Manifest destiny

Based on Wikipedia: Manifest destiny

In 1845, a newspaper editor invented a phrase that would justify the displacement of millions, the annexation of a sovereign nation, and a war that even its own generals later called shameful. The phrase was "manifest destiny." And like many ideas that reshape history, it was not a policy or a plan. It was a feeling—a conviction that American expansion across the continent was not merely desirable but inevitable, not just practical but divinely ordained.

The phrase caught fire almost immediately. Politicians who embraced it didn't need to explain what they meant. Everyone understood the underlying message: westward expansion was America's birthright, and anyone standing in the way—whether Native nations who had lived on the land for millennia or the Mexican government or European colonial powers—was opposing not just American interests but providence itself.

The Three Articles of an Unwritten Creed

Manifest destiny was never codified. No document spelled out its tenets. No convention ratified its principles. Yet historian William Earl Weeks identified three core assumptions that animated the concept.

First, there was the belief in America's unique moral virtue. The young republic saw itself as fundamentally different from the old monarchies of Europe—a nation founded on liberty, equality, and the rights of man rather than hereditary privilege and aristocratic power.

Second came the assertion of a redemptive mission. America would not merely exist as an alternative to the Old World's corruption; it would actively spread republican government and what its proponents called "the American way of life." This was not passive example-setting. It was an evangelical project on a continental scale.

Third, and perhaps most dangerous, was an unshakeable faith that God himself had ordained this mission's success. When you believe providence is on your side, moral qualms about how you achieve your goals tend to dissolve. After all, you are merely fulfilling the divine plan.

The Man Who Named the Idea

John O'Sullivan was a newspaper editor, a promoter of Jacksonian democracy, and—eventually—a propagandist for the Confederacy. His friend Julian Hawthorne described him as "always full of grand and world-embracing schemes." In other words, he was a man susceptible to big ideas, especially flattering ones about American greatness.

In 1839, O'Sullivan wrote an essay predicting a "divine destiny" for the United States based on values like equality and personal enfranchisement. He imagined America as one member of a future "Union of many Republics" sharing these ideals. This early vision was more missionary than territorial—spreading values rather than seizing land.

Six years later, his thinking had crystallized into something more concrete. Writing in the Democratic Review in 1845, O'Sullivan urged the annexation of Texas with a striking phrase: it was, he wrote, "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

Almost nobody noticed.

The phrase gained traction only after O'Sullivan used it again later that year, this time in his newspaper the New York Morning News. Writing about the Oregon boundary dispute with Britain, he argued that America had "the right of 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."

Here was the core logic: America had been given a mission to spread democracy. Britain, a monarchy, would never spread democracy. Therefore, British claims to Oregon were illegitimate—overruled by what O'Sullivan called "a higher law."

This was audacious reasoning. It essentially declared that American moral superiority trumped conventional diplomacy, treaties, and international law.

A Paradox at the Heart

Here's something curious about O'Sullivan's original conception: he didn't envision military conquest. He imagined Americans simply moving westward, setting up communities, establishing democratic governments, and then petitioning to join the United States. Texas had followed this pattern. California, he predicted, would do the same. Eventually, even Canada might ask for annexation.

In this vision, expansion would be organic and voluntary—the natural result of people choosing democracy when given the chance.

The reality, of course, was messier. O'Sullivan himself opposed the Mexican-American War when it began in 1846, though he eventually convinced himself the outcome would benefit both nations. But by then, manifest destiny had escaped his control. The phrase had taken on a life of its own, invoked to justify actions far more aggressive than anything O'Sullivan originally imagined.

The Whig Resistance

Manifest destiny never represented a national consensus. From the beginning, it was a partisan weapon wielded primarily by Democrats.

The Whig Party, which drew much of its strength from the industrializing North, opposed expansion for both principled and practical reasons. Many Whigs believed in developing the country's existing territory rather than acquiring more. They wanted investment in infrastructure, manufacturing, and education within current borders.

But there was a deeper fear: slavery. Every new territory acquired raised an explosive question—would it enter the Union as a free state or a slave state? Northern Whigs understood that westward expansion was, in practice, the expansion of the slaveholding South's political power. The more territory acquired, the more senators and representatives to vote for slavery's protection and extension.

One of the Whigs' most powerful weapons was ridicule. On January 3, 1846, Representative Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts became the first congressman to use the phrase "manifest destiny" on the House floor—and he used it mockingly:

There is one element in our title to Oregon... which I confess that I have not named... I mean that new revelation of right which has been designated as the right of our manifest destiny to spread over this whole continent... The right of our manifest destiny! There is a right for a new chapter in the law of nations; or rather, in the special laws of our own country; for I suppose the right of a manifest destiny to spread will not be admitted to exist in any nation except the universal Yankee nation!

Winthrop's sarcasm established a template that critics would use for decades: manifest destiny's proponents claimed divine sanction for policies that were really driven by greed, racism, and self-interest.

The Converts and the Apostates

Perhaps the most telling indication that manifest destiny was about power rather than principle was how easily its supporters changed their minds when circumstances shifted.

John Quincy Adams had been one of the strongest advocates for American expansion. As secretary of state in the 1810s and 1820s, he had championed the Monroe Doctrine and pushed for continental supremacy. Yet by 1843, Adams had reversed himself entirely. The reason was Texas—and specifically, Texas as a slave state.

When Adams saw that manifest destiny had become inseparable from slavery's expansion, he repudiated the whole project. The principle he had championed had been captured by an interest he abhorred.

Ulysses S. Grant traveled the opposite journey—from participant to critic. As a young officer, Grant served in the Mexican-American War. Decades later, he reflected on that experience with shame, calling it "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." Abraham Lincoln, while serving in Congress during the war, had similarly condemned it, questioning the very justifications President James Polk had used to initiate hostilities.

These were not pacifists or isolationists. Lincoln would later prosecute the bloodiest war in American history. Grant would command the Union armies. Their opposition to the Mexican-American War was not about military action per se—it was about recognizing manifest destiny as a rhetorical cover for conquest.

What Lay Beneath the Words

Strip away the providential language, and what did manifest destiny actually claim?

At its core was a racial hierarchy. Historian Reginald Horsman documented in 1981 how proponents believed the American Anglo-Saxon race was "separate, innately superior" and "destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity and Christianity to the American continents." This was not a subtext. It was often stated explicitly. The corollary was equally stark: "inferior races were doomed to subordinate status or extinction."

This ideology provided ready justification for the enslavement of Black Americans and the displacement and killing of Native peoples. If these groups were inherently inferior—if their subordination or disappearance was simply the working out of natural law—then there was no moral crime in subjugating them. Manifest destiny didn't just rationalize expansion; it rationalized the violence expansion required.

The Roots Go Deeper

The theological dimension of manifest destiny drew on older sources than O'Sullivan might have acknowledged.

In 1630—more than two centuries before the phrase was coined—the Puritan leader John Winthrop delivered a sermon aboard a ship bound for Massachusetts. He told his fellow colonists that their settlement would be "a city upon a hill," watched by the entire world. If they succeeded in building a virtuous community, they would serve as a model for all mankind. If they failed, they would become a cautionary tale.

This sermon established a template for American self-understanding that persists to this day: the nation as an example to the world, bearing a special responsibility because of its special founding.

Thomas Paine invoked similar imagery in Common Sense, his wildly influential 1776 pamphlet arguing for independence from Britain. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," he wrote. "A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand."

Thomas Jefferson, writing to James Monroe, looked westward and saw limitless possibility: "it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent."

By the 1840s, these threads had woven together into something potent and dangerous: a conviction that American expansion was not just permitted but required—and that history itself would be divided into the era before the Declaration of Independence and the era after.

The Mission Outlives the Phrase

The specific phrase "manifest destiny" faded somewhat after the Civil War, discredited by its association with slavery's expansion. But the underlying ideas proved more resilient.

When the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, critics called it "Seward's Folly" after Secretary of State William Seward. But the purchase reflected the same expansionist impulse—the conviction that America's natural domain extended beyond its existing borders.

In the 1890s, under President William McKinley, the nation acquired Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa. The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked America's emergence as an imperial power with overseas territories.

This new imperialism sparked fierce debate. The 1900 presidential election became a referendum on whether America should become an empire in the European mold. Anti-imperialists argued that ruling distant peoples without their consent betrayed the nation's founding principles. How could a republic dedicated to self-government subjugate the Philippines?

Historian Daniel Walker Howe summarized the conflict: "American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity."

The debate had shifted from whether to expand across North America to whether to project power across the Pacific. But the fundamental tension remained: Was America's mission to serve as an example, or to impose its model on others? Was the goal to embody liberty or to export it—by force if necessary?

Lincoln's Reframing

In the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln offered perhaps the most enduring restatement of American mission—one that carefully avoided the triumphalism of manifest destiny while preserving its sense of purpose.

In his December 1862 message to Congress, Lincoln called the United States "the last, best hope of Earth." The phrase carried weight because of its context: the nation was tearing itself apart over slavery, and Lincoln was warning Congress that what they decided would determine whether democratic self-government could survive anywhere.

A year later, at Gettysburg, Lincoln went further. The war, he said, was testing "whether any nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, can long endure."

Notice what Lincoln did not say. He did not claim divine ordination for American expansion. He did not invoke racial superiority. He did not suggest that America's triumph was inevitable. Instead, he framed the American project as an experiment—one that might fail, one whose success depended on the choices Americans made.

Historian Robert Johannsen called Lincoln's Gettysburg Address "the most enduring statement of America's Manifest Destiny and mission." But Lincoln's version was crucially different from O'Sullivan's. It was humbler, more contingent, and focused on living up to principles rather than extending territory.

The Indigenous Perspective

For Native Americans, manifest destiny was not an abstract ideology. It was a death sentence.

Recent scholars have drawn connections between manifest destiny and earlier European legal doctrines—specifically the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, a fifteenth-century principle that granted Christian nations the right to claim lands inhabited by non-Christians.

Nick Estes, a Lakota scholar, traces how this medieval doctrine provided intellectual architecture for American expansion. When Europeans "discovered" lands already inhabited by Indigenous peoples, the doctrine held that these peoples possessed only "occupancy" rights—their lands could be taken by the powers of discovery.

This principle was imported directly into American law. In the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Indigenous peoples possessed occupancy rights but not ownership—meaning their lands could be taken by the discovering power. Marshall explicitly invoked the Doctrine of Discovery in his reasoning.

Tonya Gonnella Frichner, an international jurist from the Onondaga Nation, argues that manifest destiny required manufacturing a specific concept of "Indian land"—one that could be legally taken. The result was a framework that treated Indigenous peoples as obstacles rather than nations, as problems to be solved rather than peoples with sovereignty and rights.

From this perspective, manifest destiny was not a break from European colonialism but its continuation under a new name—wrapped in the language of democracy and divine mission but serving the same purpose of dispossession.

The Varieties of Destiny

Historian Ernest Lee Tuveson captured something essential about manifest destiny: it was never one thing. "A vast complex of ideas, policies, and actions is comprehended under the phrase 'Manifest Destiny,'" he wrote. "They are not, as we should expect, all compatible, nor do they come from any one source."

Some proponents emphasized territorial expansion—the literal covering of the continent with American settlements. Others saw manifest destiny as a call to serve as an example, demonstrating democracy's superiority without needing to impose it.

Some versions focused on North America; others looked across the Pacific to Asia or south to Latin America. Some imagined a purely Anglo-Saxon nation; others believed in assimilating conquered peoples into American citizenship.

These tensions were never resolved because manifest destiny was never a philosophy. It was a slogan—capacious enough to accommodate contradictory interpretations, vague enough to mean whatever the speaker needed it to mean.

This elasticity was its power. An ideology that requires detailed elaboration can be picked apart. A feeling that Providence is on your side resists such scrutiny. You cannot argue someone out of a belief they never argued themselves into.

The Shadow That Remains

Manifest destiny as a phrase has largely disappeared from contemporary political discourse. It sounds too triumphalist, too racially charged, too openly imperialist for modern sensibilities.

But the underlying assumptions have proven harder to dislodge. The conviction that America has a special role to play in the world. The belief that American values are universally applicable and generally beneficial. The faith that American power, properly applied, spreads freedom.

These ideas animate debates about foreign policy to this day. When American leaders speak of the "rules-based international order" or the "indispensable nation" or the obligation to promote democracy abroad, they are walking paths first cleared by the ideology of manifest destiny.

The difference—and it matters—is that contemporary versions usually lack the explicit racial hierarchy and divine ordination that characterized nineteenth-century expansionism. The mission has been secularized and universalized, at least rhetorically.

Whether this represents genuine moral progress or merely better packaging remains a question each generation must answer for itself. The phrase may be gone, but the tension between American ideals and American power—between the city on a hill and the empire across the continent—remains very much alive.

What History Teaches

Frederick Merk, one of the twentieth century's most influential historians of westward expansion, offered a judgment in 1963 that cuts against the popular mythology: manifest destiny, he argued, "did not reflect the national spirit."

This might seem counterintuitive. Didn't America expand relentlessly westward? Didn't it acquire Texas and Oregon and California and all the rest?

Yes—but the expansion was controversial at every step. It was not a consensus but a conflict. Whigs opposed it. Northern free-soilers opposed it. John Quincy Adams, who had championed expansion for decades, opposed it when he saw it serving slavery. Religious leaders opposed it. Writers opposed it. Abraham Lincoln opposed it.

Manifest destiny won these fights, largely. Territory was acquired, wars were fought, treaties were broken, peoples were displaced. But it won as a partisan program, not as an expression of national unity.

This history matters because it offers a different story than the triumphalist narrative. Americans were not united in the conviction that expansion was righteous. Many understood exactly what was happening and objected strenuously. They lost, but they existed, and their dissent is part of the American tradition too.

The phrase O'Sullivan coined in 1845 named something real: the ideology that justified continental conquest. But it never named something universal. From the beginning, there were Americans who heard "manifest destiny" and recognized it for what it was—a claim of divine sanction for very human interests.

Their skepticism deserves to be remembered alongside the expansion it failed to stop.