History and historiography of Manifest Destiny

Origins – Manifest Destiny and Continentalism

The concept of ‘manifest destiny’ is usually attributed to journalist John O’Sullivan. 

As early as 1839, O’Sullivan had written of America’s “divine destiny … to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”, based on the American principles of equality, freedom-of-conscience, and democracy. 

In August 1845, arguing that America should annex Texas, O’Sullivan (or maybe the journalist Jane Cazneau) coined the term ‘Manifest Destiny’, writing of:

“our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” 

Although O’Sullivan’s words have an horrific resonance to the Nazi idea of lebensraum, the term ‘Manifest Destiny’ is not in itself a political ideology.  The word ‘manifest’ simply means ‘obvious-for-everyone-to-see’.  And the word ‘destiny’ can merely mean ‘final-outcome’.  So, when Sullivan floated the term, it was possible for it simply to mean that it was ‘obviously inevitable’ that the US would expand across the continent. 

The problem was justifying that ambition.  And that is where ‘Manifest Destiny’ became tangled up with other ideas.  One such idea was ‘American exceptionalism’ – the idea that America is a unique and morally superior country because of its history, principles and Christian religion. 

Therefore, when O’Sullivan wrote next of Manifest Destiny in November 1845, during America’s quarrel with Britain over Oregon, he justified it thus:

“And that claim is by 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 and federated self-government entrusted to us.” 

The meaning here is that it is God’s clear mission for the US to spread the benefits of American freedom and democracy by taking over the rest of the continent.  In a 2012 article, Adam Gomez concluded that O’Sullivan’s writing:

“characterizes America as a sinless agent of God’s will, possessing a messianic destiny to initiate a global democratic transfiguration and redeem the world from tyranny.  O’Sullivan’s millenarian thought identifies democracy with American power, framing politics as a conflict between democratic good and despotic evil.  His vision of America as specially obligated and authorized to intervene in the affairs of other nations remains influential on American political speech and self-understanding today.” 

This God-given mission trumped all legal or moral objections: “were the respective arguments and cases of the two parties reversed,” wrote Sullivan, “our claim to Oregon would still be best and strongest” – a view Gomez parallels with the 2003 Bush Administration’s resolution to topple Saddam Hussein "with or without a UN resolution and regardless of whether unconventional weapons were discovered”. 

Criticisms

Even at the time, there were Americans who disagreed. 

There was particular opposition to expansion-by-force.  In 1846 Senator Alexander Stephens from Georgia, who was later to become Vice-President of the Confederacy, said of the war to conquer Texas:

“I am no enemy to the extension of our domain….  I trust the day is coming, and not far distant, when the whole continent will be ours; when our institutions shall be diffused and cherished, and republican government enjoyed, throughout the length and breadth of this land….  That this is our ultimate destiny…

“But it is not to be accomplished by the sword.  We can properly enlarge only by voluntary accessions, and should attempt to act on our neighbors only by setting them a good example.  This has been the history of our silent but rapid progress thus far. 

Other opponents saw Manifest Destiny as the same kind of imperialism that America had fought Britain to escape – opponents such as General Ulysses Grant who, reflecting much later on the 1846-8 war on Mexico, declared it:

“the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.  It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory”. 

Opposition was particularly strong in the North.  A National Intelligencer article of 1848 denounced the misuse of “Political Clap-Trap” to justify “supporting an iniquitous war” – among which it included the terms “Anglo-Saxon race”, “Our country right or wrong”, and:

“‘Our manifest destiny’, a shallow and impious phrase; who shall assure us that it is not of the Devil’s fetching?”

In the 1850s, writers in the North ridiculed Manifest Destiny as the ideology of robbers, rabble-rousers and drunks.  An 1854 satirical poem featured a Captain Robb stealing the lands of his neighbour (Farmer Cobb) on the grounds that it is the “march of destiny”: Robb explains that he is Anglo-Saxon, has “six-shooters, rifles, bowie-knives”, and exclaims: “Who ever heard your name?”

Manifest Destiny and Slavery

In the 1850s, the idea of ‘Manifest Destiny’ changed its focus, getting entangled in the debate about slavery.  What were the new states being gathered into the Union to be – slave or free?  Texas became a slave state, California a free state.  Former Vice-President John Calhoun – who claimed that slavery was a “positive good” – proclaimed that “ours is a government of the white man” and demanded that “slavery follows the flag”.  In 1854-59, there was a small civil war in ‘Bleeding Kansas’ over whether it was to be a slave state or a free state

Some of the most aggressive pro-slavery expansionists took part in ‘filibusters’ – armed attempts by private armies to acquire territories which could then be annexed into the US as slave states.  In 1850 and again in 1851 the adventurer Narciso Lopez, funded by Southern money, led an invasion of Cuba.  The pro-slavery adventurer William Walker led failed attempts to conquer Baja California (1953) and Nicaragua (1855-56, where he briefly became President and declared slavery legal). 

One of the great supporters of the filibusters was John O’Sullivan, who was arrested in April 1851 for planning an unsanctioned attack on Cuba. 

Manifest Destiny, Imperialism and Commerce

By the end of the 19th Century, Manifest Destiny had morphed into imperialism.  William Seward, who was Secretary of State 1861-69, openly advocated the commercial and territorial expansion of the US, obtained Alaska from Russia in 1867, and made a number of attempts to buy various Caribbean islands into the Union.  Speaking in Ohio in 1860, he thundered:

“You are to lay still broader foundations, and to erect still more noble columns to sustain the empire which our fathers established, and which it is the manifest will of our Heavenly Father shall reach from the shores of the lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean….  I know that when you consider what a magnificent destiny you have before you, to lay your hand on the Atlantic coast, and to extend your power to the Pacific Ocean and grasp the great commerce of the east, you will fully appreciate the responsibility. 

It was a theme echoed by soon-to-be Senator Albert Beveridge in his ‘March of the Flag’ speech in 1898:

“Ah! as our commerce spreads, the flag of liberty will circle the globe, and the highways of the ocean, carrying trade of all mankind, guarded by the guns of the republic.  And, as their thunders salute the flag, benighted peoples will know that the voice of Liberty is speaking, at last, for them; that civilization is dawning, at last, for them .  Liberty and Civilization, those children of Christ’s gospel, who follow and never precede, the preparing march of commerce!

“It is the tide of God’s great purposes made manifest in the instincts of our race, whose present phase is our personal profit, but whose far-off end is the redemption of the world and the Christianization of mankind....  Fellow Americans, we are God’s chosen people. 

As in the 1840s, this jingoism was opposed by many Americans who declared that such annexationism threatened to overturn the laws of nature, human intelligence and the Constitution itself.  But it did not stop Congress swallowing Hawaii in 1898, after a huge campaign for ‘Hawaii and our future sea-power'. 

It is worth noting that the historian Frederick Merk (1963) explicitly rejected historians who regarded “the imperialism of the 1890s … as a variant merely of Manifest Destiny of the 1840s”.  The Manifest Destiny of O’Sullivan and others, Merk argued, was continentalism and the spread of freedom; by contrast:

“Expansionism in 1899 was insular and imperialistic.  Its inspiration was nationalism.  It involved the reduction of distant peoples to a state of colonialism”. 

I will leave you to decide whether you agree. 

Manifest Destiny and Interventionism

President Abraham Lincoln, in his address to Congress in 1862, described the United States as "the last, best hope of Earth", and in the famous Gettysburg Address he defined America’s mission: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”. 

In 1920, after the First World War had tainted both imperialism and expansionism, President Woodrow Wilson – who had tried in the Treaty of Versailles to create a new world based on self-determination and the League of Nations – sought to justify his position by appealing to Lincoln’s kind of Manifest Destiny:

“The Old World is just now suffering from a wanton rejection of the principle of democracy and a substitution of the principle of autocracy.  This is the time of all others when Democracy should prove its purity and its spiritual power to prevail.  It is surely the manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit prevail."

Frederick Merk did not accept that this was ‘Manifest Destiny’, declaring that:

“Manifest Destiny, in the twentieth century, vanished.  Not only did it die; it stayed dead through two world wars.  Mission, on the contrary, remained alive, and is as much alive at present as it ever was.  It is still the beacon lighting the way to political and individual freedoms—to equality of right before the law, equality of economic opportunity, and equality of all races and creeds.  It is still, as always in the past, the torch held aloft by the nation at its gate—to the world and to itself.” 

But it seems to me that all Merk is doing here is replacing the words ‘Manifest Destiny’ with ‘Mission’; the intention is exactly the same … and it is this intention which has been used to justify American interventionism ever since, through a multitude of names including the Truman Doctrine, Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’ and Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’. 

What do you reckon? 

The Historiography of Manifest Destiny

The historian Albert Weinberg (1935) – in a book described in one academic review as “apologetic” about its subject – saw Manifest Destiny as just one aspect of American expansionism:

“American expansionism is viewed here as an ‘ism’ or ideology, exemplified but by no means exhausted by the ideas of manifest destiny.  The ideology of American expansion is its motley body of justificatory doctrines. 

And he drew a glaring difference between the America’s stated ideals which were used to justify that expansion, and its actual ‘path of empire’:

“The altruism of international morality leads to an aggrandizement which usually requires the contraction of some other party.  The inverted character of international morality is most striking in the ideology supporting territorial expansion.” 

Frederick Merk, writing in 1963, as we have seen, defined Manifest Destiny as Continentalism only, and saw it as propaganda –

“Propaganda designed to prepare for a seizure of territory has a characteristic language.  It comes interlaced with stereotypes, parallels, and figures of speech.  The stereotypes of the forties were ‘war of liberation’, ‘protection of the better classes’, ‘regeneration of the downtrodden’, ‘better use of the gifts of Providence’, ‘superior rights of God’s elect.’”

Merk was more than ‘apologetic’ about Manifest Destiny – he rejected it altogether, drawing a distinction between the propaganda-misuse of the term, and the “enduring values of American civilisation” which were informing America’s “Mission” in the 20th Century:

“Manifest Destiny and Imperialism were traps into which the nation was led in 1846 and 1899, and from which it extricated itself as well as it could afterward.” 

As you would expect, studies after the Civil Rights movement highlighted the racism underlying Manifest Destiny.  Reginald Horsman, whose 1981 book was subtitled ‘The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism’, was the first historian to consider Manifest Destiny’s impact on the Indigenous Nations, as well as Black, Mexican and mixed-race Americans.  Horsman showed how, between 1800 and 1850, American expansionism became infected with “rampant racialism” based on the belief in white American superiority:

“As American settlements advanced outward, the Puritans not only saw God’s kingdom moving to the West, but thought of America as the place from which the renovation of the world would begin … By the mid-19th century many Americans were less concerned with the liberation of other peoples by the spreading of republicanism than with the limitless expansion of a superior American Anglo-Saxon race.” 

Laura Gomez (2007), also, focussing on the experience of Mexican Americans immediately after the 1846-8 Mexican War, saw Manifest Destiny “as a cluster of ideas that relies on racism to justify a war of aggression against Mexico”.  And Robert Miller (2008), highlighted what he called the Doctrine of Discovery: “an international principle that allegedly granted Euro-Americans property and sovereignty claims over native peoples and native lands as soon as Euro-Americans ‘discovered’ these lands”… and he added that he was writing so that modern America might “work to eliminate these ethnocentric, racial and feudal ideas from American law and life.” 

Laurel Clark Shire (2016), focussing on American expansion into Florida, examined an alternative aspect of Manifest Destiny – the vital part that gender and race together played.  Whilst the various sham-legal and ideological tenets of Manifest Destiny established surface, political possession, she explained, it was women who not only provided needed labour and children for the settlers, but also thereby proffered national expansion as the spread of domesticity and civilisation.  Most importantly of all, therefore, when the Seminoles fought back (1835-42), the war could be represented as protecting vulnerable white women and their homes, and stories of ‘Indian depredations’ turned the colonisers into victims and the invaded into aggressors.  She labelled this process “repurposing domesticity for Manifest Destiny”. 

Finally, Betsy McCall in her Historiographic Analysis of Manifest Destiny (2017), points out that until recently all the writing on Manifest Destiny was by white historians from a white point-of-view, and that we still do not have a study which – rather than simply presenting them as victims – gives agency to the invaded indigenous peoples.