it on 9 April 1867 (37 to 2), but the money was paid only on 1 August 1868; the USA took charge at Sitka on 18 October. [4]
  • Why Russia sold: Alaska had become a money-loser, and Russia was deep in debt after the Crimean War (1853–56). [4]
• Much of the south won in war from Mexico — the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed 2 February 1848, ended the Mexican–American War. Mexico gave up more than 525,000 square miles (1,360,000 sq km), more than half its territory. [5]
  • This Mexican Cession became parts of today's California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. The new border was fixed at the Rio Grande and the Gila River; the USA paid $15 million plus about $3 million of Mexican debts. [5]

Nobody asked the natives

• Every one of these deals was between one European-descended power and another — France, Russia, Mexico, the USA.
• No one thought the natives' consent was needed. The people already living on the land were simply not treated as owners.
• The 'frontier' (the moving line between settled farms and native land) kept shifting west. As it moved, natives were pushed back with it — again and again.

Land-hunger: who came and why

• Younger sons from Britain and France. Under the family rules at home, the eldest son took the land and the younger sons got nothing. America offered them land of their own.
• Germans, Swedes and Italians who had lost their small farms to big farmers back home.
• Poles, who were happy on the open prairie grasslands — the flat grass country reminded them of the steppes (wide treeless grass plains) of home.

What the settlers did to the land

• They cleared the forest to make fields.
• They brought in rice and cotton — crops that cannot grow in Europe's climate. That is exactly why they sold so well: Europe had to buy them.
• They hunted wolves and mountain lions to extinction to protect livestock.
• They felt safe on their farms only after barbed wire (1873) — cheap fencing that finally marked "this is mine" across open country.

Slavery, the plantations and the Civil War

• The hot south. Enslaved natives had been put to work there and had died in large numbers. So planters turned to enslaved Africans to run the plantations (big single-crop estates, mainly cotton).
• Protests ended the slave trade — the shipping in of new captives. But people already enslaved stayed enslaved. Stopping the trade was not the same as freeing anyone.
• The north had no plantations and condemned slavery. This split the country.
• The Civil War (1861–65) ended with abolition — slavery was made illegal.
• But segregation (blacks kept separate in schools, buses, jobs) carried on. It ended only with the civil-rights struggle of the twentieth century.

Note: [5] adds that the huge Mexican Cession of 1848 reopened the fight over whether slavery could spread into new territory — leading to the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854), and then to war in 1861. This extends, and does not contradict, the NCERT account.

Canada: from French colony to Confederation

• Britain won Canada from France in 1763. A large French-speaking settler population suddenly lived under British rule.
• The French settlers demanded autonomy again and again — the right to run their own affairs, language and law.
• British attempts to settle this, in order:
• Quebec Act, 1774
• Canada Constitutional Act, 1791

• Canadian Union, 1840

• The demand was finally settled by the Confederation of 1867, which created autonomous states inside one country.

• It was made by the British North America Act, which came into force on 1 July 1867 and joined four provinces: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. [6][7]
• The Act gave the new provinces British-style constitutions, confirmed French language and legal rights, and split power between the federal government and the provinces. It stayed Canada's constitution until 1982, when it was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867. [7]

• More provinces joined later; Newfoundland and Labrador was the last, in 1949. [7]

• Canada Indians Act, 1876 — the law that defined and controlled the status of native people. Autonomy was for the French settlers; the natives got control instead.

Prelims Hooks

• Louisiana Purchase (1803) — bought from France for $15 million; about 828,000 sq miles; doubled the size of the USA. [2]
• Alaska was bought from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million; nicknamed "Seward's Folly" after Secretary of State William H. Seward. [4]
• The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (2 February 1848) ended the Mexican–American War and handed the USA the Mexican Cession (over 525,000 sq miles). [5]
• Barbed wire came in 1873 — settlers felt secure on their farms only after this.
• The natives' consent was never sought in any of these land transfers.
• Rice and cotton were introduced by settlers because they cannot be grown in Europe, so they fetched high export prices.
• Wolves and mountain lions were hunted to extinction by settlers.
• US Civil War: 1861–65, ending in abolition of slavery; segregation ended only in the twentieth century.
• Britain took Canada from France in 1763; the Confederation of 1867 (British North America Act, in force 1 July 1867) created autonomous provinces — first four: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. [6][7]
• Canada milestones in order: Quebec Act 1774 → Constitutional Act 1791 → Canadian Union 1840 → Confederation 1867 → Indians Act 1876.

Mains Points

• Territory was transferred between empires, not between owners and buyers. France sold Louisiana, Russia sold Alaska, Mexico ceded the south-west — yet none of these sellers had asked the people living there. This is the legal core of settler colonialism: the native was treated as an occupant, never a landholder. Useful for any GS-I question on how colonialism differed from ordinary conquest.
• The frontier was an economic engine, not just a line on a map. Land-hunger in Europe (younger sons with no inheritance, peasants losing land to big farmers) supplied the settlers; export crops like rice and cotton supplied the profit; barbed wire (1873) locked the gains in. Displacement of natives was the cost that never entered the account books.
• Expansion and slavery were linked, not separate stories. Every new block of land reopened the question of whether slavery would spread into it. The Mexican Cession of 1848 is the clearest case [5]. The Civil War (1861–65) was therefore partly a war about what westward expansion was for.
• Compare the two settler states. The USA settled its internal conflict by war (1861–65); Canada settled its French-settler conflict by constitutional bargaining (1763 → 1774 → 1791 → 1840 → 1867). But both left the native question out of the settlement — Canada's answer to natives was the Indians Act, 1876, control rather than autonomy. Good comparative material for questions on federalism and minority accommodation.