Manifest Destiny and the Oregon Trail
The phrase manifest destiny was coined by the journalist John L. O'Sullivan in 1845, writing in the Democratic Review that it was the nation's manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of its yearly multiplying millions. He used it first to argue for the annexation of Texas and then, later that year, for the whole of Oregon. The phrase caught because it named something already operating. American settlement had been pushing west for decades, and the idea that the expansion was providential, that republican institutions were self-evidently superior, and that the land was being used inefficiently by those already on it, supplied a justification that did not require argument. It had immediate political consequences. Texas was annexed in 1845, nine years after breaking from Mexico, and the boundary dispute that followed produced the Mexican-American War in 1846. That war ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which Mexico ceded roughly half its territory — California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming — for fifteen million dollars. The Oregon question was settled with Britain by compromise at the 49th parallel, not by the fifty-four forty or fight of the slogan. The doctrine was contested at the time. Whigs including Abraham Lincoln opposed the Mexican war, and Ulysses Grant later called it one of the most unjust ever waged. Its consequences for Native nations and for the slavery question were the ones that mattered. The new territory reopened the question of whether slavery would follow the flag, which the Compromise of 1850 postponed and the war settled. O'Sullivan himself ended his career as a Confederate propagandist in Europe.
- Year: 1843 CE
- Category: Social
