Alexis Monroe
The Crisis of the 1850s: Western American Land and Landscape, 1848-1861
The Mexican-American War added a massive amount of territory to the United States, disrupting the balance of power between slave and free states and forcing Americans to confront whether slavery should be allowed to take root beyond their nation’s former borders. The debate over slavery’s expansion might have been an abstract one if not for the images, produced by artists assigned to the government-sponsored surveys that spread across the American West in the 1850s, that were distributed to Congress and the public. My dissertation examines the way these landscape images, perhaps anodyne to the modern viewer, were suffused with evidence of the power of sectional conflict and charged with the power to shape the country’s future. I argue that while Northerners opposed to slavery’s westward expansion were genuinely interested in the content of these images for what they conveyed about the varied landscapes of the West, pro-expansionist Southerners betrayed, through their indifference to visual descriptions of Western landscapes, a plot to achieve political and economic dominance over the North through the addition of more “slave states” and the construction of a transcontinental railroad linking Southern ports to the Pacific. Despite the overt political inflection of the US-Mexico Boundary Surveys, the Pacific Railroad Surveys, and other government-sponsored expeditions of the period, the drawings and prints produced for their official reports have yet to be studied in terms of their reflection of and influence on the sectional crisis that defined the 1850s. In our current moment of intense partisan discord, my dissertation offers perspective on another defining moment of seemingly insurmountable political conflict in our nation’s history.