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Failure in America raised questions about the value of colonies and the future of the British empire. British governments, however, considered that certain colonial possessions remained of fundamental importance and that they should continue to be managed on established principles. The prominence given to Ireland and the West Indies together with the remaining North American colonies meant that the Atlantic remained the main sphere of British concerns, although the East India Company's Indian territories was becoming a major imperial commitment which was gaining in consequence. The chapter stresses continuities rather than changes which might be seen as marking any immediate shift towards the creation of second empire different from that before the loss of America. A concluding section notes the beginnings of a new American continental empire purporting to be very different from the British one.

The impact of the war varied in severity throughout America, generally leaving the bitterest legacy in the south. After the war Britain was widely conceived still to be hostile to America, trying to curb her maritime commerce, to detach the new western settlements and even to subvert American morals by exporting luxury goods. Americans resented the slighting way in which their society and institutions were generally portrayed in the British press. Assessments of Britain varied from those like Thomas Jefferson, who saw her as irredeemably corrupted and bent on the overthrow of American republicanism, to Alexander Hamilton, for whom the power of the British state and Britain’s recent economic development were models for America to emulate.

In the mid-1850s, Texas slaveholders estimated that some 4,000 fugitive slaves had escaped south to Mexico. This chapter broadly examines the process in which runaway slaves from Texas escaped to Mexico. Specifically, it explores how they learned about freedom south of the border, the types of supplies they gathered for their escape attempts, and the ways in which Texas’s vast landscape shaped their experiences. It argues that the routes that led fugitive slaves to freedom in Mexico were a part of a precarious southern Underground Railroad, but one that operated in the absence of formal networks or a well-organized abolitionist movement. The chapter centers on fugitive slaves’ efforts toward self-emancipation and navigate contested spaces of slavery and freedom with little assistance and under difficult conditions. It sheds new light on the history of runaway slaves by examining the ways in which American westward expansion and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands shaped the fugitive slave experience in the nineteenth century.

The early American republic remained embedded in the structures of the British Empire long after the achievement of its political independence in 1783. The nationalism of “postcolonial America,” as recent scholarship has called it, owed much to the on-going struggle to consolidate independence from an increasingly powerful and global British Empire. The best means of loosening Britain’s economic grip over the new republic triggered great social and political conflict. Furthermore, Britain intensified the sectional conflict over slavery that would lead to civil war, both by increasing Southern insecurity through its anti-slavery position and by offering a market and potential alternative political alliance to the cotton producing states of the Deep South. Yet, paradoxically, Britain’s persistent influence and its global pre-eminence played an important role in the consolidation and expansion of the United States.

This chapter examines the politics of American expansion into the Southwest, focusing on how some racist politicians promoted manifest destiny while others opposed expansion. The chapter first takes a look at Mexico's land policy and its attempt to design its settlement policies in a way that copied the United States. It shows how Mexico struggled to assert national authority over its states and territories, promoting a federated structure that empowered the states to control their own land policies. Many of those territories, in turn, committed themselves to land policies that were at odds with those of the central government. The chapter proceeds by discussing U.S. efforts to acquire territory from Latin America, including Cuba and the Dominican Republic, before concluding with an analysis of the politics of the battle to incorporate New Mexico Territory as a state.

This chapter explores how Metis borderlanders came into conflict with American federal officials who were convinced that Metis traders enabled Lakota resistance to American expansion and undermined the administration of Indian affairs in the region. While U.S. officials were determined to unravel Metis cross-border economies, the much more limited Canadian presence on the northwestern Plains allowed Metis borderland communities to flourish and undermined American enforcement efforts. Indeed, officials in both countries betrayed a surprising dependence on Metis intermediaries in their diplomatic dealings with other Indigenous peoples and even the actual survey of the forty-ninth parallel. The absence of effective measures to suppress illicit trade or to assess the situation for themselves illustrates the very real limits on American and Canadian efforts to consolidate their sovereignty and the role the Metis played in shaping those efforts.

This chapter examines the extent, if any, a Seminole strategy existed to check aggressive white advance into the Gulf Coast region from the period 1812 to 1858. The Florida Indians conducted a lengthy and valiant resistance in an effort to remain on their lands, and several reasons are attributed for their stout defiance. This chapter also identifies a number of factors, most beyond the control of the Seminole, which eventually sealed their demise.

This chapter examines the history of yellow fever, the role it played in shaping slavery in the United States, and its part in the country’s westward expansion. Yellow fever was an endemic disease of West Africa that traveled to the New World and elsewhere aboard trading ships with their cargoes of slaves. The black African peoples, although easily infected, nevertheless withstood the effects in that fewer died from the infection than Caucasians, American Indians, or Asians. Ironically, as smallpox and measles devastated natives along the Caribbean coast and islands, growing numbers of African slaves were brought to replace those plantation laborers. When the value of Africans over natives became apparent, by virtue of the blacks’ resistance to yellow fever, the importation of these Africans increased still further. Because it was so lethal to susceptible humans, yellow fever actually disrupted exploration into the Caribbean. In fact, American expansion became possible only after a team led by Walter Reed arrived in Cuba to combat the disease and prove it was transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Chapter 1 documents the life path of Thomas Jefferson Brown, the son of an African-American father and Irish mother, who migrated from Arkansas to Indian Territory in the 1870s and married two African-descended women of the Creek and Seminole nations. This chapter uses Brown’s story to illustrate how some early African-American settlers initially bolstered their claims to freedom in the postemancipation era by attaching themselves to American expansion, Native Americans, and the acquisition of Indian land. This complex moment of African-American participation in the expropriation of Indian Territory was tellingly short-lived. African-American access to Indian land ended abruptly with the advent of Oklahoma statehood, Jim Crow segregation, and oil speculation. As Indian sovereignty was dissolved and notions of racial purity and “blood” acquired growing significance, “race” ultimately eclipsed “nation” as a guarantor of rights and resources. Brown’s story illuminates the construction of a new racial order in Indian Territory, and, ultimately, the limits of North American escape.

Despite playing a unique and significant role in the history of American expansion, the francophone merchants of the bourgeois frontier found that the cultural landscape of the region they had helped establish could not accommodate their own distinctive culture. By the 1840s, the language and cultural practices of the French seemed to have disappeared in the very cities they had founded. German and Irish immigrants quickly dominated the Catholic institutions they established and supported. In Detroit and St. Louis, francophone merchant families became centered in the genteel enclaves of Hamtramck, Grosse Pointe, and Frenchtown (Soulard) but continued to exercise both political and economic power throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond. This chapter explores the persistence of French or Creole culture in Creole St. Louis and French Detroit, as well as the Americanization of both cities during the nineteenth century.

This chapter discusses the continued American expansion into former Indian homelands north and south of the Ohio River, which sparked a renewed passion for what American politicians called “internal improvements.” In addition to roads, canals seemed particularly promising. In 1825, the opening of the Erie Canal heralded a new era in commercial transportation, and almost overnight it made Cleveland an Atlantic port by connecting it to the valuable New York trade network. Equally significant were the improvements in steamboat navigation that united Cleveland's rival Cincinnati with New Orleans in a tight bond of corn, pork, and cotton exchange. The push for improved roads to connect local producers to commercial depots also strengthened in the mid-1820s, as men of “small capital” and those of greater means all sought to tap into the new wealth that seemed to be sweeping the Trans-Appalachian region.

This chapter details Salem merchant John B. Williams's frustrated efforts to live up to the legacy of Salem's mercantile culture. Though money was what Williams wanted from Fiji, he valued money not for its purchasing power but as a symbol of his success in business. He hoped that a fortune reaped in Fiji would command respect by demonstrating his superior commercial acumen to the people of Salem, a city renowned for having produced some of the nation's earliest millionaires. The speculations at the heart of American commercial expansion could generate extraordinary returns one day and ruin a person the next. Even if failure was endemic, Williams anguished over the cause of his. He was trapped between two competing cultural values. He believed that self-made wealth would earn him others' esteem, but to exhibit blatant self-interest was despicable. Although Williams never achieved his objective in Fiji, his actions bore consequences for others. More than any other American, Williams influenced the islands' history. Whereas David Whippy sought foremost to protect the foreign enclave at Levuka, Williams belonged to a vast, global economy in which his self-interest constituted one tentacle.