The Scramble for America

For seven years after the Declaration of Independence the United States had no internationally recognized boundaries and no defined sovereign territory. It was more an idea than a country.

Then in 1783 the United States began to expand at a staggering rate, adding territory equivalent to the landmass of modern Bulgaria each year, every year, for eighty-four years. By 1867— less than a century after its founding—the United States laid claim to some 3.6 million square miles of land on the North American continent.

How did it happen? In The Scramble for America, historian Clement Knox uncovers the history of these epic years. It is the story of how the United States exploded out of its original confines on the Eastern seaboard, breaching the Appalachians, the Great Plains, the Rockies and extending its reach to the Rio Grande, the Florida Keys, and the Bering Strait, eventually straddling two oceans and commanding some of the most valuable lands on the planet.

In vivid prose he recounts how a cast of settlers, prospectors, and soldiers, hungry for land, motivated by visions of gold, and inspired by the rhetoric of national greatness, spread out across the North American continent, making history as they advanced and bringing violence and dispossession in their wake.

The principal currents of American history are all interwoven with these years of conquest: the origins of the revolution, the tragedy of the Native Americans, the spread of slavery, and the crisis of the union that culminated in the Civil War.

Those turbulent years of rampaging continental expansion in the nineteenth century teed up the United States for global supremacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The creation of the continental United States was one of the great events in modern history and continues to shape our world.

Published to mark the 250th anniversary of American Independence, this book offers a retelling of its national history like no other.