John L. O'Sullivan - "Manifest Destiny"

"Manifest Destiny"

In the July–August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, O'Sullivan published an essay entitled "Annexation", which called on the U.S. to admit the Republic of Texas into the Union. Because of concerns in the Senate over the expansion of the number of slave states and the possibility of war with Mexico, the annexation of Texas had long been

a controversial issue. Congress had voted for annexation early in 1845, but Texas had yet to accept, and opponents were still hoping to block the annexation. O'Sullivan's essay urged that "It is now time for the opposition to the Annexation of Texas to cease." O'Sullivan argued that the United States had a divine mandate to expand throughout North America, writing of "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Texas was annexed shortly thereafter, but O'Sullivan's first usage of the phrase "Manifest Destiny" attracted little attention.

O'Sullivan's second use of the phrase became extremely influential. In a column, which appeared in the New York Morning News on December 27, 1845, O'Sullivan addressed the ongoing boundary dispute with Great Britain in the Oregon Country.

And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

That is, O'Sullivan believed that God ("Providence") had given the United States a mission to spread republican democracy ("the great experiment of liberty") throughout North America. Because Great Britain would not use Oregon for the purposes of spreading democracy, thought O'Sullivan, British claims to the territory could be disregarded. O'Sullivan believed that Manifest Destiny was a moral ideal (a "higher law") that superseded other considerations, including international laws and agreements. He made clear he did not include eastern Canada as part of the destiny, and worked to defuse tensions between the two countries in the 1840s.

O'Sullivan's original conception of Manifest Destiny was not a call for territorial expansion by force. He believed that the expansion of U.S.-style democracy was inevitable, and would happen without military involvement as whites (or "Anglo-Saxons") emigrated to new regions. O'Sullivan disapproved of U.S. involvement the Mexican-American War in 1846, although he came to believe that the outcome would be beneficial to both countries.

O'Sullivan's phrase provided a label for sentiments which had become particularly popular during the 1840s, but the ideas themselves were not new. O'Sullivan himself had earlier expressed some of these ideas, notably in an 1839 essay entitled "The Great Nation of Futurity". O'Sullivan was not the originator of the concept of Manifest Destiny, but he was one of its foremost advocates.

At first, O'Sullivan was not aware that he had created a new catch phrase. The term became popular after Whig opponents of the Polk administration criticized it. On January 3, 1846, Representative Robert Winthrop ridiculed the concept in Congress, saying "I suppose the right of a manifest destiny to spread will not be admitted to exist in any nation except the universal Yankee nation". Despite this criticism, Democrats embraced the phrase. It caught on so quickly that it was forgotten that O'Sullivan had coined it. It was not until 1927 that historian Julius Pratt determined that the phrase had originated with O'Sullivan.