All Americans with some education are aware that Manifest Destiny was one of the Bad Things in our past and very few know any more about it than that. Articles in legacy outlets linking Trump with the concept demonstrate almost no knowledge of what it meant in its time. For example, Franklin Foer of The Atlantic, in his article “Donald Trump’s Manifest Destiny,” considers “the 19th-century vision of American imperialism” to be an adequate definition. On NPR’s Morning Edition, Susan Page described Manifest Destiny as “this notion that America was destined to control all of this territory . . . we have to have all of this land [sic] because we were exceptional.” I haven’t yet found one such explanation that identifies the meaning the term had for the men who first promoted it, above all the editor John O’Sullivan. This is unfortunate, because Manifest Destiny still offers a compelling and radical answer to the question of what it means to be democratic.
“It is a part of who we are as a nation, and who we always will be.”
The time in which O’Sullivan developed his movement (the 1830s and 40s) had striking parallels to our own. Movements were springing up throughout the West to challenge the old-fogey notions that determined politics and culture. Italy had the Young Italy movement led by the liberal nationalists Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini; Germany had the Young Hegelians, which included Karl Marx. In the United States, there was Young America, a cultural and political movement centered on O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review and a cohort of Democratic politicians, notably Stephen A. Douglas. Ironically, the guiding inspiration of Young America was a man not so young himself, the firebrand president Andrew Jackson. Jackson, despite his age, seemed to embody the growth of the country, the casting off of elite domination, and the extinction of the last vestiges of Englishness. He symbolized a new America that would be freer, less stodgy, and fiercely democratic.
Channeling this aspiration, O’Sullivan declared that “the vital principle of American literature must be democracy.” Some of the writers who answered O’Sullivan’s call for a new democratic literature and contributed to the Review were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Culturally, the troubled antebellum period was a renaissance, an American Golden Age, and the now-forgotten O’Sullivan was one of its leaders. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby Dick, the essays of Thoreau and Emerson, the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, the paintings of Thomas Cole: All these works of distinctly American art appeared between the early 1840s and mid-1850s, one of the most dynamic eras in American culture and also the era when Manifest Destiny was at its peak of popularity.
O’Sullivan first used the term Manifest Destiny in an editorial titled “Annexation.” The editorial advocated the acceptance of the Republic of Texas as America’s 28th state. American immigrants to what was then a fringe territory of Mexico had seceded, partly to protect their slave property and partly out of opposition to the authoritarian military government established by General Santa Anna. Texas was not the only Mexican state to rebel during this period in response to Santa Anna’s policies, but it was the only one to win independence. O’Sullivan believed that it was right for Texas, the large majority of whose non-Native American population was composed of Anglo-American immigrants, to join the United States, according to the wish of that majority.
For proponents of annexation, welcoming Texas into the nation was not a land grab, but an embrace. To annex Texas was to welcome those seeking the blessings of American liberty of their own volition. As O’Sullivan wrote of the American immigrants to Mexico’s northern territories: “They will have a right to independence . . . to the possession of the homes conquered from the wilderness by their own labors and dangers, sufferings and sacrifices—a better and truer right than the artificial tide of sovereignty in Mexico, a thousand miles distant, inheriting from Spain a title good only against those who have none better.” He believed that this right of popular sovereignty over a territory by its settlers had to be defended against those European powers who “have undertaken to intrude themselves . . . for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our multiplying millions.” Whatever the material motives behind annexation, the ideology of Manifest Destiny was less about asserting imperial might than about defending an expanding sphere of self-governance.
Manifest Destiny was part of a broader upwelling of liberalism in the 19th century. The Mexican-American War was seen by its enthusiasts as of a piece with the democratic revolutions that spread across Europe in 1848, the same year the war concluded. As the historian Steve Widdmer has noted, Whitman announced the arrival of a “holy millennium of liberty.” Melville suggested that “the political Messiah had come.”
Such a reaction is startling to present-day readers who have been taught to see the Mexican-American War as one of illiberal conquest. But the historians Stephen Hahn and Frederick Merck have established that Manifest Destiny’s proponents hoped to achieve a network of independent states, voluntarily affiliated. This is a very different picture than that presented by Franklin Foer when he likens Trump’s supposed doctrine of Manifest Destiny to “a Hobbesian world in which the most powerful are given free rein to dominate.”
Young America took up more ideas than expansion and popular sovereignty. Young American politicians embraced the “free land” idea of George Henry Evans, a radical reformer associated with Marx and Engels. Evans, in turn, would eventually change the name of his magazine The Working Man’s Advocate to Young America. The “free land” idea called for distributing western lands to settlers to ease the plight of workers in the crowded cities of the east. Ultimately, this reform was achieved through the passage of the Homestead Act. This radical egalitarian measure served the project of an expanding democratic republic overspreading the continent.
Young America, of course, flourished on the brink of the Civil War, unbeknownst to its followers. The annexation of Mexican territory accelerated the war by opening the question of whether the new territories would be slave or free. The Young American policy of popular sovereignty, encoded in Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act, brought the war closer. Popular sovereignty as applied to slavery meant letting the settlers of each new state vote on whether it would be slave or free. In the Kansas-Nebraska territory, violent clashes between slaveholders and “free soilers” ensued. It was in these battles that John Brown got his start as a militant. Some enthusiasts of the act believed it would ultimately end slavery, as liberty would win out in a free democratic contest. In a sense, they were right, but the route from popular sovereignty to emancipation was more tortured and bloody than they could have imagined. Ultimately, the ideas of Young America and the dream of Manifest Destiny would be utterly eclipsed by sectionalism and the Civil War.
But now the Civil War and the issues it settled are behind us, and something of the exuberance and revolutionary spirit of the antebellum era seems to be in the air once more. We want to remake our country on democratic principles, to renew the spirit of the Revolution. We want new art and literature freed from the supervision of academic experts and elite critics. And we once again feel the surge of growth waking the nation to bright, restless life. Manifest Destiny is more than a term to be memorized for a history test and forgotten. It is a part of who we are as a nation, and who we always will be.