Manifest Destiny: "A Divine Mandate to Rule?" From "Our Country, Then and Now," Chapter 4.
Serialization of selections from my recent book, Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press. Following completion of the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the U.S. was occupied with westward expansion. Settlers pushed to the west and south, encountering a multitude of Native American peoples along the way, but gradually securing their own brand of ownership of the land. In the region of Texas, the settlers encountered not just Indians, but also Mexicans who had recently gained independence from Spain. In the Pacific Northwest, settlers began moving into the Oregon Country on land also claimed by Great Britain. While the Oregon boundary was settled by treaty, the Americans instigated a war against Mexico that resulted in the acquisition of a vast territory from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. What the Americans believed was their imperative to expand came to be called “Manifest Destiny.” Along the way, they warned Europe to cease any further colonization of the Americas. It has been forgotten, however, that this warning also contained a pledge not to interfere in European affairs. It could be argued that every foreign war fought by the U.S. against a European nation since then has been in violation of this pledge, including today’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The section you are about to read is the first of two installments from Chapter 4. Our Country, Then and Now may be ordered directly from the publisher here.
Manifest Destiny: “A Divine Mandate to Rule?”
The Manifest Destiny narrative is the idea that a divine power had specially favored Americans with the right to rule over the entire continent of North America “from sea to shining sea”—and maybe even beyond. Future iterations of this narrative would encompass claims that the US is the “exceptional” or “indispensable” nation.
Were there, then, any particular responsibilities that devolved upon the holders of this purported supremacy? Or are the fruits of Manifest Destiny just some kind of reward or favor for innate or systemic virtues that the white masters were enabled to use at their discretion? Or does it purport to have a legal basis, as Chief Justice John Marshall affirmed, resting on the “right of discovery” and “right of conquest”?
Where did such an august idea come from? Well, like so many other ideas that have driven Americans to action and distraction, “Manifest Destiny” seems to have started on a crasser level: as a media pronouncement. In 1839, journalist John L. O’Sullivan, an influential proponent of Jacksonian Democratic Party politics, a man described as “always full of grand and world-embracing schemes,”[i] wrote a newspaper article that predicted a “divine destiny” for the US. Due to its inherent values such as equality, individual rights, and personal autonomy, the U.S. was preordained “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man.” Use of the term “salvation” might lead us to ask, on the basis of what theological standing or sacred texts did O’Sullivan arrive at this conclusion? He didn’t say.
Six years later, in 1845, O'Sullivan published an essay entitled “Annexation” in the Democratic Review, in which he introduced the actual phrase “Manifest Destiny.” There, he urged the US to annex the Republic of Texas, because it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
To use a German word that gained notoriety in the years before World War II, he seemed to have been writing about Lebensraum, “elbow room.” O'Sullivan used the phrase again on December 27, 1845, in his newspaper The New York Morning News. Speaking of the ongoing boundary dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon Country, O’Sullivan wrote of Oregon: “And that claim is by the right of our 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.”
So, God gave America the entire North American continent, or at least so O’Sullivan said. But where did Great Britain fit in, with its control of Canada? Well, wrote O’Sullivan, the US was for “republican democracy, the great experiment of liberty.” Britain obviously was not. Now that Texas had been welcomed into the fold, O’Sullivan believed California would follow. Then, he wrote, Canada would come along of its own volition, which never happened.
President Andrew Jackson used similar terms when he spoke of national expansion as “extending the area of freedom.” But freedom for whom? Certainly not for the Indians Jackson removed from the eastern U.S. Certainly not for the slaves who worked his plantation. Freedom from the British?
O’Sullivan was still pushing his narrative in 1845 when Democratic President James K. Polk was elected.[ii] Polk was fully intent on going to war with Mexico over lands in the Southwest and of fighting Britain over Oregon if necessary. Polk’s Whig opponents, who had been voted out of office after Martin Van Buren’s single term, argued in The American Whig Review in January 1848:
“…that the designers and supporters of schemes of conquest, to be carried on by this government, are engaged in treason to our Constitution and Declaration of Rights, giving aid and comfort to the enemies of republicanism, in that they are advocating and preaching the doctrine of the right of conquest.” (my italics)
The Whigs did not remark on the fact that, in concert with declarations twenty-five years earlier by Chief Justice John Marshall, “the right of conquest,” as indicated above, was the principle by which Europeans and Americans had been disenfranchising Native Americans for centuries.
And who was to say that Manifest Destiny was to stop at the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans? In 1859, Reuben Davis, a member of the House of Representatives from Mississippi, said:
“We may expand so as to include the whole world. Mexico, Central America, South America, Cuba, the West India Islands, and even England and France [we] might annex without inconvenience... allowing them with their local legislatures to regulate their local affairs in their own way. And this, Sir, is the mission of this Republic and its ultimate destiny.”[iii]
Some would argue that now, in 2023, Reuben Davis’s mission is still the US goal.
The Monroe Doctrine
By 1823, the US felt secure enough for the issuance of the Monroe Doctrine against renewed or further European colonization in the whole of the Americas. Originally proposed by Great Britain to be issued as a bilateral statement, thus making Britain a co-guarantor along with the U.S. against all other European nations, the Monroe Doctrine, as drafted by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams for President James Monroe, emerged as a unilateral U.S. declaration. Though Britain tried to pressure Monroe on the point, the U.S. was averse to sharing. Agreement would have been close to admitting that the U.S. was still part of the British Empire. Here is how the US State Department’s Office of the Historian today puts the matter:
“The bilateral statement proposed by the British thereby became a unilateral declaration by the United States. As Monroe stated: ‘The American continents … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.’ Monroe outlined two separate spheres of influence: the Americas and Europe. The independent lands of the Western Hemisphere would be solely the United States’ domain. In exchange, the United States pledged to avoid involvement in the political affairs of Europe, such as the ongoing Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire, and not to interfere in the existing European colonies already in the Americas.”
The second part of this declaration about avoiding “involvement in the political affairs of Europe” has been conveniently, and grievously, forgotten.[iv] Anyone who cites the Monroe Doctrine without mentioning this provision is being less than candid.
In any case, by 1823 the US was declaring itself the master of the Western Hemisphere and warning Europe to back off. But fighting Mexico was another matter. In the previous chapter, we discussed the annexation of Texas. Now, as the Mexican War approached, the nation was bitterly divided not only over Texas, but over taking any further steps to antagonize what was now the “sister republic” of Mexico.
As we have seen, the Whigs were committed to forestalling the extension of slavery into new territories, and were also taking a stance on principle against any new war of aggression. Future President Ulysses S. Grant served in the Army during the Mexican War but wrote in his memoirs of his belief that the Mexican War was unjustified. Abraham Lincoln, elected to Congress in 1846, was strongly opposed to the Mexican War and spoke picturesquely of President James K. Polk’s desire for “military glory—that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood.”
[i] Frederick Merk and Lois Bannister Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation, Vintage Books, 1973, p.215-216.
[ii] As a reward for his patriotism, O’Sullivan was made US Minister to Portugal from 1854-1858 by President Franklin Pierce. When the Civil War came, he shifted his loyalties to the Confederacy, which had its own concept of “Manifest Destiny”; namely, the spread of slavery.
[iii] Congressional Globe, February 2, 1859.
[iv] This has certainly been forgotten by people like Neocon author Robert Kagan, a founder of Project for a New American Century, who has argued that interference in the political affairs of the entire globe was part of US ideology and intention from the nation’s founding. It most emphatically was not.