Westward Expansion In The Late 19th Century

The growing population of the Americas, westward expansion became more inevitable. The soil in the east wasn’t able to keep up with the increasing crowded population, and the rich westward soil peaked many farmers interested. However, before the transportation revolution there was no way to get there. We can watch as the new transportation technologies grow, the westward expansion does as well. The new transportation technologies such as the canals, steamboats, and early railroads the bound the each and west, as well as the North and South throughout the early 1800s. They allowed an increasingly efficient means of traversing the country side, accelerating expanse of land throughout North American which we call manifest destiny. Just as John C. Calhoun argued, these interval improvements of transportation powerfully “[bound] all sections of the nation together.” With the growing western front, a system was needed to connect the continually growing west to the eastern markets. There were already existing …show more content…
The Westward expansion skyrocketed yet again, eventually allowing settlers to move even past the Mississippi river while still being directly connected to the eastern shore. We call the dramatic increase in land and population manifest destiny, claiming that it was our right to be able to expand across all of America. The railroad heavily encouraged the agriculture to move further west due to the richer soil their and cheaper methods of transporting the produce. It provided jobs for immigrations to work, laying down tracks, completed the needs for transportation, by creating a high speed method of traveling directly between the east and west that could operate year-round. The railroads could easily carry massive amounts of goods or people from the east to the west, or vice-versa, quite literally binding the two