Summary Of Freedom's Frontier By Stacey Smith

Historians have viewed the idea of white dominance as a key element to the legacy of slavery. Losing this dominance with the concept of emancipation was mind boggling. However, the admission of California into the Union required it to enter as a free state according to the Compromise of 1850. Losing white dominance in the newly acquired regions in the West frightened Southern slave holders. Leading to the long trek of individuals from both the North and the South to ensure their version of destiny in the West.
Stacey Smith draws from research that involves the issues of California’s statehood, her book Freedom’s Frontier (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Smith states that the events leading up to the California’s state

The manipulation of the concept of slavery and Manifest Destiny before California’s entrance in the Union is pivotal to Smith’s analysis, and is seen as a staple in Morrison’s argument even though they get to this conclusion from different starting points. Morrison’s argument focuses on the American ideology of freedom and republicanism beginning from the American Revolutionary period to provide evidence on the topic of the expansion of slavery in the West as crucial to the events leading up to the Civil War. Whereas Smith views the onset of the Gold Rush as being a starting point for the move west. Michael Morrison in Slavery and the American West (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 1999) argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution held Americans together until disagreements over the extension of slavery into the new acquired western territories led northerners and southerners to divergent understandings of the Revolution’s symbolic meanings. Each region became convinced that the other was disregarding the principles of liberty and equality established at the beginning of the