Many Americans in 1850 took this prodigious growth for granted. To trade with Asia, the United States needed the Pacific ports that stretched from San Francisco to Puget Sound. Some politicians, moreover, had become convinced that national prosperity depended on capturing the rich trade of the Far East. Land hunger drew hundreds of thousands of average Americans westward. 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… 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.Īs important as national pride and racial arrogance were to manifest density, economic gain made up its core. O’Sullivan was an armchair expansionist, but he took second place to no one in his passions for conquest of the West. O’Sullivan coined the term manifest density as the latest justification for white settlers to take the land they coveted. In the summer of 1845, New York journalist John L. ![]() ![]() 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. More positively, the idea of manifest destiny inspired missionaries, farmers, and pioneers, who dreamed only of transforming plains and fertile valleys into farms and small towns.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. Austin to talk grandly of colonizing the Mexican province of Texas with "North American population, enterprise and intelligence." It led expansionists, united behind the slogan "54° 40' or fight!," to demand that the United States should own the entire Pacific Northwest all the way to the southern border of Alaska.Īggressive nationalists invoked the idea to justify Indian removal, war with Mexico, and American expansion into Cuba and Central America. Manifest destiny inspired a 29-year old named Stephen F. ![]() "We Americans," wrote Herman Melville, one of this country's greatest novelists, "are the peculiar, chosen people-the Israel of our time." The very idea of manifest destiny encouraged men and women to dream big dreams. The idea that America had a special destiny to stretch across the continent motivated many people to migrate West. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, referred in his magazine to America's "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." One of the most influential slogans ever coined, "manifest destiny" expressed the romantic emotion that led Americans to risk their lives to settle the Far West. ![]() Digital History Printable Version Manifest Destiny
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