Our Manifest Destiny: The Story of America Series [Ep. 26]

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, another installment of our series, “About Us, the Story of America,” with Hillsdale College professor and author of “Land of Hope,” Bill McLay.

By 1850, a seventy-four-year-old America was in a period of prosperity like we’d never seen before. But we were once again embroiled in an old crisis. Something had to break, but would it? Let’s get into the story. Take it away, Bill.

Looking back at the time before the Civil War, it’s easy to conclude that war was inevitable. It sure seems that way when we’re looking backward. But as the late and great historian Dave McCullough once noted, the people that lived at the time didn’t know what was going to happen. They were living in the present. Their present, just as we live in ours. There were, however, several moments that did make the war much more probable. But before moving forward with that part of the story, let’s take a step backward.

Let’s go back to the 1820s, not long after Mexico won its independence from Spain. It sought to bring in immigrants from the American South to farm and work the land, to populate the land. And they came, and they kept coming. They were lured by this vast, unsettled territory and the immense opportunity it provided. One of those grants was the son of a banker from Missouri named Stephen F. Austin. He arrived with 300 settlers and began what would soon become a substantial wave of immigrants. Five years after Austin’s arrival, the number of American immigrants outnumbered the number of Mexicans by nearly three to one. Mexico, trying its best to slow the migration numbers down, could not stop the steady flow of newly arrived American immigrants, and that massive influx of migrants created conflict with the existing Mexican population. It was exacerbated by this strong cultural contrast between the Mexicans, who were Catholic, and the Americans, who were Protestants.

Things began to come to a head when Mexico’s new government abolished slavery and, at the same time, demanded that the newly arrived Americans convert. To make matters worse, General Antonio López de Santa Anna came to power with the goal of centralizing authority and making himself a dictator, which he did in 1824 when he abolished the Mexican Constitution and ended the state legislatures. It would lead to the struggle for Texas independence, one that would be led by Virginia native and one-time Tennessee Governor Sam Houston. You’ll notice these names: Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston. These are people whose names would become the names of major American cities in Texas. Things didn’t begin well for the Texas. Santa Anna’s army of 6,000 moved rapidly against their opposition and ruthlessly so, following Santa Anna’s orders to execute all survivors. Those orders were followed with brutal efficiency in an old Spanish mission in San Antonio named the Alamo, where a small but courageous American force was slaughtered. The town of Goliad was next, and 400 prisoners of war were massacred. Santa Anna, it turns out, was on the edge of a big and very bloody victory, but less than thirty days later, the American prospects would change dramatically at the Battle of San Jacinto. Mostly untrained youit, the volunteers, along with the small contention of Sam Houston’s men, would launch a surprise attack at a vastly larger and better-trained Mexican army. The battle lasted mere minutes, and the Americans captured Santa Anna himself.

In the fall of 1836, Sam Houston would be elected president of a new nation, the Independent Republic of Texas. This is why, until this day, Texans sometimes see themselves as part of their own country, because it once was. Not long after that, Texas voted in overwhelming fashion to become a part of the United States, and Houston, in his capacity as a nation’s leader, made an appeal to the U.S. government. That appeal was not given a warm reception by President Andrew Jackson. Jackson rightly feared that adding Texas to the nation would enrage Mexico and would inflame the slavery controversy. Martin Van Buren, and Jackson’s successor, also kicked the can down the road all the way to the 1840s. These were wise decisions by both presidents. Both men understood that war with Mexico was just not an option. It would disturb the uneasy peace at home on the slavery question. All this was happening at a time when America was and growing in its own national confidence in. The westward expansion of the country was a fundamental part of that confidence.

One journalist who argued for Texas to become part of the ever-expanding United States with a writer and journalist named John O’Sullivan, who coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny.” In modern American life, the term is likely to be viewed negatively, and for good reason. It’s easily viewed as brash, arrogant. That’s not an entirely complete or accurate or fair picture, because, for O’Sullivan and members of a movement called “Young America,” Manifest Destiny was not merely about the acquisition of land. The roots of the phrase were embedded in a kind of American idealism that was born in the era of Jackson, but had deeper roots going back to the very beginnings of our nation and the longing and drama the generations that came before him: that America was a “city on a hill” and a “land of ope.”

When we come back, more of “The Story of Us,” our Manifest Destiny, here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and all of our history stories are brought to us by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go to learn all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that matter in life. If you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu. That’s Hillsdale.edu. And we return to Our American Stories and the story of our expansion into the West. When we last left off, Professor McLay told us about John O’Sullivan, the mouthpiece of a group of people involved in the “Young America” movement that advocated for the nation to stretch from sea to shining sea. Indeed, O’Sullivan would put a name to this idea: Manifest Destiny. Here’s Professor McLay now to read the article O’Sullivan published in his “Democratic Review” where the phrase was coined. Let’s return to the stories.

“The American people, having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality. These facts demonstrated once our disconnected position as regards any other nation, that we have in reality but little connection with the past history of any of them, and still left with all antiquity, its glories, or its crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only, and in so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man in moral, political, and national life, we may constantly assume and our country is destined to be the great nation of future.”

“It is so destined because the principle upon which nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, is universal. It presides in all the operations of the physical world, and it is also the conscious law of the soul, the self-evident dictates of morality, which accurately defines the duty of man to man, and consequently, man’s rights as man. Besides, the truthful annals of any nation furnish abundant evidence that its happiness, its greatness, its duration, were always proportionate to the democratic equality in its system. Government and now here’s O’Sullivan writing about the cruelties and injustice inflicted upon mankind through the agents. What friend of human liberty, civilization, and refinement can cast his view over the past history of the monarchy and aristocracies of antiquities and not deplore that they ever exist? What philanthropists can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties and adjusted inflicted by them on the masses of mankind, and not turn with moral horror from the retrospect? America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battlefields, but in defense of humanity, of the oppressed, of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal and franchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dukes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes. We’ve had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones. Nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat supremacy in its magnificent domain of space and time. The nation of many nations is destined to manifest to man time the excellence of divine principles, to establish on Earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High, the sacred, and the true. Its floor shall be a hemisphere, its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation and union of many republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God’s natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood, of peace and goodwill amongst men.”

These happy millions did not include slaves. Tragically. Now, here’s how he ended things.

“Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement. Equality of rights is the cynosure of our union of states, the grand exemplar of the correlative equality of individuals. And while truth sheds its effulgence, we cannot retrograde without dissolving the one and subverting the other. We must onward to the fulfillment of our mission to the entire development of the principle of our organization: freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in Nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect, we must accomplish it all. All this will be our future history to establish on Earth the moral dignity and salvation of man, the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen? And her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and goodwill where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field. Who then can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity?”

Oh, wow. There was no doubt in his mind, no doubt. There were economic factors driving this concept of Manifest Destiny, and arrogance was most certainly at play, considering the many Native American tribes that wouldn’t be impacted negatively by this vision, and the African Americans that were somehow left out of the picture entirely. But still, these were remarkable ambitions and ideals being advanced. And these are ideals that would remain in place and be extended. But anyway, we do have to see the whole notion of Manifest Destiny, liked so many things, as a mixture of good and bad.

In 1844, Congress passed the annexation of Texas, and Justice Jackson had predicted, it led to real trouble right away with Mexico. That did not deter the newly elected American President, James K. Polk. Indeed, even while negotiating with Mexico, he was preparing for war, which won congressional proof. Unlike the War of 1812, this war, at least in military terms, was a huge success. By September of the very same year, with great speed and precision, the cities of Monterey, Vera Cruz, and finally Mexico City itself were captured. A group of Marines raised the American flag at the National Palace on September 13. This was the Halls of Montezuma that we hear in the Marine Corps Hymn, remarkably, too. At the very moment General Scott’s soldiers were occupying the Mexican capital, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California, prompting a massive Gold Rush that would bring over 300,000 dreamers, prospectors, and miners into the area, transforming the once desolate desert landscape into a bustly, thriving new state. Indeed, the discovery of gold in California seemed to cast upon the expanding nation a kind of divine favor. As historian Robert Johansson would later note, “It was almost as if God had kept the gold hidden until the land came into the possession of the American Republic.”

When we come back, more of “The Story of Us” here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and the final portion of our story on Manifest Destiny and the impending crisis over the expansion of slavery. When we last left off, America had trounced Mexico, and it acquired vast amounts of land in the West: New Mexico, California, and so on. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Professor Bill McLay.

The war would end with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February of 1848. Mexico gave up its claims to Texas above the Rio Grande River and ceded California and New Mexico to the United States. Added up, America and acquired 1 million square mile. Comprehend that number: it was an addition of nearly 640 million acres of new land, which was, by all measures, an astonishing number, as significant as the Louisiana Purchase in its scope and impact. Only two years later, America acquired the Oregon Territory in a treaty negotiated with Great Britain. The dream of Manifest Destiny, of a transcontinental nation, a nation spanning from coast to coast, had been fulfilled, and with remarkable speed. America now was a nation truly from sea to shining sea. America’s future was as bright and replete with opportunity as much as it ever had been in its brief history, and perhaps more so.

This did not change the deep divisions that slavery. In the question of whether to extend the institution of slavery into this vast new territory, or what degree to allow it to expand, disrupted what had actually been a rather uneasy peace in place since the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Even before the war was over, efforts were underway to control the impact it might have. Democratic Congressman David Wilmot, who endorsed the addition of Texas to the nation as a slave state, also proposed that Congress forbid slavery in any of the new territories that America might acquire as a result of a victory in our war with Mexico. Called the Wilmot Proviso, it passed the House many times, but was opposed by the Senate time and time by Southern senators like John C. Calhoun, who insisted that slave owners had a constitutional right to take their slaves, who were their property, anywhere they wanted, including any new territories. It was, in Calhoun’s and many Southerners’ minds, a direct violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, that this would amount to a taking of property without due process of law. How could such a fierce division be settled, particularly when it revolved around different interpretations of fundamental constitutional law?

Well, one, I did it, emerged at the time, was a notion of popular sovereignty. This would allow the territories to manage their internal affairs in a way that best suited the needs and concerns of the people living in them. It was seemingly an elegant solution, a simple solution, a preferred solution to the alternative, which was to keep the debate going and get nowhere. The idea that decisions about slavery could best be left to the people closest to the situation was really in line with the whole idea of self-rule an American federalism. But that solution ran up against an even more foundational principle, the Declaration of Independence itself. But as often it happens, events brought the issue of slavery to a head irrespective of what politicians said or did. The Gold Rush California had created an urgent need for government that could establish basic law and order, and General Taylor, himself a slave owner, suggested that California should be admitted into the ever-expanding nation and admitted as a free state. Californians themselves had drafted a constitution and created a state government prohibited slavery. Needless to say, Southerners were shocked. They were shocked at Taylor’s suggestion, believing that a fellow slave owner woul