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)
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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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