Introduction to Manifest Destiny
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the United States began to expand into its western territories. During the 1830s and 1840s, the migration began to pick up steam and led some Americans to begin to dream of a continental empire, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Like the Puritans, who envisioned their colony as a "city upon a hill," these Americans believed that the United States had a divine mission to spread liberty across the continent. A New York journalist named John L. O'Sullivan captured this sense of mission when he coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny."
John L. O'Sullivan was an ardent Jacksonian Democrat and a lawyer, as well as a journalist. In 1841, he established the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, which became the leading organ of the Democratic Party at the time of the Van Buren and Polk presidencies. Active in many reform movements, O'Sullivan believed that it was destiny of the United States to occupy all of North America.
Writing in 1845, O'Sullivan claimed that it was the nation's "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" (cited in Current and Garraty 1965). Along with O'Sullivan, many other Americans believed that no other nation should be allowed to keep the United States from fulfilling its destiny, which was to become a nation that stretched from sea to sea.
The election of James K. Polk in 1844 added support to the expansionists' goals. The following year, Texas was annexed to the United States, causing an escalation of the conflict with Mexico and eventually leading to war. By 1848, Mexico was defeated, and the United States had fulfilled its destiny, becoming a nation that spanned the entire continent.
Later in the century, the United States' expansionistic desires began to surface again. This time the migration of Americans for settlement was not the reason for expansion. Rather, it was the growth of the country's powerful industrial economy that led the way for the control of new lands in the Pacific and Caribbean. With the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had annexed Hawaii, and acquired control of the Philippines, Samoa, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.
The concept or emotion of manifest destiny expressed itself in many ways. The various rationalizations that Americans have relied upon to explain why the United States had to expand across the continent are best described by Albert Weinberg (1935), who, in his book Manifest Destiny, explained: "young nations, like living organisms, must grow or die; 'natural' boundaries must be attained; undeveloped lands cannot morally be left in a state of nature; the benefits of democracy must be brought to those benighted peoples who do not know them" (53). These were some of the most important arguments that were used to justify the 19th century expansion of the United States.