MANIFEST DESTINY AS A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE AMERICAN EXPANSION

Abstract

Americans, during the first half of the nineteenth-century were obsessed by expansion. They thought that God had granted them an innate superiority in nearly all things. American settlers were culturally, economically, racially and politically superior to all others. The purpose of this extended essay is to examine how Americans wrote and read about expansion. Doing so reveals that for every citizen extolling the unique greatness of Americans, one questioned such an assumption. For every American insisting that the nation had to expand to the Pacific Coast to be successful; there was one who disdained expansion and wanted to industrialize the territory the nation had already possessed. Americans during the first half of the nineteenth century were of diverse opinions about expansion. The destiny of the United States was anything but manifest.