St John’s, Newfoundland, to Vancouver is about 3,000 miles; Plymouth, Massachusetts, to San Francisco is about 2,700 miles, the distances which English covered on its westward expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific between 1700 and the late 1800s. Revolution, purchase, negotiation, violent conquest, slavery and genocide brought the continental USA finally to its modern geographical limits. English-speaking powers controlled the east coast of North America from Labrador to Florida, and the west coast from the Arctic Ocean to the USA–Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana. The 250 years of spread of native English speakers occurred at the expense of indigenous North American languages, and to a lesser extent Spanish, French and the other languages of other European colonists.

The book opens with a chapter on slavery, starting with the absence of Blacks from “we the people” in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. The American Revolution led to the Constitution, and Hamilton’s reports were vital to the new country. They set the basis for the Louisiana Purchase and the Missouri Compromise. Cotton agriculture in the South and manufacture in the North contributed to economic growth. The 1837 banking crisis interrupted this progress and further compromises over slavery in new states set the stage for the Civil War. Time on the Cross is examined to illustrate the role of Blacks and how hard it is to write about it.

Chapter 2 explores how two rogue diplomats, Robert Livingston and James Monroe, obtained half a continent for the United States without shedding a drop of blood. Despite President Thomas Jefferson's instructions that Livingston and Monroe negotiate only for the city of New Orleans and as much territory east of that city as Napoleon Bonaparte's government could be persuaded to part with, they broke ranks and pledged $15 million for the transfer of the immense Louisiana territory from France to America. This act violated two of Jefferson's most cherished principles: economy in government and strict construction of the Constitution. Fifteen million dollars was a huge sum of money in 1803 - it vastly expanded the national debt - and there was no clause in the Constitution empowering the president to buy land. Livingston and Monroe risked their reputations, and possibly their lives, on the gamble that Jefferson would cast his scruples aside and submit the Louisiana treaty to the Senate. They were right, and, as a result of their disobedience, the United States doubled in size, acquiring 827,000 square miles of territory west of the Mississippi at a cost of three cents an acre. It was a mind-boggling bargain, and, like the treaty that ended the American Revolution, it grew out of American diplomatic indiscipline.