Antebellum U.S. Migration and Communication

3.1 Antebellum U.S. Migration and Communication

The nineteenth century in the United States was a period of movement. A wave of migration in the 1830s and 1840s witnessed easterners heading out from established states into unsettled territories and challenging new environments across the West and Southwest. These migratory adventures slowed signi cantly during the late 1850s, 1860s, and early 1870s, as individuals were drawn into the Civil War and its aftermath.

However, by the 1880s, many people were on the move again, often trying to get to the west coast and nding themselves stranded in mid-America. Despite the military and social con icts of the 1830s and 1840s, Texas, or the land that would become Texas, became a popular settlement point for migrants from a wide variety of backgrounds and with an equally diverse set of goals.

Two letters and a travel diary, available online as part of the `Our Americas' Archive Partnership2 (a digital collaboration on the hemispheric Americas) and physically housed in Rice University's Woodson Research Center, can assist in teaching exercises focused upon the movement of peoples and ideas in the antebellum U.S

Question of War

Figure 3.1: A selection from a letter that M. Mattock sent to Major McEwen on May 7, 1848.3 Mattock is in Mexico during the composition of the letter and considers the possibility of war.