The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 by David Morris Potter

O’Sullivan bombastically proclaimed that “the far reaching, the boundless future will be an area of American greatness.” And in 1845 he declared flatly that the nation’s Manifest Destiny was “to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self-government entrusted to us.” In this O’Sullivan and other true believers in a destiny so manifest were sadly and tragically mistaken. The bacillus of national destiny began to infect the minds of otherwise rational people, producing in some hallucinations of empire.

The rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, which had begun to take shape in the 1830s, became florid, exaggerated, and protean. With the annexation of the Texas republic to the Union in 1845 and the Mexican Cession of 1848, the United States acquired more than one million square miles of land.

Between 18 a surge of territorial expansion took the nation to the Pacific Coast and made it a true continental republic. Virtue, mission, geographic predestination, and national destiny were fused into a powerful, if often disingenuous argument for aggressive territorial expansion and commercial growth that undergirded and informed western migration. īy the 1840s Manifest Destiny had come to encompass a broad spectrum of expansionist rationalizations. Pushed onto the frontier by overcrowding and soil exhaustion in the East, immigrants were also pulled into the West by prospects of personal independence and upward mobility. Put in reductive terms, the average population growth in the two sections doubled every ten years. speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.” From 1810 to 1860, Americans and European immigrants moved west steadily, as rates of population increase per decade in these years averaged 96 percent in the Old Northwest and 109 percent in the slaveholding Southwest. During the national debate on the Louisiana Purchase treaty in 1803, John Quincy Adams asserted that the United States was “destined by God and nature to be coextensive with the North American continent and become the most populous and powerful people ever combined under one social compact. As early as the Jefferson presidency the nation’s destiny had been rooted in expansion. By the late 1830s the idea of a national destiny-a Manifest Destiny-had begun to take definitive shape as Americans North and South surged west, attracted by cheap lands, fertile soil, and a generally salubrious climate.

The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 by David Morris Potter