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2. Manifest Destiny
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38 2 Manifest Destiny Thomas Jefferson often used grand and inspirational phrases— “America is a hemisphere unto itself”—but one of his most memorable expressions was an “empire of liberty,” the belief that the young United States could avoid or at least delay the problems of overpopulation and class conflict that some believed would inevitably threaten its newly won freedoms. As the president who had masterminded the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, he had enabled the country to double that empire. A half century later, following a decade of diplomatic wrangling with Great Britain over the Oregon country and what some contemporaries believed was an unjust war with Mexico, the United States fulfilled what a New York journalist called its “manifest destiny.” The idea of manifest destiny conveyed as much a practical and strategic agenda as a providential one—to add territories that would eventually become states, to preserve the fragile federal system crafted in the Constitution, and, more than anything, to satisfy the seemingly relentless land hunger of old-stock Americans and the waves of mostly Irish and German immigrants entering the country. To other hemispheric governments, particularly Mexico and Great Britain, manifest destiny served principally as the means of extending U.S. territory and power at the expense of its neighbors and the vulnerable Indian peoples who lay in the country’s path. After all, the origins of the American Revolution lay not only in the demand for autonomy or equality within the British Empire but also with fundamental differences about developing the trans-Appalachian frontier acquired in 1763. Later, Washington had prophesied that the survival of the republic depended on retention of the western country. Continental mission, Americans were persuaded, would ensure that the West would be “the last home of the freeborn American.”1 Such expansive visions of their future prompted Americans of the era to dismiss the monarchical and republican projects of the other Americas and their peoples as politically, culturally, and even spiritually inferior. The American Revolution had been the exceptional revolution, they were persuaded. British North America appeared irrevocably divided between English and French cul- 39 Manifest Destiny tures. They believed Spanish Americans were largely the victims of two debilitating legacies—three hundred years of Spanish misrule and the daunting task of incorporating the vast mixed-race peoples of the continent into a republican society, a judgment made by Simón Bolívar in his famous 1819 address before the legislators gathered at the Congress of Angostura and in less severe phrases by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic account, Democracy in America. The Spanish record in the subjugation of indigenous peoples may have been bloodier , but by comparison the British record of imperial management was sloppier and less effective. At bottom, the sectarian diversity and haphazard colonial experience of British America as contrasted with the religious conformity and complex society of Spanish America help to explain why the transition to independence seemed far more difficult in the latter.2 To U.S. leaders of the era, there was nothing comparable in Spanish America to the unifying and mobilizing spirit most Americans identified with manifest destiny. Yet its consequences would be the collapse of the nation and a civil war that in its ambiguities and savagery more closely resembled the kind of war Bolívar had fought and would alter, sometimes in subtle ways, the image and place of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Old Hickory in the Americas In 1830 such a prospect seemed not only unlikely but far-fetched. Jackson was now president, and he subscribed to none of Adams’s or Clay’s notions about “good neighborliness.” Unlike them, he believed the best way to preserve the union lay through expansion into the West. Few U.S. leaders of this era voiced the platitudes of manifest destiny more confidently than Jackson. Jefferson’s dream of an “empire of liberty” inspired later generations, but Jackson in both word and deed set the pattern by which the U.S. government, with laws, treaties , and force, acquired 1.85 billion acres of Indian lands in North America in the century after the American Revolution. Jackson believed that the removal of the major Indian tribes from their proximity to white settlements in the Deep South would not only secure the southwestern frontier but ensure the peace and prosperity of white settlers. At the same time, he was persuaded that with the protection of the federal government, the transplanted Indians would [3.89.116...