The expansion of the United States westward from 1763 to the Civil War was intimately intertwined in a number of ways with American politics and the national economy. Obviously, the massive expansion westward could not have been accomplished without the support of the political power of the government, and that expansion just as obviously and necessarily altered the economy of the nation. After all, economic gain was a major motivation for expansion, and it was inevitable that industry (railroads, towns, communication systems, etc.) would spring up as expansion took place.
The year 1763 is significant because on February 10th of that year the Treaty of Paris was signed. With that signing the Seven Years' War concluded, "France surrendered all of Canada to the British, and everything east of the Mississippi except New Orleans. With a stroke of the pen America was cleared for uninterrupted westward expansion" (Wexler 2).
Politics, then, and its military arm, served the westward expansion by eliminating the French as a major obstacle to such expansion: "After the French departed from North America . . . , the English colonists found the vacant territories ripe for land speculation and settlement" (Wexler 2-3). Disputes between settlers and Indians led to increased political oversight from the British, specifically the British Board of Trade which "controlled land speculation through administrators who entered into purchase agreements with the Indian tribes and then passed on to individual owners the land they acquired" (Wexler 4).
Thus, the Indians became the next major obstacle after the elimination of the French. The British and then the American government used a number of political and legal means to steal Indian land. For example, land speculators found a number of ways to skirt political and regulatory limitations imposed by the government, such as land warrants. When such roundabout maneuvers proved unsuccessful, th...