People began to look for perfection, and some described it as transcendentalism. Transcendentalism was the literary and philosophical movement that said individuals should transcend material reality, leaving behind the competitive, materialistic world to attain through intuitive reasoning oneness with the universe as a whole and with the spiritual forces that lay behind it. Some even began utopian experiments, which included the spirit of reform and the belief in the limitless possibilities of antebellum America.
As Americans continued westward into unknown territory, a new ideology was born. The Manifest Destiny, which reflected burgeoning mid-nineteenth century American nationalism. Resting on the ideal that the U.S. was destined by God and history, to expand its boundaries over the vast North America continent and in the process, bring to other cultures and people the great “uplifting” benefits of American democracy and the free-labor ideal.
The United States wanted Mexico’s land. We had just annexed Texas, but President Polk wanted Mexico’s other northern provinces and that made was impossible to avoid. The war had many opponents in the United States, Whig critics chief among them, who charged that from the beginning Polk had contrived the whole affair and that the war amounted to bullying of a weak nation by its greedy imperialist neighbor. Opposition intensified as the war continued and as the public home became aware of the casualties and expense. The U.S. won the war and gain new territory, but it had created a new set of troubling and divisive issues.
As you can tell America was getting richer, in land, manufacturing, and economically. But issues between the rich and poor brought out much diversity. The white Americans dealing with the Indians and their land also had created many controversial issues that America was again split on. The hypocrisy in the Declaration of Independence, being written by actual slave owners, and the way we dealt with the immigrants and their right in relation to the rest of the country were all very important issues that divided American and their views. These are some of the things and reasons that gave American people the reason to have split views on many of the issues from 1790 to 1850. America was also become very powerful and democratic, but because of the America’s diversity of people, religion, and culture, we had conflicting views on how America could be bettered as a whole. .