How Did Manifest Destiny Shape America?

Manifest Destiny was the idea that European colonists in the early U.S. had a God-given duty to expand across the continent. Learn how it worked then and continues today in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/american-history/manifest-destiny-america.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain
Stuff Lauren Bogelbaum. Here a woman in white floats above
a verdant plane, her eyes turned westward, a star glowing
on her forehead. She's a phantasm hovering at the center
of the oil on canvas painting completed in eighteen seventy

(00:23):
two by the Prussian American artist John Gast. The work
is called American Progress. This simple painting, less than a
foot tall, is the artistic realization of a concept that's
been at the center of America's psyche for most of
its existence. It's right there in the paintings, settled but
brutal allegory. The woman, a white woman with wavy golden hair,

(00:48):
leads a group of farmers and other settlers, also all white.
In her left hand is a string of telegraph wire.
In her right, a book, A stage coach, and a
train also follow in her wake, and the land behind
her is bright and bountiful. Ahead of her, to the west,
dark skies and foreboding mountains await. A herd of buffalo

(01:08):
rumbles away in the distance. A wild beast, perhaps a
bear or badger, snarls at her as it retreats, a
band of Native Americans flees As she glides ever onward.
She is manifest destiny, a belief born in America's infancy
and fully implemented with the country's drive west during the
eighteen hundreds. Manifest destiny was a doctrine that basically espoused

(01:33):
that the Christian God wanted European Americans to take over
the continent. In a single word, manifest destiny was and
still is trouble. The term manifest destiny sprung from the
fingers of a newspaper columnist and editor in eighteen forty five,
though the basic idea had been around from the country's

(01:55):
get go. After all, it takes a hefty dose of
self entitlement to claim a land as your own, even
though millions of people lived there already in the early
days of what we now know as America. What lands
couldn't be relatively easily taken were bought, like in the
Louisiana Purchase, split with others like the Oregon Country, or

(02:15):
fought over like big parts of the West in the
Mexican American War of eighteen forty to eighty eight. It
was the latter that pushed to annex land held by
Mexico before it was one in the war, the prompted
editor John O'Sullivan to coin the term manifest destiny. He wrote,
it is our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted

(02:38):
by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.
But of course, the concept of manifest destiny was inextricably
tied into the politics of the time, which were, as
they are now, fueled by something decidedly unholy money. America's
land must was driven first and foremost by the first

(03:01):
four more wealth for its colonists, but distributing that often
ill gained bounty wasn't easy in a time when the
scourge of slavery was already beginning to rip apart the nation.
The issue of how to divide the newly acquired land,
which states to be would allow slavery and which would
not became a political hot button, and declaring the land

(03:25):
grabs a divine right seemed, if nothing else, a nice
cover story for expansionists of the time. But even more
than money, politics, or religion, manifest destiny demonstrated something else
about the mindset of many Americans. For the article, this
episode is based on how stuff Works spoke with Don
Hayter Markle, the head of the Department of Political Science

(03:48):
at the University of Kansas. He said, implied in the
notion of Manifest Destiny is that we know best. And
basically when we say we, we mean sort of Anglo
Saxon Protestant, otherwise known as sort of white. That's telling
Native Americans, that's telling Mexicans, that's telling Africans, we kidnapped,
it enslaved, that we are superior. Our way is superior.

(04:11):
I don't see how you can escape from the notion
that this is a form of white supremacy. So did
people really accept this idea at the time. Certainly many
people at the time believed in Manifest Destiny that God
wanted the newcomers to take over the continent, to work
the land, to bring Christianity to the Indians and Mexicans,

(04:33):
to be biblically fruitful and multiplied as a Sullivan pudd it,
and if God found it within his grace to grow
rich while doing it, expelling more than a hundred thousand
Native Americans from their homes in the American South, murdering
thousands of others, and taking land from Mexicans, wasn't just
accepted as a divine American right, it was a duty.

(04:56):
But not everyone bought into the notion. Many saw the
idea as little more than a dodge. Housta Works also
spoke with Harry Watson, a professor of Southern culture at
the University of North Carolina. He said there were people,
for example, who thought that the drive to annex Texas
was a ploy to gain more land to create more
slave states, because eastern Texas was suitable for growing cotton.

(05:20):
Even then, there were people who were bitterly opposed to
slavery and desperately wanted to abolish it, and the first
step to abolishing it might be to prevent it from growing.
They did not want to admit Texas. They did not
want to fight Mexico to get Texas. They did not
want slavery to be allowed to spread. All of this
was fought out very bitterly in Congress. Still, politicians like

(05:44):
President James K. Polk founded politically and economically favorable to
press onward. His call to annex both Texas and Oregon,
which would appeal to both northern and southern political stances,
helped him win the presidency in eighteen forty five over
anti expansionist Henry Clay. Even though Polke's drive threatened war
with both Great Britain and Mexico, and despite fears from many,

(06:08):
Polk believed that a vast nation transversing the continent would
be more easily defended and mightier than one concentrated on
the eastern seaboard. He said in his inaugural address, it
is confidantly believed that our system may be safely extended
to the utmost bounds of our territorial limits, and that
as it shall be extended, the bonds of our union,

(06:28):
so far from being weakened, will become stronger. By the
time Polk left office in eighteen forty nine, Manifest Destiny
was all but complete. Barely sixty years after the U
s Constitution was ratified, America stretched from sea to Shining Sea.
In historical terms, Manifest Destiny is defined only as the

(06:51):
doctrine that increased the United States landholdings on the North
American continent. The idea, though, is still reference today, though
it's us about expansionism and divine intervention, and more about
spreading the American way of life to other places. In
that way, Manifest Destiny is a precursor to what's now
termed American exceptionalism, the belief that America is uniquely exceptional

(07:16):
and that its virtues the freedom, democracy, capitalism, are worthy
of sharing with, or perhaps even imposing on other countries
and cultures. Historically, that's often meant more trouble. The Philippine
American War, the business led Coup of Hawaii, the Korean War,
the Vietnam War, the Gulf Wars, just for example. America's

(07:38):
bloody history after the country's continental expansion, which continues today
in places like the Middle East, shows that the idea
of American exceptionalism that was so evident in Manifest Destiny
still lives on. Watson said, I think the idea of
Manifest Destiny supported the idea of a global role for
the United States in the twentieth century, and they there

(08:00):
is still this notion that it's not only America's right,
but America's obligation to extend its influence over various countries,
and that can work both ways or many ways. The
Woman in White, it seems, presses ever onward. Today's episode

(08:21):
is based on the article how Manifest Destiny stretched the
US from Sea to Shining Sea on House to works
dot Com, written by John Donovan. Brain Stuff is production
by Heart Radio in partnership with Houstfworks dot Com and
is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my
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