Why Was Manifest Destiny Bad? The Untold Consequences
Back in 1845, when John O’Sullivan introduced the concept that would shape America’s destiny, few could predict the devastating consequences that would unfold. The belief that it was God’s will to push westerly toward the Pacific Ocean seemed like a divine mandate to citizens who felt their nation didn’t have enough land. What started as a positive idea in the minds of Americans quickly turned into something far more sinister, with bad outcomes not just for Native Americans and Mexicans, but for the moral fabric of America itself.
The 19th century witnessed an American expansion that stretched the United States from coast to coast, but this attitude fueled western settlement at an unconscionable price—Native American removal and war with Mexico became the hallmarks of this era.
How John L. O’Sullivan Sparked an Era of Aggressive Expansion
The belief in Manifest Destiny had numerous parts serving many things in different ways, creating separate reasons to overcome a new land. Throughout the 1840’s, this ideology became a defense for U.S. territorial expansion, an idea taken to be true that God had destined the white man for a godly mission of American movement and defeat in the name of Christianity and democracy.
John L. O’Sullivan first initiated this concept, having edited and published arguments for the annexation of Texas in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, along with his promotion of the Oregon Country. The name and description he gave to this creed of victorious Americans would echo through the next two decades as the nation demanded more territory, leading to enormous territory growth as the nation stretched beyond what anyone had imagined.
Why Americans Believed Expansion Was a Divine Mission
When the United States wasn’t yet immense and powerful, its people and leaders wanted to expand with an urgency that bordered on obsession. They thought the entire country should be theirs, and anyone who stood in their way would pay for it—this became the motto for the country during this time. The construction of the first railroad that could cross the entire country was built and encouraged people to move out west, which seemed good for Americans but might not have been so good for the indigenous populations already there.
Rapid population growth and overuse of the land east of the Mississippi River, coupled with the knowledge that there was an abundance of opportunities for new settlement west of the river, fed into this ideology of expansionism, which became simply known as Manifest Destiny. Amy S. Greenburg, through her work Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion, deeply explains the motivation of individuals who sought to expand their settlements westward. Since the time of publication, we’ve realized how poorly we handled the situation in which we removed the inhabitants of the west from their homeland—there certainly was a better way.
The Dangers Behind the “God-Given Right” to Conquer the West
The prevailing belief was that Americans had a God-given right to expand westward by destroying anything in their path. These courageous pioneers felt a divine obligation to stretch the boundaries of their noble republic to the Pacific Ocean, regardless of who suffered in the process. In short history, American manifest destiny was a big mistake for Indian people in the past—they had lived on the land before the Americans came, yet this affliction made Americans believe God had given them permission to seize control. Settlers took their land and forced them into an uncomfortable place with less nature resource and conditions difficult to survive.
This attitude prevalent during the 19th century period suggested the nation not only could, but was destined to stretch from coast to coast. The expansion was mainly accomplished through the Monroe Doctrine, the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican-American War, though the nation wasn’t yet a true continental power until after 1850, when the Civil War, westward expansion, and the rise of big business finally made the United States what it is today.
Industrial Growth and the Push Toward a Continental Empire
Industrialization of the nation was in full swing by the 1840s, which evidenced that the continued expansion of the states was both an issue and a matter of major importance. As John L. O’Sullivan once stated, “Our Manifest Destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” This idea originated in the 1840s when Anglo-Saxon Colonists sought to expand their ideal civilization and institutions across North America to become a super nation.
Though there were conflicts during this expansion, supporters argued they led to major successes that molded the states into the superior country it is today. The article by O’Sullivan sparked an initial interest amongst the American people, and the idea that it was the United States’ destiny to expand across the continent became an ardent hope. America had a strong Christian belief that God had intended this for the country, and the need for more land became vital as an increasing amount of immigrants flocked to the country each year.
The US Quest for Land and the Ideology of Racial Superiority
As the US gained more land, they steadily began to approach the western part of the continent. At the time, the United States was only half of what it is now—the other half was owned by a country that would soon be forced into a two year war. This term, first coined in 1845 by a journalist named John L. O’Sullivan, described America’s destiny to expand as God’s will.
According to Genovese, “The notion of westward expansion and domination of the white races struck a responsive chord in many Americans.” The idea of expanding America’s territory was so popular it was later used in Congress to justify the claiming of Oregon’s territory. While the idea of expanding America seemed great to Americans, it was not so great for those living on the land the Americans would later claim. According to Hastedt, “The failure to assimilate and prosper was the fault of those receiving America’s goodness.”
Americans felt superior to those whose lands they were trying to take—Native Americans and Mexicans—believing they should be the ones to adopt American culture, even if they were there before Americans claimed the land. They even thought that whose lands they were taking would be happy to convert to their way of living, as stated by Hastedt: “The inherent superiority of American Values was sure to be recognized by those they came in contact with and would gladly be adopted.”
Why Understanding Manifest Destiny Reveals America’s Darkest Mistakes
This mindset would ultimately lead to the expansion of America, turning it into what we know today, but it would also ultimately result in conflict with those the American’s were attempting to take the land from for the sake of expansion. What if hypocritical, selfish Americans took your rights, along with your land?
Albert Gallatin, an American Senator from 1845, served as a primary source that talks about the account of Manifest destiny—the belief that the expansion of the US throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable—as a negative development. Indian Chief John Ross was stripped of his freedom well as his land.
Alexander Hamilton, one of the United State’s own founding fathers, bashed Thomas Jefferson for his decision, mentioning quote about “lucky coincidences and unexpected circumstances” being “not the result of any wise or thoughtful actions on the part of Jefferson’s administration.” Understanding why was manifest destiny bad requires examining this as an extremely negative event in the history of the United States.
Impact on Native Americans
Forced Removal and Broken Treaties
Manifest Destiny created many negative affects on the Indians, with consequences that still echo today. First one tribe, the Cherokee, were forced out of their homelands in what became known as the Trail of Tears. Despite two favorable Supreme Court decisions, the Cherokee Indians faced forced evictions from their ancestral homelands, demonstrating how legal victories meant nothing against the tide of expansion. Second, even though the Indians had treaties with the federal government, these agreements were violated repeatedly. Native American land and culture was impacted by western expansion of the United States because of the Transcontinental Railroad, the United States army, militias, and government policies that systematically dismantled indigenous ways of life.
Cultural Destruction and Disease
The expansion caused entire tribes to wipe out, causing a cultural divide among the Native American population that persists to this day. The bad side of the coin was that manifest destiny ran the Native Americans out of lands they had inhabited for millennia. American settlers took their land and forced them into another uncomfortable place with less nature resource and conditions difficult to survive.
Moreover, America settlers brought diseases into Indian tribes that made a lot of Indian people sick and dead—smallpox, measles, and other illnesses to which indigenous populations had no immunity devastated entire communities. The competition for land, resources, and riches furthered individual and collective abuses particularly against American Indians and the older Mexican communities and missions that had been established before statehood.
Racism and Justification of Oppression
The Americans felt superior to those whose lands they were trying to take—Native Americans and Mexicans—and believed they should be the ones to adopt American culture, even if they were there before the Americans claimed the land. The ignorance of Andrew Jackson in stating all Indians should be away from whites, along with mentioning their “Savage habits,” prove the thesis that this was fundamentally about racial superiority.
The accurate words of wise men including Albert Gallatin, an American Senator from 1845 who was writing a letter justifying concerns about Manifest Destiny and talking about how a man is not born governed, stand in stark contrast. Indian Chief John Ross, who was stripped of his freedom well as his land, speaks about this tragedy first hand, providing testimony that should never be forgotten.
Economic Impact
Railroad Expansion and Land Seizures
In addition to social and political changes that impacted the Indians, there were changes aimed at the economy that also negatively affected the Indians in profound ways. One act that negatively affected the Indians was the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, an act created to help with the construction of a railroad and telegraph lines from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. Permission was given to the company creating the railroad that they can take away any land touching that of which the railroad was to be built on within 200 feet of width.
Although the railroad was a great impact of Manifest Destiny because it allowed for quicker transportation of goods and people to and from the west, it legally allowed for Indian land titles to be extinguished without proper compensation or consideration.
Loss of Livelihood and Economic Collapse
Finally, concerning economic changes, the Natives eventually lost their jobs because of their continuous west-ward migration forced upon them by settlers and government policy. Also, as they moved west into colder climates, they would not have enough arable land, and given that most of them were farmers, this strongly affected them economically and socially. They did not have a stable income to support their families, neither did they have a proper home since they were always moving around to escape encroachment.
American settlers had a negative impact on the environment and natures resource such as engaging in more hunting and fishing that cost extinction of various species, plus more cutting trees to build houses due to deforestation that permanently altered ecosystems. When examining why was manifest destiny bad, the economic devastation it wrought on indigenous populations cannot be overstated.
Political and Social Impacts
The possibility of westbound extension through Manifest Destiny had both positive and negative impacts on governmental issues, society, and the financial aspects of the United States and the Native Americans living there at the time. Strategies that were made and Presidents that were chosen during this era supported the general population of the United States while leaving Native Americans with no real option except to experience the ill effects of the changing and extending development.
There were numerous political impacts of Manifest Destiny that molded the entire development westbound, reshaping the political landscape of the continent in ways that favored Anglo settlers while systematically disenfranchising indigenous peoples and Mexican citizens who found themselves suddenly living under American rule.
The Gold Rush and Its Consequences
The Gold Rush and Its Consequences
If the great draw of the West stood as manifest destiny’s kindling, then the discovery of gold in California was the spark that set that fire ablaze. The strongest driving forces behind Manifest Destiny lay in the somewhat coordinated movement of settlers via trails—whether slave-based, focused on subsistence agriculture, or religious in nature—combined with the military conducting the War with Mexico against American Indians and engaging in filibustering adventures, plus political focus on the expansion of slavery and the Compromise of 1850 toward the western territory added to the United States.
Undoubtedly, while the vast majority of those leaving the Eastern seaboard and the old Mississippi valley frontier via the wagon trails sought land ownership, the lure of getting rich quick drew a not unsizable portion of the migration’s primarily younger single male participants (with some women) to gold towns throughout the West.
Economic Boom, Urban Growth, and Rising Racial Tensions
These core constituencies of adventures and fortune-seekers then served as magnets for the arrival of corresponding providers of services associated with the gold rush. The rapid growth of towns and cities throughout the West, notably San Francisco whose population grew from about 500 in 1848 to almost 50,000 by 1853, and the seemingly endless possibility for individual success in all matters of pursuit put a positive economic spin on the tenets of manifest destiny.
Yet, the lawlessness, predictable failure of most fortune seekers, conflicts with native populations of the area—including Mexican, Spanish, American Indian, Chinese, and Japanese populations—and the explosion of the slavery question all demonstrated the downside of Manifest Destiny’s promise. The gold rush sped up the already quickening political march to the Pacific, accelerating tensions that would eventually lead to civil war.
Why the Gold Rush Accelerated Sectional Conflict
On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall, a contractor hired by John Sutter, discovered gold on Sutter’s sawmill land in the Sacramento valley area of the then territory of California. The agitation of the territory’s relatively small American population, much like Texas before it, attracted substantial U.S. military effort in aid of some American forces already there at the onset of the Mexican war. Encouragement of westward migration was as much an individual economic imperative as it was a national defense necessity.
The discovery of gold did much to solve at least one of those issues as the integration of the quickly populated state California, and with it the vital port of San Francisco, augmented American strength and national economic grounding.Throughout the 1850s, Californians beseeched Congress for a transcontinental railroad to provide service for both passengers and goods from the Midwest and the East Coast.
The potential economic benefits for communities along proposed railroads made the debate over the railroad’s route rancorous and overlapped on top of growing dissent over the slavery issue. For their part, the economic boom ushered in by the gold rush allowed the state government of California to begin work on a state rail system in the Sacramento Valley in 1854.
Diversity, Conflict, and Racial Violence in the Gold Rush Era
The great influx of people and the great diversity on display, encased in a combative and aggrandizing atmosphere of individualistic pursuit of fortune, produced all sorts of antagonisms. Linguistic, cultural, economic, and racial conflict roiled both urban and rural areas as different groups competed for limited resources. By the end of the 1850s, Chinese and Mexican immigrants made up 1/5th of the mining population in California mining towns, yet they faced severe discrimination and often violent persecution. This period revealed why was manifest destiny bad not just for indigenous peoples but for all non-white populations caught in its wake.
The Oregon Trail and Western Migration
Why Settlers Risked Everything to Move West
California, belonging to Mexico prior to the war, was at least three arduous months travel from the nearest American settlements. While missionaries made the trip more frequently, there was only some sparse settlement in the Sacramento valley. The fertile farmland of Oregon, like the black dirt lands of the Mississippi valley, attracted more settlers than California initially, promising agricultural prosperity to those willing to make the journey.
Exacerbating concerns was the presence of often over-dramatized stories of Indian attack that filled migrants with a sense of foreboding, although the majority of settlers encouraged nonviolence and encountered often no Indians at all during their journeys.
Harsh Conditions and the Deadly Reality of the Oregon Trail
The slow progress, disease, human and oxen starvation, poor trails, terrible geographic preparations, lack of guidebooks, threatening wildlife, vagaries of weather, and general confusion were all more formidable and regular challenges than Indian attack. Despite the harshness of the journey, by 1848 there were approximated 20,000 Americans living west of the Rockies, with about three-fourths of that number in Oregon.
The great environmental and economic potential of the Oregon Territory led many to pack up their families and head west along the Oregon Trail. The Trail represented the hopes of many for a better life, yet in reality, the Trail was violent and dangerous, and many who attempted to cross never made it to the “Promised Land” of Oregon.
How Western Settlement Changed American Identity
The lure and imagination of the West lured many migrants to the far west, though those with the adventuring spirit and stomach for risk were relatively modest in number. Many who moved sought the reflection of what they believed themselves to be in the great untamed lands of the West. The romantic vision of life west of the Mississippi attracted a certain breed of Americans who valued independence above all else.
The rugged individualism and martial prowess celebrated in the West and the Mexican war was the first spark that drew a new breed different than the modest agricultural communities of the near-west, fundamentally changing the character of American settlement patterns.
Alexander Hamilton’s Criticism
Alexander Hamilton, one of the United State’s own founding fathers, approached Manifest Destiny negatively in an article published in the newspaper New York Evening Post titled “Purchase of Louisiana” in July 1803. He states that the third president, Thomas Jefferson, equipped this land through “lucky coincidences” and “unexpected circumstances,” and claims that “We can honestly say” this purchase was not the result of careful planning.
Alexander Hamilton, as one of the United State’s own founding fathers, spent considerable effort absoluting bashing Thomas Jefferson for his luck and coincidence rather than deliberate statecraft. While the United States now has all of this land through various means of expansion, it remains hard to forget what horrible things Manifest Destiny did to the people who were here first, and Hamilton’s early criticism proved prophetic about the moral costs of expansion.
