A.

P
Marjorie P. Malang

Grade 9-Garnet

MANIFEST DESTINY
FACTS AND SUMMARY

Manifest Destiny is a term for the attitude prevalent during the 19th century
period of American expansion that the United States not only could, but was
destined to, stretch from coast to coast. This attitude helped fuel western
settlement, Native American removal and war with Mexico. The phrase was
first employed by John L. OSullivan in an article on the annexation of Texas
published in the July-August 1845 edition of the United States Magazine and
Democratic Review, which he edited.

The term manifest destiny originated in the 1840s. It expressed the belief that
it was Anglo-Saxon Americans providential mission to expand their civilization
and institutions across the breadth of North America. This expansion would
involve not merely territorial aggrandizement but the progress of liberty and
individual economic opportunity as well.

It was, OSullivan claimed, our manifest destiny to overspread the continent

allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying
millions. The term and the concept were taken up by those desiring to

secureOregon Territory, California, Mexican land in the Southwest, and, in the

1850s, Cuba. Originally a partisan Democratic issue, manifest destiny gained
Republican adherents as time passed. By the end of the century,
expansionists were employing quasi-Darwinist reasoning to argue that
because its Anglo-Saxon heritage made America supremely fit, it had
become the nations manifest destiny to extend its influence beyond its
continental boundaries into the Pacific and Caribbean basins.