Manifest Destiny

7 Key excerpts on "Manifest Destiny"

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  Guide to U.S. Foreign Policy

  A Diplomatic History

  • Robert J. McMahon, Thomas W. Zeiler, Robert J. McMahon, Thomas W. Zeiler(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  19 ★ b y R i c h a r d A . S a u e r s c h a p t e r 2 Manifest Destiny F ollowing the War of 1812, Manifest Destiny was the belief held by many Americans in the mid-1800s that the United States was des-tined, ordained by God, to occupy the North American continent. Critics, however, also have written that the concept of Manifest Destiny was simply a justification for imperialism or expansionism, namely westward expan-sion of U.S. territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. The term Manifest Destiny originated in 1845 when news-paper editor John L. O’Sullivan described the divine mis-sion of the American people as “the fulfillment of our Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” THE SPIRIT OF Manifest Destiny In analyzing this period of rapid territorial growth, histori-ans describe four main components in the construct of Manifest Destiny. First, the United States experienced an explosive population growth that fueled the stretching of its borders; second, expansion was eased as the federal govern-ment approved a series of laws that made it increasingly easy for settlers to acquire land; third, the concept of a rightful American expansion justified eliminating or pushing aside any existing population, if it could not be easily assimilated; and finally, and perhaps most important, there arose a vocal group of powerful leaders who boldly advocated the American idea of Manifest Destiny. Impact on Foreign Policy The nation’s vision of Manifest Destiny led to the growth and expansion of America’s diplomatic missions with European powers. Continued westward settlement brought the growing United States into competition with Great Britain for control of the Oregon Territory as well as creat-ing conflict with Spain, and later Mexico, over Texas. The apogee of Manifest Destiny occurred during the presidency of James K.

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  A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations

  Colonial Era to the Present

  • Christopher R. W. Dietrich(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Seven Many Manifest Destinies

  Brian Rouleau

  Often lost in the voluminous historiography surrounding Manifest Destiny is the fact that the ideology was itself a theory of history. The Americans of the 1840s who coined the concept did so as a means to explain the country's expansion across the North American continent. Civilization, the theory went, marching steadily westward for centuries prior, had reached its apex in the United States, and so it became the special duty of Americans, their heaven‐directed fate, to spread their ideals and way of life across as much of the earth's surface as possible. A whole host of “interests” drove the nation's geographic enlargement. The political, strategic, and economic dimensions of that process cannot be dismissed, but neither can they be disentangled from the narratives Americans crafted regarding expansion. And that is how Manifest Destiny is best understood: as an ideology that explained to the republic's citizens why their growth across space was a good thing. It was a story the appeal of which, moreover, transcended the era in which it was created. Generations of Americans since the middle of the nineteenth century have seen “Manifest Destiny” as shorthand for an array of principles and processes marking the United States' supposedly exceptional place in the world.

  Manifest Destiny, then, is a concept with a very long career, and, significantly, many of its basic premises went largely unexamined well into the twentieth century. When, in 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner offered up his now‐famous address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” he lent scholarly imprimatur to a sort of folk‐wisdom that had been entrenched in the United States since the early nineteenth century at least (Turner 1920 ). Turner's argument – in positioning westward expansion as the sine qua non of American history and democratic self‐government – echoed John L. O'Sullivan's grandiose claims, not to mention even earlier Jeffersonian and Jacksonian precursors, about a westering process that promoted individual liberty and strengthened republican values. A subsequent generation of students trained by Turner dispersed across the academy largely to reinforce most of their mentor's conclusions. Some, like Herbert Eugene Bolton, tinkered around the edges so as to challenge Turnerian assumptions. But injecting new concepts like the “borderlands,” as well as new players such as the Spanish, into what had been an “American” story did surprisingly little to dislodge the basic assumptions about nineteenth‐century territorial expansion (Bolton 1933 ). These were: a conception of the American people as particularly righteous; a conviction regarding the special genius of the country's representative institutions; and a religiously held certainty about Providence's plan to see that body of American values and practices spread across as much of the earth's surface as possible (Weeks 2013 ). Such were the essential tenets of Manifest Destiny, and, as a testament to the broad consensus surrounding them, they did much to shape the early historiography of territorial expansion. Since the 1950s at least, when William Appleman Williams published an influential essay on the subject (Williams 1955

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  The American Yawp

  A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook, Vol. 1: To 1877

  • Joseph L. Locke, Ben Wright(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  O’Sullivan and many others viewed expansion as necessary to achieve America’s destiny and to protect American interests. The quasi-religious call to spread democracy coupled with the reality of thousands of settlers pressing westward. Manifest Destiny was grounded in the belief that a democratic, agrarian republic would save the world.

  Although called into name in 1845, Manifest Destiny was a widely held but vaguely defined belief that dated back to the founding of the nation. First, many Americans believed that the strength of American values and institutions justified moral claims to hemispheric leadership. Second, the lands on the North American continent west of the Mississippi River (and later into the Caribbean) were destined for American-led political and agricultural improvement. Third, God and the Constitution ordained an irrepressible destiny to accomplish redemption and democratization throughout the world. All three of these claims pushed many Americans, whether they uttered the words Manifest Destiny or not, to actively seek the expansion of democracy. These beliefs and the resulting actions were often disastrous to anyone in the way of American expansion. The new religion of American democracy spread on the feet and in the wagons of those who moved west, imbued with the hope that their success would be the nation’s success.

  John O’Sullivan, shown here in an 1874 Harper’s Weekly sketch, coined the phrase Manifest Destiny in an 1845 newspaper article. Wikimedia.

  The Young America movement, strongest among members of the Democratic Party but spanning the political spectrum, downplayed divisions over slavery and ethnicity by embracing national unity and emphasizing American exceptionalism, territorial expansion, democratic participation, and economic interdependence.2 Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson captured the political outlook of this new generation in a speech he delivered in 1844 titled “The Young American”:

  In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?3

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  Phantom Democracy

  Corporate Interests and Political Power in America

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

    (Publisher)

  With slavery and frontier expansion, the settlers had by the mid–nineteenth century erected a massive network of exploitation held intact by economic and military power. The idea of Manifest Destiny originated in the prerevolution- ary period when the Puritans looked to conquer new frontiers they saw as inhabited by savages lacking the capacity to develop land they had occupied for centuries. Celebrating a nascent “empire of liberty,” the Puritans set themselves up as harbingers of a liberal revolution that would sweep away obstacles to human progress—“progress,” unfortunately, often requiring maximum use of armed force. Integral to a special national and religious community with a messianic zeal, expansionism came with few limits or apologies. Familiar romantic images of early settler populations as inward-looking and isolationist, and respectful of other cultures, were always a fiction. The historic forging of a new republic deepened this sense of uniqueness and entitlement, formally endowing the European colo- nists with a civilized virtue and national destiny grounded in deep convictions of racial superiority. As Zinn observes, “There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more impor- tant, for so long a time, as the United States.” 10 Those backward peoples obstructing U.S. Westward expansion were brushed aside as subhuman, savage, godless, and fit for extermination. This out- look was destined to spread beyond continental frontiers, justified by such diktats as the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which proclaimed that Latin America would henceforth be subject to U.S. domination, accompanied by an implicit warning that Washington had the right to intervene anywhere in the Western hemisphere to ensure its hege- mony. During the nineteenth century the U.S. militarily intervened in several Latin American nations more than 100 times—a prelude to later ventures in Central America and the Caribbean—after wrest- ing away Mexican territory in the 1840s.

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  Native America, Discovered and Conquered

  Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny

  • Robert J. Miller(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  They also discussed in public letters to Indiana in 1818, North Carolina in 1823, and Tennessee in 1825 Dis- covery and Manifest Destiny principles such as contiguous territory, occupation of claimed lands, and the destiny of the United States to extend to the Pacific. Some congressmen were against this expansion, and they told their constituents that. Representatives from South Carolina, Indiana, North Carolina, and Missouri also wrote their constituents in 1818–1819 and 1824–1826 about Indian removal (the Jeffersonian idea to move all the eastern tribes west of the Mississippi), the 144 Native America, Discovered and Conquered definition and method of extinguishing Indian land titles, and the progress of the goal of civilizing and governing Indians. 63 One statement from these numerous congressional circulars best exemplifies the merging of Manifest Destiny and Discovery elements in this time period. Con- gressman John Rhea wrote his Tennessee constituents on March 5, 1821, “The people of the United States, by treaties lately made, have their boundaries and limits defined; extending from the Atlantic ocean to the South Sea [Pacific]…. They are now the sovereign of an extensive country, and their right is bottomed on irrevocable treaties made with Great Britain, with France, and with Spain. The United States, under the protection of the Almighty, are great and powerful and progressing to unknown greatness.” 64 We can also see the ugly head of Discovery racial themes and Manifest Des- tiny in a statement by Secretary of State Henry Clay in 1825. He opined that the future destinies of America and the Indian Nations were on a collision course. There would be no peaceful coexistence. Clay stated that it was “impossible to civilize Indians…. They were destined to extinction.” This was not a new idea to many Americans; do not forget Washington’s and Jefferson’s analogy of Indians to wild animals.

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  Safe Passage

  The Transition from British to American Hegemony

  • Kori Schake(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  118 6 Manifesting Destiny: Defining the Nation T his chapter differs from others in this volume because it does not focus on a singular event or crisis between Great Britain and the United States but instead attempts to grasp the two socie-ties’ sense of themselves as they underwent hugely disruptive po-litical, social, and economic changes. Governments make snap decisions; they have the capacity to change directions swiftly and need to make choices when events present themselves. But societies typically do not; their reconsiderations are unspooled hand over hand, slowly, as ideas take hold and become part of a collective con-sciousness. Understanding that process is tricky. It is also impor-tant. Societies’ communal understanding shape their reactions to events, and in societies with representative governments, it defines the government’s range of choice. In 1870 the reversal of station between Great Britain and the United States was still some distance in the future, but the percep-tual shift between hegemons was already taking place. 1 Henry Adams wrote of the time that “the revolution since 1861 was nearly complete, and for the first time in history the American felt him- m a n i f e s t i n g de s t i n y 119 self almost as strong as an Englishman. He had thirty years to wait before he should feel himself stronger.” 2 America grew stronger, bigger, and flintier, hardened by the Civil War and wresting land from Indian tribes. Britain became pervasively pessimistic about its economy, less persuaded of the benefits of empire, more attentive to the improvement of its domestic possibilities. 3 Occurring inde-pendently but nearly simultaneously, the changes made America an empire and Great Britain a democracy. The Union’s grim determination to prevent Southern secession and ennoblement of that effort in abolishing slavery removed a prin-cipal disparagement tarnishing America’s republican ideology.

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  Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature

  Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism

  • Jonathan Arac, Harriet Ritvo, Jonathan Arac, Harriet Ritvo(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  What Albert Weinberg calls America's geo-graphical determinism operated by equating geography with destiny, an equation that, in conflating time and space—in harnessing time to space— at once recomposed time and incorporated it as a vehicle for spatial aggran- 204 Wai-chee Dimock dizement. The familiar strategy for antebellum expansionists was to invoke some version of Providence, whose plans for the future happened to coincide exactly with America's territorial ambitions. American expansion in space and providential design in time turned out to be one and the same. In the famous words of John L. O'Sullivan, it was America's Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. 41 This Manifest Destiny had no spatial limits, for as another expansionist enthusiastically put it, America was bounded on the west by the Day of Judgment. 42 For this hopeful soul, and for many others, spatialized time legitimized and em-powered. Yet the same mechanism could just as easily victimize and destroy. For Indians, too, happened to be subjects of spatialized time. As much as America, they were destined—destined, that is, to melt and vanish. Representative Wilde of Georgia found that destiny only too manifest: Jacob will forever obtain the inheritance of Esau. We cannot alter the laws of Providence, as we read them in the experiences of the ages. 43 Within the spatialized time of providential design, the fate of the doomed savage became legible as a text. Spatialized time is also whit Moby-Dick invokes to make Ahab's fate legi-ble. Reading that fate, Melville's prophets turn Ahab, too, into a doomed figure, spatializing his temporal endeavor into a timeless script. Melville's imperial folio, then, logically shares the same temporal economy with its imperial environment, for a structure of dominion is inseparable from a structure of time, as J.

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