Manifest Destiny
In the July/August 1845 issue of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, the owner/editor, John L. O’Sullivan, wrote an argument in favor of the annexation of Texas. The article included this statement: “…manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” It is generally accepted that this is the first use of the phrase “manifest destiny” in reference to the expanding population of the young United States of America. O’Sullivan co-founded The United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1837 and served as the magazine’s editor and wrote most of the longer, in-depth essays that appeared in the bi-monthly issues. It was a well regarded political journal and featured prominent writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Whitman. O’Sullivan had a law degree and served for a time in the New York Legislature. He opposed the Civil War, suggesting various proposals for two nations, but was a Confederacy supporter once the war was underway..
O’Sullivan used the same phrase in December of the same year, 1845, in an editorial for the New York Morning News that addressed the dispute with England over the Oregon Territory. In that article he wrote “…that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given to us….” It’s not clear if O’Sullivan was aware of the connection his position had with the Doctrine of Discovery. But, from the vantage point we have in the 21st century, it seems an obvious conclusion that Manifest Destiny was one of the offsprings of the ‘Doctrine’. Some historians and scholars have connected the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny as the same pronouncements of domination and control, but from two different eras. Manifest Destiny never had the power of the Doctrine and was more of an explanation than a direction. It is perhaps true that Manifest Destiny probably would not have existed with the same level of influence if the Doctrine of Discovery hadn’t preceded it.
The dictionary definitions of ‘Manifest’ is “clear or obvious”, and of ‘Destiny’ as “fate; the hidden power believed to control what will happen in the future”, so the phrase clearly supported the widely held belief in the inevitability of the United States expanding its borders westward across the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean. An editorial from 1851 in the Terre Haute Express, by John B. L. Soule, provided one of the most famous frontier quotes: “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” This westward expansion couched in patriotic and religious terms encouraged and sanctioned the continuing colonization of Indigenous Peoples and their lands, enforced with various means of conquest, suppression and control.
The late professor Albert Weinberg of Johns Hopkins University identified Manifest Destiny as an expansionist phase that can be traced to John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill.” Weinberg claimed that in this view, God played a role in anointing America as the bearer of a unique vision, and that role was assigned at the founding of the nation during the early colonial period. Additionally, there is also a trace of the same ideas in the Monroe Doctrine in which President Monroe defines the differences between the American system and the system in monarchical, conservative Europe. Stephen Douglas, during the time he was Chairman of the House Committee on Territories in the United States, continually refuted British property and land claims that were based on legal principles by asserting that American claims were supported by a “higher law”, a moral law of geographic predestination, the law of Manifest Destiny.
It would be surprising if anyone didn’t immediately connect this piece of artwork with Manifest Destiny. The artist is John Gast, who was fairly well known in his time. He did this piece on commission in 1872 for a travel guidebook published by George Croft. The original is rather small, approximately 12” x 16”, though most people think of it as being a mural. Its title is American Progress and features Columbia as the central figure. It isn’t clear how this painting became the symbol representing the idea of Manifest Destiny, particularly since that phrase was first used in 1845, a quarter of a century earlier. But it has endured, as evident by most everyone’s instant recognition of it and what it symbolizes.
Primary Source:
Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935