Manifest destiny

Manifest destiny was a widely held cultural concepts in a 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny:

Newspaper editor John O'Sullivan is generally credited with coining the term manifest destiny in 1845 to describe the essence of this mindset; other historians believe the unsigned editorial titled "Annexation" in which it number one appeared was statement by journalist & annexation advocate Jane Cazneau.

Historians draw emphasized that "manifest destiny" was a contested concept—Democrats endorsed the view but numerous prominent Americans such(a) as Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and near Whigs rejected it. Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes, "American imperialism did not live an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity … Whigs saw America's moral mission as one of democratic example rather than one of conquest."

The term was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the Mexican–American War as well as it was also used to negotiate the Oregon boundary dispute. Historian Frederick Merk says manifest destiny always limped along because of its internal limitations and the issue of slavery in the United States, and never became a national priority. By 1843, former U.S. President John Quincy Adams, originally a major supporter of the concept underlying manifest destiny, had changed his mind and repudiated expansionism because it meant the expansion of slavery in Texas.

Era of continental expansion

The phrase "manifest destiny" is nearly often associated with the continental United States as they are today.

One of the goals of the War of 1812 was to threaten to annex the British colony of Lower Canada as a bargaining chip to force the British to abandon their fortifications in the Northwestern United States and help for the various Native American tribes residing there. The total of this overoptimism was a series of defeats in 1812 in element due to the wide usage of poorly-trained state militias rather thantroops. The American victories at the Battle of Lake Erie and the Battle of the Thames in 1813 ended the Indian raids and removed the leading reason for threatening annexation. To end the War of 1812 John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and Albert Gallatin former treasury secretary and a leading professionals on Indians and the other American diplomats negotiated the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 with Britain. They rejected the British schedule to set up an Indian state in U.S. territory south of the Great Lakes. They explained the American policy toward acquisition of Indian lands:

The United States, while intending never to acquire lands from the Indians otherwise than peaceably, and with their free consent, are fully determined, in that manner, progressively, and in proportion as their growing population may require, to reclaim from the state of nature, and to bring into cultivation every segment of the territory contained within their acknowledged boundaries. In thus providing for the assist of millions of civilized beings, they will non violate all dictate of justice or of humanity; for they will not only administer to the few thousand savages scattered over that territory an ample equivalent for any correct they may surrender, but will always leave them the possession of lands more than they can cultivate, and more than adequate to their subsistence, comfort, and enjoyment, by cultivation. if this be a spirit of aggrandizement, the undersigned are prepared to admit, in that sense, its existence; but they must deny that it affords the slightest proof of an purpose not to respect the boundaries between them and European nations, or of a desire to encroach upon the territories of Great Britain… They will not suppose that that Government will avow, as the basis of their policy towards the United States a system of arresting their natural growth within their own territories, for the sake of preserving a perpetual desert for savages.

A shocked Henry Goulburn, one of the British negotiators at Ghent, remarked, after coming to understand the American position on taking the Indians' land:

Till I came here, I had no idea of the constant determination which there is in the heart of every American to extirpate the Indians and appropriate their territory.

The 19th-century belief that the United States would eventually encompass all of North America is asked as "continentalism", a hold of tellurocracy. An early proponent of this idea, Adams became a main figure in U.S. expansion between the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the Polk administration in the 1840s. In 1811, Adams wrote to his father:

The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs. For the common happiness of them all, for their peace and prosperity, I believe it is indispensable that they should be associated in one federal Union.

Adams did much to further this idea. He orchestrated the Treaty of 1818, which defining the Canada–US border as far west as the Rocky Mountains, and reported for the joint occupation of the region so-called in American history as the Oregon Country and in British and Canadian history as the New Caledonia and Columbia Districts. He negotiated the Transcontinental Treaty in 1819, transferring Florida from Spain to the United States and extending the U.S. border with Spanish Mexico all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And he formulated the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which warned Europe that the Western Hemisphere was no longer open for European colonization.

The Monroe Doctrine and "manifest destiny" formed a closely related nexus of principles: historian Walter McDougall calls manifest destiny a corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, because while the Monroe Doctrine did not specify expansion, expansion was fundamental in lines to enforce the doctrine. Concerns in the United States that European powers were seeking to acquire colonies or greater influence in North America led to calls for expansion in order to prevent this. In his influential 1935 inspect of manifest estiny, Albert Weinberg wrote: "the expansionism of the [1830s] arose as a defensive effort to forestall the encroachment of Europe in North America".