Manifest Destiny

The sense of uniqueness and mission was as old as the Puritans, but by the 1840s the conviction of superiority had been bolstered by the young nation’s amazing success. What right had Americans, they asked, to keep the blessings of liberty, democracy, and prosperity to themselves? The west needed the civilizing power of the hammer and plow, the ballot box and pulpit, that had transformed the East.

In the summer of 1845, New York journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the term manifest density as the latest justification for white settlers to take the land they coveted. O’Sullivan was an armchair expansionist, but he took second place to no one in his passions for conquest of the West. O’Sullivan called on Americans to resist any foreign power – British, French, or Mexican – that attempted to thwart “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions…[and] for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self-government entrusted to us.” Almost overnight, the magic phrase manifest destiny swept the nation and proved an ideological shied for conquering the West.

As important as national pride and racial arrogance were to manifest density, economic gain made up its core. Land hunger drew hundreds of thousands of average Americans westward. Some politicians, moreover, had become convinced that national prosperity depended on capturing the rich trade of the Far East. To trade with Asia, the United States needed the Pacific ports that stretched from San Francisco to Puget Sound.

Many Americans in 1850 took this prodigious growth for granted. They considered it evidence of God’s beneficence to this virtuous republic, this haven for the oppressed seeking refuge from Old World tyranny, this land where all (white) men stood equal before the law. During the 1840s a group of expansionists affiliated with the Democratic Party began to call themselves the “Young America” movement. They proclaimed that it was the “Manifest Destiny” of the United States to grow from sea to sea, from the Arctic Circle to the tropics. It is “our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty,” wrote John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, in 1845. “Yes, more, more, more!...till our national destiny is fulfilled and…the whole boundless continent is ours.” Not all Americans thought this unbridled expansion was a good thing. For the earliest Americans, whose ancestors had arrived on the continent thousands of years before the Europeans, it was a story of defeat and contraction rather than of conquest and growth. By 1850 the white man’s diseases and guns had reduced the Indian population north of the Rio Grande to fewer than half a million, a fraction of the number who had lived there two or three centuries earlier. The relentless westward march of white settlement had pushed all but a few thousand Indians beyond the Mississippi.

In the early 1840s, the American people were no more stirred by the quarrels of Tyler and Clay over such issues as banking, tariffs, and distribution, important as they were, than students of history would be at a later date. What stirred the blood was the mounting evidence that the “empire of freedom” was hurdling the barriers of the “Great American Desert” and the Rocky Mountains, reaching out toward the Pacific coast. In 1845, an eastern editor gave a name to this bumptious spirit of expansion. “Our manifest destiny,” he wrote, “is too overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiply millions.” At its best this much-trumpeted notion of “Manifest Destiny” offered a moral justification for American expansion, a prescription for what an enlarged United States could and should be. At its worst it was a cluster of flimsy rationalizations for naked greed and Imperial ambition. Whatever the case, hundreds of thousands of people began streaming into the Far West during the 1840s and after. The western frontier across the Mississippi River differed radically from previous western frontiers encountered by settlers from the East. Here was a new environment as well as a new culture. The Great Plains and the Far West were already occupied by Indians and Mexicans, people who had lived in the region for centuries and had established their own distinctive customs and ways of life.

But the Democratic convention, where expansionist sentiment was stronger, denied Van Buren the nomination he coveted. Instead, the delegates chose James K. Polk of Tennessee, whose commitment to territorial expansion was clear and unqualified. To avoid the accusation of sectional favoritism, the Democratic platform cleverly united a demand for the admission of Texas with a demand for the acquisition “of the whole of the Territory of Oregon.” The platform also made the dubious assertion that the United States had a clear title to both. It followed, therefore, “that the re-occupation of Oregon and the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period are great American measures, which this convention recommends to the cordial support of the Democracy of the Union.” By combining the expansionist desires of South and West, the Democrats had found a winning formula. Throughout the campaign Manifest Destiny transcended all other issues, so much so that Clay began to shift his position on Texas. He would favor annexation after all if it could be accomplished without war and upon “just and fair terms.” But this commitment still sounded halfhearted when compared with the spread-eagle oratory and aggressive slogans of the Democrats.