Historical events and conflicts that occurred during the expansion of the United States of America.
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In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million
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In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had attempted to resolve this question: It had admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the fragile balance in Congress
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nearly 7 million Americans–40 percent of the nation’s population–lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Following a trail blazed by Lewis and Clark, most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity
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In 1843, one thousand pioneers took to the Oregon Trail as part of the “Great Emigration.”
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In 1848, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States
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In 1854, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed that two new states, Kansas and Nebraska, be established in the Louisiana Purchase west of Iowa and Missouri
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the civil war in Kansas over the expansion of slavery was followed by a national civil war over the same issue. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted, it was the question of slavery in the West–a place that seemed to be the emblem of American freedom–that proved to be “the knell of the union.”
