Writing sample to critique……………a first draft of the essay assignment for unit 4

Assignment: take a minimum of three documents across a minimum of two themes and explain how the documents help us understand the era. This essay below is about 1,000 words.

Yours should be in the 500 to 1,000 word range.

In 1848 once the controversial War with Mexico was finished, Frederick Douglass, a famous black abolitionist wrote a scathing editorial in his newspaper, the North Star. Douglass noted how now everyone is happily declaring “Peace! Peace! Peace!” over the Mexican government and armies. It’s true that the United States invaded Mexico after annexing Texas and in 1846 the Mexican government tried to defend itself. In about 18 months the Mexican Army had been thoroughly defeated by the US Army not only in Texas and California (two provinces of Mexico) but also Mexico City itself had come under siege by American forces.

To Douglass and others it seemed as if the United States under President Polk had started the war, and that it quickly became a war of aggression against Mexico, one in which the current shape of the United States would depend. The future states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, western Colorado, and Texas all came into the possession of the USA after this crushing defeat for the young (1821) republic immediately after the War. Although the treaty that forced Mexico to give over this land had not yet been signed when Douglass penned his editorial, he noted, that the “atrocious deeds of barbarous heroism” would now allow not “peace but plunder.”

Douglass says his “soul is sick” due to the “hypocrisy” of Americans who seem to think that might makes right, that the new western lands can be conquered and that those who do the conquering believe “it is a triumph of Christianity.” Obviously the Mexicans were themselves Christians (Roman Catholics) but not the kind of Christian who America has sent into the west. Three years earlier the term manifest destiny was used to justify the conquest of the west from natives and from any claims by Mexico in a famous article by John O’Sullivan. There was, according to O’Sullivan, “an irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration” headed west, “armed with the plough and the rifle,” and he writes it would “be idle for Mexico to dream of dominion.” O’Sullivan is saying that the Mexican government will not be able to rule the west once white Americans “pour down upon it.” And, O’Sullivan is not just explaining what he thinks is inexorable, what cannot be stopped. He is saying it is manifestly good: “The Spanish-Indian-American populations of Mexico, Central America, and South America afford the only receptacle capable of absorbing the [black] race whenever we shall be prepared to slough it off.” Conquest of the west and the south into Mexico and Central America, he believes, will help end slavery! But this does not make O’Sullivan an abolitionist, instead he is a kind of mad and racist schemer.

Douglass would have strongly disagreed with the notion that Americans were bringing about liberation of these lands for the benefit of humanity, especially when we consider that Douglass was a serious reformer. The lands to the west, beginning with east Texas, were areas that abolitionists feared would become populated by slaveowners. Despite the Mexican prohibition of slaves in their state, Americans emigrated there under the leadership of Stephen Austin with their slaves, and by the mid-1830s were seeking independence from Mexico. A decade later many of those same men would encourage annexation of their ‘lone star’ republic by the United States to legalize their states’ right to own other human beings. The expansion of slavery was gravely concerning to Douglass, and other reformers and though he doesn’t mention the Mexican War and slavery together in this editorial that may be his greatest concern.

Just three years before O’Sullivan’s manifest destiny article is in print, we have the judgment by a famous British fiction writer about the kind of country America is becoming. Charles Dickens thought he’d come to a wondrous new republican, liberal land, but what he found south of the Mason Dixon line, however, deeply offended him. “This is not the republic of my imagination,” Dickens wrote while in Baltimore in 1842. He saw very little freedom of opinion in America especially when he asked about the future of slavery, or when he was at all critical of the kind of hypocrisy that Douglass was to point out in 1848. “The sight of slavery in Virginia….has pained me very much.” Americans, according to Dickens, cannot “bear to be told of their faults.” So, although we think of the era of the 1830s and 40s as one of reform, very few reforms it seems were actually popular and often reformers were ignored. Certainly the most fundamental reform—the abolition of slavery as a state right—was so opposed that it would take far more than Douglass’s newspaper or a hundred others like it to change the way of life of many southern Americans as the country expanded to the west.

Two themes, one of reform and pointing out faults on the one hand, and the optimism of expansion and a desire to just grow the size the country and not worry about improving it socially or morally, on the other hand, were at odds with each other. The expansion into the west and the war with Mexico might be a grand distraction from the business of reforming: making modern basic improvements in the existing states, like creating public school systems, building canals, and roads, reducing alcoholism, etc. But that physical expansion whether brought about by “natural emigration” (O’Sullivan) or “barbarous warring greed” (Douglass) would ultimately not eliminate the call for reform, especially the reform most buried in the racist notions of the superiority of some white “Anglo-Saxon” people. Indeed, the addition of Texas as a new slave state would nearly tip the country into war in 1850, a decade earlier than it finally occurred.

WHICH 3 documents were used in the construction of this essay?

WHAT 3 themes are addressed?

HOW many paragraphs does this essay have?

HOW many times are dates used in this essay?

HOW many direct quotes are used in this essay?

WHAT does the last paragraph do? What is its function?

WHAT improvements would you make in this essay?

IF you were to illustrate this essay WHAT images might you use?

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