I’ve written a bit about Manifest Destiny in previous posts, but today I’d like to write about the core values of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is a flexible concept, which helps account for its durability over time. This is a brief overview of the idea and the values driving it.
The term first appeared in 1839 in a publication called the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. This was a publication, as its name implies, affiliated with the Democratic Party. John O’Sullivan usually gets credit for coining the term, although one of his female writers, Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, may also be the originator. In any case, the term itself contains one of the core values of Manifest Destiny. American expansion was obvious (it was manifest) and unstoppable (it was the nation’s destiny).
These ideas, when paired together, helped drive western expansion in 19th century America. It also explained western expansion as natural and thus normal. In this framing, Americans had little need to lose sleep over the consequences of their actions—they were fulfilling a divine plan. And make no mistake, religion was a key component, another of the core values of Manifest Destiny. Many, if not most, Americans believed their success and expansion divinely ordained. (This idea was not new at all. Puritan Massachusetts, recall, was to be a “city on a hill.”)
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Core Values of Manifest Destiny in Politics
In the 1840s, as it does today, the US had two main political parties, the Democrats and Whigs. Of the two, the Democratic Party looked more favorably on expansion. One of my college professors once simplified for undergraduates by stating that the Democrats wanted a bigger America while the Whigs wanted a better America. It’s somewhat true. Many of the most overtly expansionistic acts between 1830 and the Civil War were Democratic initiatives.
Sad to say, the Democrats often acted out of a desire to expand slave territory. As we’ll see in a future post, things like the Ostend Manifesto and the filibusters of William Walker had the support of important Democratic leaders. (Important caveat here. The Democratic Party of 1840 bears little resemblance to the Democratic Party of 2020. A lot has changed in 180 years, just not the name.) After the Compromise of 1850, particularly, Democratic politicians were always looking for areas to expand that would expand slave territory.
In an example of historical conjunction, the era of Manifest Destiny also coincided with the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. One feature of the Second Great Awakening was an outburst of American missionary activity. Protestant denominations vied with each other to spread their faith around the globe. This included, of course, the Native Americans living west of the Mississippi River. These missionaries needed little convincing to believe the settlers following in their wake were helping them fulfill God’s plan for America.
Westward Expansion and the Core Values of Manifest Destiny
To be honest, I struggle with the term Western Expansion. It’s a very neutral term for a phenomenon that included displacing (by war, treaty, or both) an awful lot of people—Hispanics and Native Americans in particular—who already lived in the American West. The reality was much more violent. Which makes it distinctly unnatural, and thus not manifest. But you couldn’t have convinced many Americans of this at the time.
The many wars against American Indians need little elaboration here, I think. But what might need explanation is how Americans justified those wars. Yes, they were blatant land grabs in most cases. However, the core values of Manifest Destiny provided part of the justification. If destined by the Protestant God to overspread the continent, one could dismiss any losses occurring in the process as part of the divine plan. Sad, but necessary to bring about God’s vision, and thus beyond questioning.
Combine this with a near-universal American belief in progress, and that Native people were holding back progress by not using the land properly, and few people outside a handful of Eastern philanthropists shed many tears when the US cavalry mowed down peaceful villages of Native Americans. Although Americans had not yet endorsed the concept of the “vanishing Indian,” it wasn’t far off. The view that American Indians were destined to go extinct comes more at the end of the 1800s and its belief in social Darwinism, but the reader can see how the progression from one view to the next might come about.
The Mexican-American War
The Mexican-American War (1846-48) was another event where the core values of Manifest Destiny were on display. While the fighting was in progress, American newspapers offered statements on the racial inferiority of Mexicans to justify the war. They wrote of Americans exterminating the weaker bloodlines of Mexicans and other statements to that effect. It surely didn’t help the public view of Mexicans that most Mexicans were Catholics.
It probably came as a surprise, therefore, when people found that the Mexicans were formidable opponents. Granted, Mexican victories in set battles proved rare. But the war had the highest casualty rate of any foreign war the US has ever fought. About ten percent of American combatants died.
Manifest Destiny also influenced the peace treaty ending the war, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Although the US gained vast lands—a huge arc from West Texas to California—many called for annexing all of Mexico. Democratic senator Lewis Cass stated, “We want almost unlimited power of expansion.” He also believed the entire Gulf of Mexico should be American territory.
That didn’t happen, mainly because many politicians proved leery of adding millions of supposedly inferior Hispanic people to the country. Cynics noted that the territory actually acquired in 1848 contained much land but very few Mexicans. When the war was over, the US also paid Mexico some money. This led one newspaper to maintain the façade of expansion as natural. It proclaimed gratefully, “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God.”
For further proof, consider New Mexico’s journey to statehood. In its first census, 1850, it had 62,000 people, making it a prime candidate for admission to the US. New Mexico did not become a state, however, until 1912. It had about 330,000 people by that time. Nevada, by contrast, had around 30,000 people when it became a state in 1864. The difference lay, in large part, in the racial composition of the two states.
This ends the first half of this blog post on the core values of Manifest Destiny. Please come back to read the second half, which is coming soon.
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