The Declaration asserted the independence of the
Colonies, but it did not define what territory they
included. That, too, was established by later
documents. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 gave the
United States title to land up to the Mississippi
River. President Thomas Jefferson, like other
Founders, expected the United States to become a
continental nation. In January 1803, in a secret
message to Congress, he asked for $2,500 to finance
the Lewis and Clark expedition from the Mississippi
to the Pacific, and in April 1803, his envoy signed
the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the
nation. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848,
the United States obtained from Mexico our largest
state, California.
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Words of shame. But the
archives' holdings tell other tales as well,
some darker. What of the Indians whom the
Constitution did not define as citizens, and the
blacks whom the Constitution left unfree? In these
documents we can read Andrew Jackson's call for
removal of Indians to west of the Mississippi in
1830, the Treaty of Fort Laramie's setting up
the Sioux reservation in 1868, and the Dawes
Act's encouraging of land ownership on
reservations in 1887.
Attempts to settle the
question of slavery in new states and territories
were on balance unsatisfactory. Those include the
Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850,
the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the Supreme
Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857 asserting
that slaves basically had no rights. These policy
failures led to the election of Abraham Lincoln and
to the Civil War. Lincoln's civil rights
legacy--the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the
13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in
1865--were punctuated by the 1863 Gettysburg
Address, in which Lincoln spelled out what was at
stake: that "government of the people, by the
people, for the people, shall not perish from the
earth."
But even the devastating Civil War
and tumultuous Reconstruction did not succeed in
ensuring equality for black Americans. That was the
work of the 20th century, recorded in archives
documents--Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 order
prohibiting discrimination in defense industries,
Harry Truman's 1948 order desegregating the
military services, Dwight Eisenhower's 1957
order sending troops to ensure the desegregation of
Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., the
official program for the March on Washington in
1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965.
The archives documents tell
us how the United States became a continental
democracy. They also tell us much about how this
country developed the world's most productive
and prosperous economy. The Constitution gave
Congress the power to regulate interstate and
foreign commerce and to recognize patents and
copyrights and establish federal rules for
bankruptcy--limited powers, but ones that were
critical to building a framework of law in which a
free market economy could grow. The archives
documents include Eli Whitney's 1794 patent for
the cotton gin, the device that made the American
South the world's major cotton producer, and
Thomas Edison's 1880 patent for the light bulb,
one of his many inventions responsible for
20th-century industry. They include the Supreme
Court's 1819 decision in McCulloch v. Maryland,
which upheld the constitutionality of the Bank of
the United States, the distant ancestor of the
Federal Reserve, the central bank essential to
20th-century economic growth, and the 1824 decision
in Gibbons v. Ogden, which barred state monopolies
from interfering with interstate commerce, essential
to the growth of a national marketplace.
