Stephen Aron

And that becomes the primary destination.

But in addition, you see the migrations in the 1830s to Texas, for example, people from the South heading into Texas where cotton lands open up there.

So it's not just Oregon that's a destination in these years.

There's a number of destinations, and yet Oregon becomes the great beacon for American migrants in the 1840s.

The great dream for most white American men in the 19th century was to achieve what they call the competence of

which was a standard of living that allowed them to basically feed their families, take care of themselves, not be dependent on others to work for wages or to be a tenant farmer, but to achieve an independence.

And land ownership was fundamental to that independence.

The yeoman ideal that Thomas Jefferson had,

gives voice to is, I think, the driving factor here.

And in those unstable times of the 1830s, in those economic turmoil, there's a lot of Americans find that opportunity challenge, that possibility challenge.

And that certainly impels many to look westward.

So the term manifest destiny, the term itself doesn't get coined until the mid-1840s, until John L. O. Sullivan, who's a New York newspaper man writing for essentially a Democratic paper associated with Andrew Jackson's party and the primary expansionist party at the time, puts the phrase in there that it is our manifest destiny to overspread the continent.

But the idea, the idea of Manifest Destiny, of Americans' opportunity laying and claiming lands to the West, in those lands to the West becoming the place on which Americans would achieve, would bring the blessings of liberty and democracy, at least for themselves, never mind what would happen to the indigenous peoples of those areas, was certainly deeply embedded in American culture going back generations.

So there's certainly, you know, the politics of expansionism is at the heart of a lot of what's going on in the 19th century and the contest over how that expansionism would take place dating back to the earliest days of the American Republic.

But certainly even the first party system that emerges in the 1790s, there's a profound division between the Federalists and Washington and Adams who take a relatively go slow approach to

to how westward expansion should take place, versus Thomas Jefferson, who becomes a much more unbridled advocate for opening up Western lands for white American farmers, and often they're African American slaves, and ejecting Indians from those lands.

And that becomes the context.

And then you have a lot of battles over land law, on what terms would the federal government make available land?

Would land be available to people on relatively cheap terms?

Or as Washington originally thought, let's make it pretty expensive so only the right sort of people can go there and that there'll be a more orderly settlement of Western territories.