New Settlers in the West

1. Read pages 10 - 18  List three reasons why people in the United States moved west.

a. It was a symbol of opportunity. People could completely restart their lives: new homes, new towns, new people.

b. The population in the United States at the time was rapidly increasing, and the West was a great place for all the new immigrant and families to move.

c. It was full of resources, had vast forests with timber, and had the rich soil that was lacking in the East.

2. How did westward expansion contribute to sectional tensions in the United States?

     With each new state that was annexed into the United States, it was either a slave state or free state. If the number of slave states outweighed the number of free states, slave states had more power in Congress, and vice versa. Therefore, as the U.S. continued to expand, its politics became more and more separated between the slave states and free states. The United States split into two main sections of belief: the south, which was full of slave states, and the north, which was full of free states.

3. What was the Peace Policy?

      The Peace Policy was created by President Ulysses S. Grant. This policy was mean to create "peace" with the Native Americans by making them all go in reservations. In the reservations, Indians would be taught English, agricultural ways of the U.S., and Christianity. So basically, the Peace Policy was another way to try to assimilate Native Americans into U.S. society. While the policy wasn't meant to exterminate the Native Americans, if any of the Indians were not on the reservations, the U.S. military would take action. The policy itself is a great example of how the United States contradicted its beliefs, but it was looked at as a good negotiation between Native Americans and the U.S at the time.