American Expansionism

7 Key excerpts on "American Expansionism"

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  The Shaping of America

  A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 1: Atlantic America 1492-1800

  • D. W. Meinig(Author)
  • 1986(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  Americans read the geography of the continent in terms of their own interests, as any nation might be expected to do, but they then translated those interests into a moral claim of natural rights superior to those of other people and thereby gave to nationalism a new dimension and portent. By using such rhetoric promiscuously to promote their special mission to command the continent, they put the full force of nationalism behind American Expansionism. The United States was a successor to three hundred years of European imperial expansion in North America. The marks of northwest Europe—of its peoples; of commercial capitalism, its chief instrument of expansion; of a diversifying Protes-tantism, its great energizing sociopolitical movement—were everywhere upon it. But the United States was obviously something more than a federation of newly independent commercial colonies of Protestant Europeans, and it was expanding inward upon the continent with a powerful instrument peculiarly its own: a special fusion of capitalism, individualism, and nationalism brought into focus on a huge territory of magnetic attraction. The basic dynamics of American expansion were unprecedented. Never had so many people acting in their own private interest under conditions of great political freedom had access to such a large area of fertile lands, parceled by a simple efficient system into readily marketable units that could be bought and sold under clean rights of property to be used for family subsistence, commercial production, speculative investment, social status, community devel- 418 REORGANIZATIONS: AN AMERICAN MATRIX opment, psychological relief, or whatever else one might desire; and never had such a wide array of private interests been further motivated by a deeply emotional corporate interest to act as a unified body of people with a mission to expand relentlessly, subordinating any other people that stood in its way.

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  The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803–1898

  • Sanford Levinson, Bartholomew Sparrow, Sanford Levinson, Bartholomew Sparrow(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

    (Publisher)

  7

  A Promise of Expansionism

  Paul Kens

  [Our]

  claim is by the right of manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us

  . John Louis Sullivan, February 27, 1845

  J ohn Louis O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” in an 1845 editorial justifying America’s claim to Oregon.1 The beauty in his words lies in how succinctly they captured the argument that America’s expansion to the Pacific Ocean was inevitable. There is little doubt that the idea that the United States was predestined to spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific was captivating in its time. There is even less doubt that it has become deeply ingrained in American folklore. Furthermore, despite the complications of slavery and sectionalism, the belief that United States territory should stretch across the continent was widely popular. Manifest Destiny, one historian has explained, was a national mood rather than a precise program—a mood characterized by buoyant optimism as Americans looked expectantly toward Texas, Oregon, and California.2

  Nevertheless, there was nothing inevitable about this expansion. Prior to the 1840s, most Americans did not think of their nation as encompassing the entire continent. Although some eastern merchants undoubtedly dreamed of ports on the Pacific and trade with the Orient, the continent itself imposed a formidable barrier to expansion. Those who thought about the territory west of the Mississippi at all commonly referred to it as the Great American Desert.3 Both the fact of expansion and the means of expansion thus involved policy decisions: controversial decisions that required the government, primarily the Tyler and Polk administrations, and others who favored the policy to provide justifications.4

  It is understandably tempting to think of expansion of the 1840s as simply a continuation of the Louisiana Purchase. In some ways it was. But the 1840s expansion was also different. Rather than resulting from a purchase, American expansion in the 1840s involved a compromise with England over the disputed Oregon Country, annexation of the sovereign nation of Texas, and war with Mexico. These events raised some very practical concerns. Some opponents of expansion worried especially about England’s reaction to aggressive expansion, fearing that, if pushed too far on the Oregon question and threatened by American control of the Texas cotton crop, England would opt for war. When the United States itself opted for war with Mexico, some critics worried about how much the war would cost and how the government would be able to carry out a war in so distant a land.

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  President McKinley, War and Empire

  President McKinley and America's New Empire

  • Richard F. Hamilton(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay (New York, 1968); three works by David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia, MO, 1973); The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900 (Columbia, MO, 1998); and The Diplomacy of Involvement: American Economic Expansion across the Pacific, 1784-1900 (Columbia, MO, 2001); Reginald C. Stuart, United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775-1871 (Chapel Hill, 1988); Sam W. Haynes, James Polk and the Expansionist Impulse (2nd ed., New York, 2002); and Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire (revised edition, Ithaca, 2003 [1985]).

  For brief overviews and comment, see Paul S. Holbo, “Economics, Emotion, and Expansion: An Emerging Foreign Policy,” in H. Wayne Morgan, ed., The Gilded Age (Revised edition, Syracuse, 1970); David M. Pletcher, “Rhetoric and Results: A Pragmatic View of American Economic Expansion, 1865-98,” Diplomatic History , 5 (1981):93-105; Hugh De Santis, “The Imperialist Impulse and American Innocence, 1865-1900,” Ch. 5 of Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (Westport, CT, 1981); and Joseph A. Fry, “In Search of an Orderly World: U.S. Imperialism, 1898-1912,” in John M. Carroll and George C. Herring, eds., Modern American Diplomacy (Wilmington, 1986), pp. 1-20;.

  The literature on the anti-expansionists is much smaller. For this see Robert L. Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900 (Chicago, 1991 [original, 1968]; E. Berkeley Tomkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890-1920 (Philadelphia, 1970); Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippines War (Cambridge, 1972); and Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Chapel Hill, 1979). For a more general treatment, Lewis Feuer, Imperialism and the Anti-Imperialism Mind

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  A Companion to American Foreign Relations

  • Robert Schulzinger(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The compari-son is apt – American antebellum nationalism, like evangelical Christianity, was a faith that would not keep on the shelf. Both had to expand in order to survive, part of a process of continual rebirth and reinvigoration. The missionary frontier was a critical facet of the expansionist thrust of the era, whether that frontier was located in Hawaii, China, or Georgia. Patricia Grimshaw’s Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii (1989) examines the lives and sentiments of the wives of American missionaries during the early years of US engagement with the islands. Similarly to Kolodney and Georgi-Findlay, Grimshaw finds that the women, while possessed of a distinct social and cultural perspective as women, nonetheless were themselves enthusiastic proponents of the American missionary endeavor, contributing “sub-stantially to the religious conversion and reorientation of Hawaiian culture in the first half of the nineteenth century” (p. 195). Once again, it was the national and religious identities of Americans that, more than gender, defined their beings. Expansion Into the Pacific The US’s expansionist successes of the era remain astounding. In 1815, the nation’s claim to the Louisiana Territory continued uncertain and ill defined. The region west of the Mississippi River was generally so unknown that it had not yet acquired the mistaken appellation of the “Great American Desert” given to it as a result of the Long–Atkinson Expedition of 1819. Yet by 1861 all of the region eventually known as the “lower forty-eight” had been acquired, and Americans had made major inroads into most of the rest of the world of the sort that had not existed prior to 1815. By 1861, California had become the new pivot point of the nation, function-ing not just as the westernmost edge of a North American empire but also as the easternmost edge of an emerging Pacific empire.

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  Economics and World Power

  An Assessment of American Diplomacy Since 1789

  • William H. Becker, Samuel F. Wells, William H. Becker, Samuel F. Wells(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  . . . 59 The moral component of Palmerston's policy became equally evident when Britain refused to retreat from its commit-ment to protect the Mosquito Indians. Since the United States remained committed to Nicaragua and Nicaragua demanded total control over all its citizens and territory, the problem lingered on in Anglo-American relations and was resolved only in 1860, well after the British had decided to end their opposition to American territorial expansion. The settlements of the Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon boundaries and the acquisition of California and the northern provinces of Mexico essentially marked the end of American con-tinental expansion. In only a few years, the United States had added 1,204,741 square miles to its domain and increased its size by two-thirds. The newly acquired territories included such im-mensely valuable and diverse resources as the iron ranges of Min-nesota, the oil fields of Texas, and the rich deposits of precious metals of Colorado, Nevada, and California, all of which would be developed fully in succeeding generations. And in addition, the United States gained control of magnificent ports on the Pacific. Throughout this process, expansionists had based their appeals for support on arguments derived from economic advantage and ne-cessity, national honor and pride, ideology, and security, all com-bined in an inseparable amalgam. The acquisition of these territories, however, created enor-mous problems for the American government in its domestic af- 112 KinleyJ. Brauer fairs, partly because the purposes behind American Expansionism were so disparate. Ironically, just as Britain had decided to accept continued American territorial expansion, domestic divisions pro-vided a brake that was never wholly released.

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  America in the World

  A History in Documents since 1898, Revised and Updated

  • Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Andrew Preston, Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Andrew Preston, Mark Lawrence, Jeffrey A. Engel, Andrew Preston(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. . . . What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of cus- tom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States di- rectly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. Motives of Expansion | 19 DOCUMENT 1.7 OPPOSITION TO FOREIGN ADVENTURES The failure to acquire Santo Domingo or Cuba in the 1860s and 1870s did not end speculation about adding new territories to the United States. Indeed, grow- ing commercial and military power made the prospect appear more feasible than ever before. Some Americans viewed that possibility with great enthusi- asm. Others worried that expanding the nation would carry numerous prob- lems and could even eat away at core American ideals. One such skeptic was Carl Schurz, a German-born politician and essayist whose career included a term in the U.S. Senate, an ambassadorship to Spain, and a stint as editorial writer for Harper’s. In the following essay published in Harper’s in October 1893, Schurz spelled out various reasons for anxiety about American ambitions in the Western Hemisphere.

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  The American West and the Nazi East

  A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective

  • C. Kakel(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Political leaders, in both cases, were able to exploit weaknesses in their great power opponents, who were unwilling to risk – or go to – war in order to stop continental expansion by Early America or Nazi Germany. In the American Republic, both political leaders and propagandists openly proclaimed their true expansionist objectives, seeking to create a national consensus in favour of western continental expansion. Early American presidents, as well as expansionists in Congress, ran on politi- cal platforms favouring the acquisition of lands inhabited by indigenous peoples and claimed by European colonial powers (who would have to be ‘persuaded’ to give way to American territorial expansion). In Nazi Germany, Hitler used subterfuge and deceit to disguise his purposes, but he revealed his true intentions in secret directives and conversations with subordinates. On a public level, however, the Nazis took steps to cover up their true intentions. The German press were told that Hitler’s Mein Kampf was merely ‘an historical source’, and they were instructed not to cite those sections pertaining to foreign policy. For their part, German diplomats reassured their foreign counterparts that a reading of Mein Kampf would only lead to erroneous conclusions about Nazi foreign policy, a policy whose publicly declared goals were ‘peace’, ‘rec- onciliation’, ‘equal status’ for Germany, and the ‘restoration of German honour’. 32 Early America Louisiana purchase Prompted by perceived fears that European powers sought to limit further American westward expansion, President Thomas Jefferson, in 1803, sought to purchase New Orleans (in the Louisiana territory) and the province of West Florida from France. America’s political leaders were united in the desire to ‘acquire’ New Orleans and secure navigation rights to the Mississippi.

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