The Way West

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A) Review the image, American Progress, 1872 by John Gast. The center figure is ‘Lady Liberty’ stringing telegraph wire. The assignment is to analyze the connection between American ideals, expansion and progress as suggested here. Give specific examples from the painting to explain these concepts. This will require two well-developed paragraphs. You aren’t finished, however, You will want to provide a third, concluding paragraph in which you will summarize your thoughts on Manifest Destiny and American Foreign Policy, p. 360.

B) John L. O’Sullivan, The Great Nation of Futurity, 1845.. Also review the textbook, Manifest Destiny, pp 359-361.
1. What connections does O’Sullivan see between the history of Europe and the history of the United States?
2. According to O’Sullivan, what is the most important principle that guides America?
3. Use your textbook’s analysis to discuss how these words will be used to justify territorial expansion and the suppression of native peoples. Direct quotations always help clarify. . The special feature on p. 360, From Then To Now, Manifest Destiny and American Foreign Policy offers good insights as well.

C) Web Destination: www.pbs.org/weta/thewest
This site represents the PBS Series The West. Click on “events’ on the tool bar above text. For the date, click on 1840-1850. After perusing the chronology of events for that decade, you choose the most important five events listed. Prepare your list, defending your choices in 2-3 sentences.


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The Great Nation of Futurity (1839) John L. O'Sullivan [This essay appeared in the Democratic Review and presents a theme eagerly taken up in Congress in the 1840s. It reflects a religious impulse as well as a nationalist one—a sense that “God, the republic, and democracy alike demanded that Americans press on west, to settle and civilize, republicanize and democratize.” (Johnson, A History of the American People, 1997: 371). In a newspaper editorial about the annexation of Texas in 1845, O'Sullivan, a journalist, focused this religious-nationalist impulse in the memorable phrase “Manifest Destiny.” In the editorial he wrote of America's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our multiplying millions." The term was used throughout the second half of the 19th century as justification for the acquisition of territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, including Alaska, Hawaii, and the Phillipines.] The American people having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only; and so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity. It is so destined, because the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, is universal. It presides in all the operations of the physical world, and it is also the conscious law of the soul -- the self-evident dictates of morality, which accurately defines the duty of man to man, and consequently man's rights as man. Besides, the truthful annals of any nation furnish abundant evidence, that its happiness, its greatness, its duration, were always proportionate to the democratic equality in its system of government. . . . What friend of human liberty, civilization, and refinement, can cast his view over the past history of the monarchies and aristocracies of antiquity, and not deplore that they ever existed? What philanthropist can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties, and injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind, and not turn with moral horror from the retrospect? America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in defence of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes. We have had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones; nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat of supremacy. We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can. We point to the everlasting truth on the first page of our national declaration, and we proclaim to the millions of other lands, that "the gates of hell" -- the powers of aristocracy and monarchy -"shall not prevail against it." The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High -- the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere -- its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood -- of "peace and good will amongst men.". . . Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement. Equality of rights is the cynosure of our union of States, the grand exemplar of the correlative equality of individuals; and while truth sheds its effulgence, we cannot retrograde, without dissolving the one and subverting the other. We must onward to the fulfilment of our mission -to the entire development of the principle of our organization -- freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in nature's eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man -- the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity? be 3.1 From Then to Now 13.2 Manifest Destiny and American Foreign Policy 13.3 F terrorism in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 13.4 rom the birth of the nation in 1776 to the U.S. war on , 2001, a sense of mission has often imbued U.S. foreign policy. Manifest Destiny was one expression of that sense of mission. According to its lofty rhetoric, the United States would fulfill its divinely ordained mission by absorbing all the peoples of North America, at least those deemed capable of self-gov- ernment, into the republic. Manifest Destiny helped inspire the United States surge to the Pacific and justify the Mexican War. But the war also provoked a contrary fear: Was the United States guilty of an imperial conquest that threatened the liberty of oth- ers rather than promoting it? Expansionists in the late nineteenth century invoked Manifest Destiny to justify U.S. acquisition of an overseas empire following the Spanish-American War, but the new empire did not really fit the model. The advocates of Manifest Destiny had envisioned neighboring peoples in North America voluntarily joining the republic, not being forced into it as dependent pos- sessions. Critics of that war insisted that America's true mission must be to serve as the "model republic" for others to follow. This is the theme that characterized at least the public face of U.S. diplomacy in the twentieth century. President Woodrow Wilson justified U.S. intervention in World War I as a moral duty to save democracy in Europe, and Wilsonian idealism infused the foreign policy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II. Throughout the Cold War, the United States iden- tified itself as the protector of democratic freedoms from the threat of international communism. In the post-Cold War world, Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton cited the need to uphold human rights as grounds for U.S. military intervention abroad. President George W. Bush went further by claiming that the United States has the right to use preemptive force against any "evil power" deemed a threat to world peace and the future security of the United States. U.S. troops faced far more hazardous conditions in Iraq than had been predicted. Question for Discussion What do you believe explains the long-held view of many Americans that the United States has been entrusted with a unique mission to redeem the rest of the world? In this late-1872 evocation of the spirit of Manifest Destiny, Indians retreat westward as white settlers, guided by a diaphanously clad America, spread the benefits of American civilization. Manifest Destiny Doctrine, first expressed in 1845, that the expansion of white Americans across the continent was inevitable and ordained by God. the development of the great experiment of Liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us." Central to Manifest Destiny was the assumption that white Americans were a special people, a view that dated back to the Puritans' belief that God had appointed them to establish a New Israel cleansed of the corruption of the Old World. What distinguished the special U.S. mission as enunciated by Manifest Destiny was its explicitly racial component. Between 1815 and 1850, the term “Anglo-Saxon originally loosely applied to English-speaking peoples, acquired racial overtones. Cau- casian Anglo-Saxon Americans, as the descendants of ancient Germanic tribes that be the foremost race in the world. The superior racial pedigree they claimed for them selves gave white Americans the natural right to expand westward, a chosen people were now said 10 had purportedly brought the seeds of free institutions to England, 360 carrying the blessings of democracy and progress. Only they, it was argued, had the energy, industriousness, and innate love of liberty to establish a successful free government. 12 industrialization and urbanization. As good Jeffersonians, they stressed the need Democrats, expansionism would counterbalance the debilitating effects of for more land to realize the ideal of a democratic republic rooted in the virtues and rough equality of independent farmers. For their working-class Irish con- stituency, the Democrats touted the broad expanses of the West as the surest 12 the misery of wage slavery. 13 means to escape Manifest Destiny captured the popular imagination when the country was 13. still mired in depression after the Panic of 1837. The way out of the depres- sion, according to many Democrats, was to revive the export trade to soak up the agricultural surplus. Thomas Hart Benton, a Democratic senator from Missouri, was the leading spokesman for the vast potential of U.S. trade with India and China, a trade to be secured by U.S. possession of the harbors on the Pacific Coast. en The Mexican War Once in office, Polk proved far more conciliatory with the British than with the Mexicans. Polk was willing to compromise on Oregon because he dreaded the possibility of a two-front war against both the Mexicans and the British. Mexico had severed diplomatic ties with the United States over the annexation of Texas (see Chapter 10), and a war could break out at any time. ( DO ) Read the Document Thomas Corwin, Speech Against the Mexican War (1847) 2011 012 vernment hat white elief that ion of the th SRO ORLD » st Destiny o-Saxon, nes. Cau- ribes that 361 This w said to for them en people s colorful kerchief depicts scenes from the battles of General Zachary Taylor during the Mexican War. ence, icans ports 13.1 rer at W r the edin 13.2 and rail, Jew olis bilo plato 13.3 ned of 13.4 ing 87 SEXO A XCR Sises ind ith ted ip, ner ew of y. in y у ES 2 Dominating Nauvoo, Illinois, by the early 1840s was this large temple built by the Mormons. f 1 Politics, Expansion, and War 13.4 Why was James K. Polk so eager to provoke a war with Mexico? T he Democrats viewed their victory in the election of 1844 (see Chapter 10) as a popular mandate for expansion. James K. Polk, the new Democratic presi- dent, fully shared this expansionist vision. The greatest prize in his eyes was California. When he was stymied in his efforts to purchase California and New Mexico, he tried to force concessions from the Mexican government by ordering American troops to the mouth of the Rio Grande, far within the territory claimed by Mexico. When the virtually inevitable clash of arms occurred in late April 1846, war broke out between the United States and Mexico. Victory resulted in the Mexican Cession of 1848, which added a half million square miles to the United States. Polk's administration also finalized the acquisi- tion of Texas and reached a compromise with the British on the Oregon Territory that recognized U.S. sovereignty in the Pacific Northwest up to the 49th parallel. The United States was now a nation that spanned a continent. Mexican Cession of 1848 The addition of half a million square miles to the United States as a result of victory in the 1846 war between the United States and Mexico. Manifest Destiny With a phrase that soon entered the nation's vocabulary, John L. O'Sullivan, editor and Democratic politician, proclaimed in 1845 America's 'manifest destiny to over- Spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for 359
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Running head: MANIFEST DESTINY

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Manifest Destiny
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MANIFEST DESTINY

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Manifest Destiny
Question A

According to the manifest destiny doctrine, God ordained the spread of the white
civilisation across America. The American progress image by John Gast serves as an ideal
testament to the impact of the expansion. Within the image, the female figure carries with her a
telegraph wire, an implication of improvement in communication that came along with the
expansion. Behind her is what appears to be a steam engine pulling several wagons, which
communicates improvement in transport as well. Consequently, along ...


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