Filled with exotic scenes and characters, the westward expansion of the United States has long intrigued the narrator. Often, inspired by this setting, he chose to write about firefights and Indian raids, or about idealistic pioneers fighting nature on the edge of the frontier. But there is an epic much darker than the plateaus and arid deserts: that of a nation whose drastic expansion tore it apart. The grand and decisive policies of American presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Polk saw the vast expanses west of the Mississippi River absorbed into the Union, extending the nation west to the Pacific and south to Mexico. Suddenly enlarged, the United States found itself plagued by social, economic, and moral dilemmas relating to the administration of the new territories. Unable to resolve these disputes, the nation fractured into factions that formed along pre-existing regional and political divides, ultimately leading to the violent and brutal bloodbath of the Civil War. The roots of this disastrous internecine conflict originated in the expansionist strategies of both Jefferson and Polk, who clearly blamed their actions for harming the nation they governed. Although their means of land acquisition differed, both Jefferson and Polk emphasized American expansion during their presidencies, obtaining large areas of North American territory. In 1803, the Jefferson administration concluded an agreement with France to purchase the Louisiana Territory, a large portion of northern Central America stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. Thirty years later, this region included several states and territories, and the pioneers pushed even further west, seeking new homes on the distant frontier. The obstacles remain... middle of paper... r the relaxation of tensions; within six years, eleven Southern states seceded from the Union, threatened by the election of an antislavery Northerner to the presidency. Soon after secession came the red rivers of civil war. If Thomas Jefferson and James K. Polk had exercised more restraint in their conquest of Western territory, the polarization of the American North and South would not have been as drastic as it turned out to be. By bringing the hotly contested issue of slavery to the fore, the sudden westward expansion reshaped America's sociopolitical dynamics, digging a deep philosophical chasm between the North and the South. For the existence of such a divide was tantamount to the decomposition of the economies of both regions, the war of ideas waged on posters and in the halls of Congress gave way to a war fought with bayonets, on the plains of Kansas and, later, in the East.