Manifest Destiny
The mid-1840s were years of extraordinary territorial growth for the United States, a period in which the national domain increased by 1.2 million square miles, a gain of more than sixty percent. In 1845, the United States annexed Texas and the following year reached a settlement with Great Britain for control of the Pacific Northwest. Mexico's opposition to the annexation of Texas led to the Mexican War (1846–1848), which resulted in the U.S. acquisition of California and the American Southwest through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. So rapid and dramatic was the process of territorial expansion that it came to be seen as an inexorable process, prompting many Americans to insist that their nation had a "manifest destiny" to dominate the continent.
Yet the expansionist agenda was never promoted by a clearly defined movement, nor did it enjoy broad bipartisan support. Some champions of Manifest Destiny favored rapid expansion and the bold pursuit of U.S. territorial claims, even at the risk of war with other nations. Others, no less committed to the long-term goal of a U.S. empire, opposed the use of force to achieve that end, believing that contiguous lands would voluntarily join the Union in order to obtain the benefits of republican rule.
For all its brash rhetoric, American expansionism was driven by economic and geopolitical anxieties. Troubled by creeping urbanization and a rising tide of immigrants from Europe, expansionists viewed Manifest Destiny as a way to attain the Jeffersonian ideal by providing new lands and unlimited economic opportunities for future generations. Southerners anxious to add slave states to the Union were among the most ardent supporters of the crusade for more territory, and American commercial interests saw expansion as a way to gain access to lucrative foreign markets. Manifest Destiny was also a response to American suspicions of British interference in the western hemisphere, a fear that had grown more acute as the United States began to define its strategic and economic interests in terms that extended beyond its own borders.
In the 1850s, preoccupied with the increasingly bitter sectional conflict over slavery, many Americans rejected Manifest Destiny. Although Southern extremists sponsored filibuster expeditions into Latin America with the objective of gaining new lands into which to extend slavery, the expansionist movement faded from the national agenda in the years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War Instead, Americans argued over the settlement of those western lands and whether they would include or exclude slavery. That problem was not fully resolved until the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment put an end to slavery in the nation.
Ironically, Manifest Destiny proved to be a mixed blessing for U.S. society and culture. On one hand, it appeared to confirm a religious conviction that the United States had a divine mission to spread its institutions across the continent, thus contributing to the nation's sense of itself as an exceptional society with a mission to play in the world. On the other hand, it became divisive because it was associated with the spread of slavery, an institution many believed to be incompatible with American ideals. Thus, rather than uniting the nation, it further divided North and South and became a factor leading to the Civil War.
Age of Westward Expansion.
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