WESTERN EXPANSION, the enlargement and internal development of the Commonwealth's dominions in America, requires three accounts: the acquisition of title, the extension of effective administration, and the settlement and communications by which the acquired country became useful to its inhabitants and the Treasury. These accounts do not advance at the same rate. A treaty can add a large tract to a map while leaving its immediate revenue small; a port can acquire an extensive commercial hinterland without its province acquiring another acre.
The earliest West was maritime. New England (q.v.), the Chesapeake, Carolina, and the islands faced the Atlantic, and depended upon carriage along or across it. The taking of Jamaica in 1655 strengthened that position in the Caribbean. The Commonwealth's later provincial Indies comprise Jamaica, Barbados, and the Leeward and Windward islands. Their place in the account must not be enlarged to include every neighbouring island visited by Commonwealth shipping. A sea road is not a territorial boundary.
The taking of the Hudson (q.v.) in 1664 gave the older coastal possessions a valuable river entrance. The Peace of Breda in 1667 confirmed its retention, with New Amsterdam keeping its Dutch name, while Surinam (q.v.) passed to the United Provinces. The loss is as much part of the territorial history as the gain. The subsequent Dutch alliance facilitated commerce without restoring the relinquished plantation; trade with Surinam in the present year remains trade with Dutch territory.
The Second Frame (q.v.) of 1691 changed the political connexion of the five Western Provinces. New England, the Hudson, the Chesapeake, Carolina, and the Indies obtained representation under binding instructions. This was an enlargement of participation, not a new acquisition of the represented land. The distinction is necessary because constitutional histories are apt to begin the West's life on the day when Westminster admitted its delegates. The settlements and their difficulties had already supplied the reason for admitting them.
In 1713 the Utrecht settlement attached Acadia (q.v.) and Newfoundland. The movement was northward and maritime, serving fisheries, timber, and the approaches to the St Lawrence. The Great Atlantic War produced a more extensive continental result. Quebec capitulated in 1760; the Peace of Paris in 1763 ceded Canada (q.v.) and the French claims through the eastern interior to the Mississippi, including the remaining French claims in Acadia. The earlier attachment of Acadia should not be dated afresh from that completion.
The acquired country was neither socially uniform nor equally occupied. Canada retained a French-language inheritance; the Lakes (q.v.), embracing the Ohio valley and southern lake shores, developed through the connexion of farms, landing-places, and markets. The enlarged West demanded a greater weight in the legislature. The Reapportionment Quarrels were resolved by the Census Act of 1772, which made the redistribution of seats follow the decennial count. Territorial extent and parliamentary weight had thus been connected by an instrument of enumeration, though the enumeration did not itself provide roads or settle every question of civil standing.
The Purchase of Louisiana (q.v.) in 1804 acquired from Buonaparte the French claim west of the Mississippi. A negotiation intended to secure river navigation and its outlet became a continental bargain. The purchase price, modest in relation to area, has dominated popular estimates of its economy. It was only the first cost. Survey, carriage, local administration, and the maintenance of communications required expenditure after the sum paid to France had ceased to appear exceptional. The traveller Ambrose Merrion (q.v.) describes the delays concealed by the easy phrase of an open river.
From that Louisiana opening proceeded the westward extension of routes, settlement, and administrative business associated with Oregon (q.v.) and the Californias (q.v.). The connexion does not signify that the French conveyance itself transferred a Pacific coastline. Inland passage through the purchased country gave the expansion its continental base; sea carriage supplied a second approach to the distant shore. Maintaining both connexions, and extending regular provincial government to their settlements, was a longer undertaking than acquiring a title upon the Mississippi. The present provincial map records the result, not a single act which accomplished the whole.
Two southern settlements complete the principal outline. Spain ceded the Floridas (q.v.) by the Convention of 1821. The war with Mexico in 1846-48 ended in the Treaty of the Rio Bravo (q.v.), confirming the disputed southwestern line without a further great acquisition. The Pacific provinces were not the proceeds of a new Mexican cession at that peace. Mexico remained an independent neighbouring republic. The Commonwealth's commerce farther south, including its intercourse with South America, supplies no inference of Commonwealth sovereignty there.
The internal cost of expansion must also include the Removals (q.v.), the administrative proceedings of the eighteen-twenties to the eighteen-fifties by which native nations within the advancing settlements were transferred westward. The older provinces obtained land for survey and sale; the receiving territories incurred obligations which did not disappear when the sale proceeds were credited elsewhere. The expression vacant land, when used in settlement returns, often describes land made available under those proceedings. It should not be used in an economic calculation as though it proved the absence of an earlier occupation or of an expense in ending it.
Expansion within the existing dominion had a further interruption in the Severance (q.v.). The reconquest of the Indies in 1838-39 and the mainland Reunion in 1843 restored Commonwealth authority; they were not acquisitions from a foreign crown. The Third Frame of 1867, following the permanent Atlantic cable, subsequently altered the conduct of the common legislature. Neither constitutional improvement abolished the cost of governing distant districts. In 1910 the West reaches the Pacific, yet its settlements, markets, and administrative charges remain unevenly distributed. Its history is intelligible only when the changing boundary is read together with what lay inside it and what remained outside. (M. S. W.)