Explanation of Manifest Destiny
“Manifest Destiny” refers to an ideology prevalent in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. On September 15, 1845, an editorial by journalist John L. O’Sullivan appeared in the New York Herald expressing the belief that the United States was destined to expand beyond its present territorial boundaries. O’Sullivan framed the vision of “Manifest Destiny” in an editorial on the 1845 annexation of Texas. O’Sullivan wrote that it was “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. . . . American patriotism takes a wider and loftier range than heretofore. Its horizon is widening every day. No longer bounded by the limits of the confederacy, it looks abroad upon the whole earth, and into the mind of the republic daily sinks deeper and deeper the conviction that civilization on the earth—the reform of the governments of the ancient world—the emancipation of the whole race, are dependent, in a great degree, on the United States.”
The expression “Manifest Destiny” became an affirmation of American self-confidence and a manifestation of the nation’s power. Mexico, our neighbor to the south and west, looked upon Manifest Destiny as simply a veiled attempt to acquire territory. The United States, before the outbreak of war with Mexico over the Texas boundary, sought the acquisition of California. President Polk, in his third annual message to Congress on December 7, 1847, called for the annexation of New Mexico and California. The President notified Congress that he had instructed Nicholas Trist, a special envoy sent to Mexico to negotiate an end to the war, to insist upon New Mexico and California as a condition for peace. “The commissioner of the United States was authorized . . . to obtain a cession to the United States of the provinces of New Mexico and the Californias and the privilege of the right of way across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The boundary of the Rio Grande and the cession to the United States of New Mexico and Upper California constituted an ultimatum which our commissioner was under no circumstances to yield.”
The president further stated that California would be open to settlement by “a hardy, enterprising, and intelligent portion of our population. The bay of San Francisco and other harbors along the Californian coast would afford shelter for our navy, for our numerous whale ships, and other merchant vessels employed in the Pacific Ocean, and would in a short period become the marts of an extensive and profitable commerce with China and other countries of the East.”
Once gold was discovered, many of the Argonauts who migrated from the eastern United States began their journey clothed in the mandate of heaven as participants in fulfilling the destiny of the nation. They “brought Manifest Destiny to the gold fields, and with it all the term implied for the superiority of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant peoples” (Rohrbough, 221). With a dramatic increase in population, California applied for admission to the Union, a process held hostage to the political debate over slavery. With the Compromise of 1850, California entered the Union as a free state. The nation that had its origin on the eastern seaboard now stretched across the continent.