Letters of Westward Expansion

Letters of Westward Expansion


  In the article "Letters of Westward Expansion", the reader discovers examples of what types of letters were written and what they would say before the civil war. In these examples, it is found that most letters were sent from the road back home to family members and told tales of what was happening on the road. One of the examples of someone writing home to a family member was written by Anna Briggs. She was writing back home to her family in Maryland when she said, "as I am journeying on through time in my distant habitation I may keep up a kind of acquaintance and not feel like a stranger in my own dear native land, if ever I should visit it again.” Another example of writing back home was by Narcissa Whitman. She was writing to her mother in New York and on December 5, 1836, she wrote, "My dear Mother, I have been thinking of my beloved parents tonight; of the parting scene, and of the probability that I shall never see those dear faces again while I live.” With the death rate being so high the most popular letters on the frontier were letters similar to Narcissa Whitman's. Another letter of hers that spoke of death was her letter to her parents explaining the death of her daughter Alice. She wrote, "I have never found it so trying to commence writing to my friends at home as at this time, simply because of the late afflictive dispensation of Providence towards us, which renders me almost incapable of writing, from excessive feeling, the moment my thoughts return to the subject." Being the only way to communicate back home, letters carried so much power and weight with them. These pieces of writing would either brighten your day with the greatest news, or ruin your day with the worst news. While this article mainly discusses westward expansion, it also touches on the expansion in the east and how it was accomplished through working. For women, each did wearing for spinning for their own families. However, when factories started to be built in New England, it put a stop to this task for women, but they did continue to work by developing the actual thread and cloth. This job was later passed on the daughters of farmers. The hours worked in the factory were longer than our time today but were about the same fragment of time girls would spend working anyway. 

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