By Allen C. Guelzo, Princeton University
The disposal of the Missouri question and the dramatic victories in Texas helped feed the notion that American republicanism, already the favored and unique child of the Enlightenment, had a manifest. The word ‘manifest’ meant something that was plainly obvious, that was self-evident, which was a manifest destiny to rule the entire North American continent.
John Tyler
Post Texan independence, the panic of 1837 only complicated things as Martin Van Buren, the elected president of Texas, was not eager to assume responsibility for the debts the Texans had run up in financing their revolution. Subsequently, in 1840, the presidential election of that year brought a Whig to the presidency for the first time, in the person of William Henry Harrison.
The Whigs preferred to pour the nation’s resources into developing the internal American economy, rather than picking up the bills for expansionist adventurers elsewhere. Consequently, Texas remained an unwilling but independent republic.
Unfortunately, however, William Henry Harrison died only a month after his inauguration as president, and the Whig Party suddenly found itself saddled with Harrison’s vice president, John Tyler. And, Tyler found himself at odds with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, the real chiefs of the Whig Party.
Tyler’s Bid to Power
Every bill that Clay and the Whig Congress wrote for the pet projects of the Whigs—bills for internal improvements, protectionist tariffs, a new Bank of the United States—were all vetoed by John Tyler. Eventually, all the Whigs in the cabinet resigned.
Shunned by the Whigs, Tyler tried to assemble his own independent political power base, and, as a Virginian and a slaveholder, he was not shy of bidding for southern support.
As bait to his fellow southerners, Tyler and his new secretary of state, Abel Upsher, negotiated an annexation treaty for Texas, and tried to turn Texas annexation into a campaign issue that John Tyler could ride back into the White House in 1844.
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The Manifest Destiny
This should have been easy for Tyler to do as the disposal of the Missouri question and the dramatic victories in Texas helped feed the notion that American republicanism, had a manifest destiny to rule the entire North American continent.
Interestingly, this was a notion that was composed of one part self-interest and one part romantic legend. The self-interest part of manifest destiny was mostly southern, as anxious slaveholders looked to western expansion to relieve the confining pressure of the Missouri compromise on slavery.
Even northerners, though, could feel cramped or dispossessed in the heavily settled East, and they, too, could hope that the old story of cheap land and brave living could be repeated, this time somewhere west of the Mississippi, somewhere west of the Louisiana Purchase.
Manifest Destiny’s Romantic Legend
The romantic legend part of manifest destiny grew out of the way that American artists, like Carl Bodmore, Thomas Coal, George Catland, Seth Eastman and George Caleb Bingham, depicted the West: the golden land, and the Plains Indians all as part of a great canvass of a land flowing with milk and honey and populated, at worst, only with noble savages.
This romantic legend was fed still further by the mystique of the ‘mountain men’, men like Jim Bridger, Jedadiah Smith, Tom Fitzpatrick, John Coulter, William H. Ashley, and Kit Carson, whose adventures in the West became the modern substitute for the heroic example of the first colonists and the first pioneers.
Manifest Destiny in Literature
The romantic legend was also fed for those who found the mountain men a bit too raffish by the tales of missionary martyrs in the West, like Marcus and Narcissi Whitman, who were murdered, in 1847, by Cayuse Indians, in the missionary compound they had built in the Oregon Territory.
It also has to be said that the romantic part of manifest destiny even achieved literary status and respectability, given to it by the Massachusetts historian, Francis Parkman, in his work The Oregon Trail, in 1847. This was done not only by a historian, but by the pioneering anthropologist of Indian culture, Henry Rose Schoolcraft, and by the epic poem Henry Wadsworth Longfellow constructed in 1855 from Schoolcraft’s research, The Song of Hiawatha.
What Was the Reality of Manifest Destiny?
The realities of manifest destiny, however, were often a good deal less than romantic. American expansion across the West created friction with Great Britain over what the actual boundaries with Canada in the West were to be, and so, constant controversy over who exactly had title to Oregon emerged as a diplomatic issue between America and Great Britain.
Manifest destiny also encouraged American freebooters to imitate the Texan example, and migrate to other fragile Spanish-speaking republics in Central America with the goal of ‘filibustering’, meaning, in that use of the word, destabilizing the local regimes, seizing power, and then offering themselves to the United States as new American possessions.
It was also a hint at what was coming, or rather who. Nobody, would carry with him better credentials as an apostle of these various kinds of manifest destiny than the Democratic Party’s next nominee for the presidency, an outright expansionist and protégé of Andrew Jackson, James Knox Polk of Tennessee.
Common Questions about American Republicanism and Manifest Destiny
The disposal of the Missouri question and the dramatic victories in Texas helped feed the notion that American republicanism had a manifest destiny to rule the entire North American continent.
The self-interest part of manifest destiny was mostly southern, as anxious slaveholders looked to western expansion to relieve the confining pressure of the Missouri compromise on slavery.
Manifest destiny encouraged American freebooters to imitate the Texan example, and migrate to other fragile Spanish-speaking republics in Central America with the goal of ‘filibustering’, meaning, in that use of the word, destabilizing the local regimes, seizing power, and then offering themselves to the United States as new American possessions.
