help?american history?don't get the question?

Well for almost 200 years the US was just east of the Mississippi (from 1600 as a colony to the 1800's) and travelling west more than doubled the size of our country.

Westward expansion was one of the major influences on the civil war starting because there was a law that said any new states and territories would not be slave owning states and the south realized soon they would be outvoted in congress and slavery would be illegal so they seceded.

I personally believe the benefits were worth the costs, but you'll have to answer that one for yourself.

How did westward expansion - when the US took over land west of the Mississippi - affect the US? Especially, how did westward expansion create conflict between North and South, which helped lead to the Civil War? What were the effects, good and bad, for the Native Americans and Mexicans that were conquered? (good effects = benefits, bad effects = costs)

I was just in US History so here's what your teacher wants you to say. Impact of westward expansion- Acclamation of land and more area for producing and farming. Influence on the Civil war- After claiming Missouri the US had odd number of states and there was a lot of uproar about whether Missouri would be a slave state causing a ton of fights and in Kansas there was a lot of former slave fights. Benefits worth the cost- No. Native Americans were exterminated, pushed westward, and given diseases intentionally by the US govt. without benefiting while Mexicans had their land sold by men who didn't even know them (Napoleon).

Traditionally, when one thinks of the expansion of the American West, the event most likely to come to mind is the California Gold Rush of 1849. While that profitable discovery did boost California's population by 80,000 eager prospectors, there remained an awful lot of land between the Pacific Coast and, say, St. Louis, Missouri. "Why mention St. Louis?" you might be asking. Because in actuality the young United States started exploring the vast land mass to the west from that very point and almost fifty years before those gold nuggets started hitting the pan in California.

In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson sent a secret message to Congress calling for an expedition into the area west of the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. He felt that an intelligent military man with perhaps a dozen hand-picked men could successfully chart the entire route and do it on an appropriation of roughly $2,500. Jefferson's message was secret because France owned the territory in question and such an expedition would surely be considered trespassing.

Then in July of the same year, Napoleon of France, in a surprise move, offered the whole Louisiana Territory to the United States for $15,000,000. America accepted and overnight the United States grew by about one million square miles, from the Mississippi to the Rockies and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.

in the mean time the red Indians were exterminated in the process