4/19/2023 0 Comments Manifest destiny![]() While manifest destiny united many Americans with a shared belief that God had a grand mission for them, it also divided them. Through various treaties, land purchases, and wars, the United States, by 1848, acquired all of the territory that comprises the continental United States today. During the 1800s, the United States government began acquiring more land from both the American Indians and from European countries claiming land in North America. Europeans drove American Indians away from their lands, including those in Ohio, throughout the 1600s and the 1700s. ![]() Some of these same people had believed that the North American continent was destined to be under white control. Since the arrival of the first European colonists to what would eventually become the United States of America, many of the newcomers had believed that they were God's chosen people. ![]() Many Anglo-Americans of various ethnicities agreed with O'Sullivan's view. O' Sullivan summarized his view this way: 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. O'Sullivan, a newspaper reporter in New York City, coined the phrase "manifest destiny." O'Sullivan claimed that it was the God-given destiny of the United States of America to spread over North America. that we are in a great degree indebted for the rapid extension and aggrandizement of our country.īut as tensions rose between slave and non-slaving owning states over who should control these vast new lands, Polk’s nationalism was sowing some of the first seeds of the Civil War.In 1845, John L. It is to the enterprise and perseverance of the hardy pioneers of the West, who penetrate the wilderness with their families, suffer the dangers, the privations, and hardships attending the settlement of a new country. Polk ended with the battle cry of Manifest Destiny: Having announced this huge increase in the size of the US, which he rather bewilderingly referred to as a ‘bloodless achievement’, his address went on to assert ‘our title to the whole Oregon Territory’, which was followed by a claim that ‘The civilized world will see in these proceedings a spirit of liberal concession on the part of the United States.’ This might have left the British a little baffled, but the aggressive stance did lead to them backing down and signing the Oregon Treaty the following year, dividing the whole territory along the 49th Parallel. Under Polk, Manifest Destiny was put into action with the annexation of the nominally independent Texas and the ceding from Mexico of parts of nine states. It was embraced by the Democrats, who saw white Anglo-Saxon America as a civilising Christian influence with a rightful claim to the whole continent, regardless of the long histories of the native peoples or European powers they found there. ![]() The first use of the term has been credited to newspaper editor John O’Sullivan. This concept of Manifest Destiny was not Polk’s own. James Polk was the first president to vocalise the concept that the US should stretch ‘from sea to shining sea’.
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