Westward O-uch!

Bad ideas die hard when they ease the mind. In the United States one of the most persistent ideas about our national development was manifest destiny. After 1803, when President Thomas Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Purchase and sent Lewis and Clark off to explore and map the West, Americans began heading west in the hope that their share of American good fortune lay in this expanse of undeveloped territory. The Homestead Act of 1862 accelerated this movement into the most important westward migration in our history of movable frontiers. The promise of nearly free land drew people from all areas and occupations: younger sons who could not inherit the family’s land; people who were failing at all kinds of trades; farmers who wanted more land; masses of immigrants from all over Europe; veterans of the Civil War; and newly emancipated African Americans.

Jefferson immediately realized that the vast acquisition of land in the Louisiana Purchase “completely reverses all the political relations of the US and will form a new epoch in our political discourse.”¹ The success of settling the frontier inspired a belief that it was the manifest destiny of the United States to conquer not only the West but any place where our national interests led us. From about 1845 until 1890, Americans defined the nation’s manifest destiny as obtaining, defending, and developing US territorial land. After 1890, manifest destiny increasingly was used to justify American control beyond our borders. The death knell for this bad idea was Vietnam. Its televised images of slaughtered villages, napalmed bodies, and frantic Americans fleeing from the roof of the American embassy in what would soon be Ho Chi Minh City ended American confidence that our destiny was to make the world fit our vision.

Claiming a “manifest destiny” implies it is God’s plan, and those who seek that destiny believe they are doing his will. Perhaps the legacy of Puritan theology of predestination and unconditional election, and the unlikely victory of some thirteen largely undeveloped colonies against the British Empire deepened the belief that this American “city on a hill” was meant to be a light unto the world. In many ways it was, and between 1789 and 1850 much of the European continent experienced democratic revolutionary movements. While Europe’s great powers were in political turmoil, the United States was nation-building at an amazing rate, except for a snag or two.

Those snags turned out to be the kind that can unravel the whole fabric. One of them was slavery, a horrendous moral crime against humanity for which the nation would pay in a bloody Civil War and another century of virulent racism. The other one was the people who were here before we started building that Enlightenment model city on a hill. As long as these Natives, whom we called “Indians” in tribute to Columbus’s egregious error in navigation, were friendly and helped us find food and learn to plant corn with a dead fish for fertilizer, they were “noble savages.” Even our early images of an American Lady Liberty often were adorned with Indian-styled feathers (the Statue of Freedom on the dome of the US Capitol Building, for example). That image of Native people who joined the settlers in the first Thanksgiving soon yielded to the “savage” view. The desire for more land on which to expand our boundaries was the crucible that made the Natives into enemies against whom we would wage unrelenting war.

Land, war, and Indians were mixed together almost from the start. Negotiations about the 1814 Treaty of Ghent to end the War...