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how do you think these acquisitions influenced the way that americans viewed themselves and their nations future by the 1850’s

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Doctrine of Manifest Destiny

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John Gast's painting (circa 1871) titled American Progress. It is an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny. In the scene, an angelic woman (sometimes identified as Columbia, a 19th-century personification of the United States of America) carries the light of civilization westward alongside the colonizers, laying telegraph and rail lines as she travels. Native Americans and wild animals flee in darkness into the uncivilized West.

The doctrine of Manifest Destiny (in English, Manifest Destiny) is a phrase and idea that expresses the belief that the United States of America is a chosen nation destined to expand from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific; It is part of the so-called myth of the border. This idea is also used by supporters to justify other territorial acquisitions. Supporters of this ideology believe that expansion is not only good, but also obvious (overt) and true. This ideology could be summed up in the phrase: "By Divine or God's Authority."

Index

Origin of expression

The origin of the concept of "Manifest Destiny" could be traced to the time when the first settlers and farmers began to arrive from England and Scotland to the territory of what would later become the United States. They were mostly Protestants and Puritans.

A Puritan minister named John Cotton in 1630 stated the following:

No nation has the right to expel another, except by a special design from heaven like the one the Israelites had, unless the natives acted unjustly with it. In this case they will have the right to legally wage war with them and to submit them.

John L. O'Sullivan, drawn in 1874. As a young man he was an influential columnist. Yet today he is generally remembered for the saying "Manifest Destiny" to defend the annexation of Texas and Oregon.

To go back to the origin of the debates on territorial appropriation, such as those posited by Cantino's Planisphere, it is possible to extend to the origins of the term Manifest Destiny. It appears for the first time in the article "Annexation" by journalist John L. O'Sullivan, published in the New York Democratic Review magazine, in the July-August 1845 issue. It said:

The fulfillment of our manifest destiny is to spread throughout the continent that has been assigned to us by Providence, for the development of the great experiment in freedom and self-government. It is a right like that of a tree to obtain the air and land necessary for the full development of its capacities and the growth that it is destined for.

O'Sullivan's second interpretation of the phrase came in a column in the New York Morning News on December 27, 1845, where O'Sullivan, referring to the dispute with Great Britain over Oregon, argued that:

And this demand is based on the right of our manifest destiny to possess the entire continent that Providence has given us to carry out our great mission of freedom and self-government.

Subsequent uses

A New Map of Texas, Oregon, and California, Samuel Augustus Mitchell, 1846

Historian William E. Weeks has highlighted the existence of three themes used by proponents of Manifest Destiny:

The virtue of America's institutions and citizens

The mission to extend these institutions, remaking the world in the image of the United States.

God's decision to entrust America with the accomplishment of that mission.

The description of President Abraham Lincoln of the United States as "the last and best hope on the face of the earth" is a well-known expression of this idea. Lincoln was a puritan and great connoisseur of the biblical precepts, his speeches were almost psalms of a very convincing character for the congressmen of the nascent unified republic. [Citation needed]

Based on this assumption, the United States annexed the territories of Texas (1845), California (1848) and invaded Mexico (1846), in what would become the United States-Mexico War. As a consequence, the United States appropriates Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and parts of Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma, a total of 2,100,000 square kilometers - 55% of the Mexican territory at that time - which is came to be called "the Mexican Cession." In return, the United States promised to pay $ 15 million.1

Later this manifest Destiny has been cited on many other occasions both in favor and against other military interventions.

The term was revived in the 1890s, primarily by Republicans, as a theoretical justification for American expansion outside of North America. It was also employed by US foreign policy makers in the early 20th century.