United States territorial expansion

The growth of United States territory through purchases, treaties, annexations, settlement, and war, from independence through the acquisition of overseas possessions.

Louisiana Purchase: The 1803 purchase in which the United States acquired France’s claim to a vast region west of the Mississippi River. It doubled U.S. territory and established the precedent of expansion through purchase.
Treaty: A formal agreement between states governed by international law. Treaties transferred territory in deals such as the Louisiana Purchase and Mexican Cession.
Treaty of Paris (1783): The treaty that ended the American Revolutionary War and recognized U.S. independence with boundaries extending to the Mississippi River. Its western boundary gave the new republic a vast territory before later acquisitions.
Indian Removal: The forced displacement of Indigenous peoples from their homelands by U.S. policies, especially during the nineteenth century. Territorial growth repeatedly depended on removing Native nations from desired lands.
Texas annexation: The 1845 incorporation of the Republic of Texas into the United States as a state. Annexation brought Texas into the Union and helped precipitate war with Mexico.
Annexation: The formal incorporation of territory into a state, typically by unilateral action. The United States used annexation to incorporate Texas and Hawaii.
Northwest Ordinance: The 1787 law establishing a process for governing and admitting states from the Northwest Territory. It supplied a model for turning federal territory into states.
Trail of Tears: The forced removal of the Cherokee people to Indian Territory in 1838–1839, during which thousands died. It is a defining instance of the human cost of expansion and removal policy.
Mexican Cession: The large territory Mexico ceded to the United States under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It transferred much of the present-day American Southwest after the Mexican-American War.
Manifest destiny: The nineteenth-century belief that U.S. expansion across North America was justified or inevitable. Its rhetoric helped frame continental expansion as a national mission.

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