Manifest Destiny - An Expression of Our National Spirit [1848 to 1852]

 Manifest Destiny, one of the most influential ideologies in American history, serves as the
 justification for the nation’s territorial expansion in the antebellum era.

 

 

Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way

Painting by Emanuel Leutze, 1860

 

 

American Exceptionalism and the American Identity

 

 

 

 

A  City on a Hill 

Puritans believed God had made a covenant with their people and had chosen them to provide a model for the other nations of the Earth.

 

One Puritan leader,John Winthrop, metaphorically expressed this idea as a "City upon a Hill"—that the Puritan community of New England should serve as a model community for the rest of the world. This metaphor is often used by proponents of exceptionalism. The Puritans' deep moralistic values remained part of the national identity of the United States for centuries, remaining influential to the present day. In this vein. 

 

 

 

 

Manifest Destiny

 

In the 19th century, manifest destiny was a widely held belief in the United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America

 

"And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us. "

 

Journalist John L. O'Sullivan, an influential advocate for Jacksonian democracy wrote  in his newspaper the New York Morning News,On December 27, 1845, O'Sullivan addressed the ongoing boundary dispute with Britain. O'Sullivan argued that the United States had the right to claim "the whole of Oregon"

 

 

 

 

 

M.A.P out Expansion West

 

 

 

Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States is divinely inspired to spread across the continent, becomes the rationale for widespread territorial expansion. Critics repudiate it as nothing short of unbridled  imperialism

 

1763 (Ignored proclamations)

 

1803 (Loose interpretations)

 

1819  (Diplomatic negotiations)

 

1820 (Representative implications?)

 

1842 (Boundary capitulations? )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Defended the right of a state to nullify a federal law that: “
…violated the sovereignty and independence of the states!”

South Carolina Senator Robert Hayne

Countered that it was the people, and not the states, who created the Constitution
and that if the states could defy the laws of Congress at will,
the Union would be a mere “rope of sand"

 

Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Debate over the Gag Rule (1836)

“All petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or to
any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being either printed
or referred, be laid on the table and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SAT word... Travail 

 

https://www.aoc.gov/art/other-paintings-and-murals/westward-course-empire-takes-its-way