Chapter 39: Manifest Destiny and the Americas
Core idea
Independence did not undo colonization
By 1776 the British colonies on the eastern seaboard had been part of the European colonization of the Americas for nearly two centuries. Independence transferred sovereignty from London to the colonists themselves, but it did not undo the underlying machinery: slave plantations remained slave plantations; treaties with indigenous nations remained instruments of dispossession; the wealth that funded the new republic remained tied to land taken from one people and labor taken from another. The same was broadly true across Latin America when the Spanish colonies won their independence in the early 1800s. Independence transferred power from European crowns to local creole elites without dismantling the colonial hierarchy beneath them.
Manifest Destiny as ideology and policy
By the 1840s, an explicit US ideology — Manifest Destiny, coined by journalist John O’Sullivan in 1845 — held that the United States had a providential right to expand across the entire North American continent. The phrase gave a religious veneer to a policy already in motion: Louisiana Purchase (1803), Indian Removal Act (1830), Texas annexation (1845), Mexican-American War (1846–1848), Oregon Treaty (1846), Gadsden Purchase (1853). Each acquisition was framed as inevitable; each came at a specific cost — often paid by indigenous nations and Mexican citizens already living on the land.
Why it matters
Two Andrews and the texture of American expansion
Two presidents named Andrew bracket the worst of nineteenth-century US policy toward indigenous nations and African Americans.
Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) took office in 1829 with a military reputation built largely on campaigns against the Creek and Seminole. As president he signed the Indian Removal Act (1830) and used the army to expel the Five Civilized Tribes — Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole — from the southeastern United States across the Mississippi. The 1838–1839 march of the Cherokee, the Trail of Tears, killed roughly a quarter of the nation in transit. Jackson was also Tennessee’s largest slaveholder and used federal power, including a ban on antislavery mail in Southern states (1835), to entrench the institution.
Andrew Johnson (1808–1875), Lincoln’s vice president and successor, was placed on the 1864 ticket to hold Southern Unionist support. After Lincoln’s assassination he opposed the Fourteenth Amendment, provided political cover for early white-supremacist organizing in the post-Civil War South, and sent the army against indigenous nations whose territory lay along the planned route of the transcontinental railroad. He was impeached in 1868, though acquitted by one vote in the Senate.
The Mexican-American War redrew the map
The 1845 US annexation of Texas — a former Mexican territory that had broken away in 1836 — and disputes over the Texas border triggered the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war with Mexico ceding roughly half its territory — present-day California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming — to the United States for $15 million. Mexican citizens in the ceded territories were promised citizenship and property rights; in practice many lost both.
Latin American independence
While the United States expanded westward, the Spanish American colonies were winning their own independence in a series of wars between 1808 and 1826, triggered in part by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) liberated Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia — the last of which was named after him. José de San Martín (1778–1850) liberated Argentina, Chile, and Peru from the south. The two met at Guayaquil in 1822 and worked out a coordinated final campaign. Bolívar dreamed of a unified South American federation modeled on the United States; the new republics fragmented instead, and many fell quickly into caudillo rule and civil war. Brazil took a different path, declaring independence from Portugal in 1822 as an empire under Pedro I and remaining a monarchy until 1889.
The Bill of Rights as a delayed promise
The US Constitution of 1787 had no Bill of Rights; ten amendments protecting individual liberties were ratified in 1791 at James Madison’s urging, after pressure from Anti-Federalists and a long-distance letter campaign from Jefferson in Paris. They were largely symbolic at the federal level for over a century, applying in practice only to federal action. Only in Gitlow v. New York (1925) did the Supreme Court begin applying them against state governments through the Fourteenth Amendment — a process called incorporation. The promise of 1791 became substantively enforceable a hundred and thirty years later.
Key takeaways
Key takeaways
- American independence in 1776 transferred power without dismantling slavery or treaty-based dispossession of indigenous nations.
- Manifest Destiny (1845) gave religious framing to a continental-expansion policy already underway since the Louisiana Purchase (1803).
- Andrew Jackson signed the 1830 Indian Removal Act; the Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838-1839) killed about a quarter of the nation in transit.
- The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, transferring roughly half of Mexico to the United States.
- Simón Bolívar liberated northern South America; José de San Martín liberated the south; Brazil declared independence from Portugal in 1822.
- Andrew Johnson opposed Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment, and indigenous treaty rights; he was impeached in 1868 and acquitted by one vote.
- The US Bill of Rights (ratified 1791) was largely unenforceable against state governments until Gitlow v. New York (1925) began applying it through the Fourteenth Amendment.
Mental model
Read it as: Independence in the Americas produced new sovereign nations but preserved the colonial-era hierarchies of slavery and indigenous dispossession. The same generation that won the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights also chose to expand westward over treaty obligations and across the Mexican border.
Key figures
Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) and José de San Martín (1778–1850)
The two great liberators of Spanish South America. Bolívar — born to a Caracas creole family, educated in Europe by Enlightenment tutors — led the northern campaign through the Andes. San Martín — a professional officer who had served in the Spanish army during the Peninsular War — led the southern campaign across the Andes from Argentina into Chile and Peru. Bolívar’s dream of pan-American unity foundered on regional rivalries; he died poor, disillusioned, and exiled.
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
Author of the Declaration of Independence, third US president, sponsor of the Louisiana Purchase, advocate of universal rights and a slaveholder until his death. The contradictions are central, not incidental. He believed liberty was a natural right of all human beings and lived a life that depended on denying it to over six hundred enslaved people whose labor financed Monticello.
Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566)
A Spanish Dominican friar and former encomendero who became the most prominent early European critic of colonial brutality. His Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) cataloged Spanish atrocities for a European audience and lobbied the crown for reforms. He is quoted at the head of the chapter precisely because the moral critique of colonization existed inside the colonizing civilization from the start — it was simply ignored.
Example: a Cherokee family in 1838
Imagine a Cherokee family in northwest Georgia in May 1838. They have farmed the same land for several generations. The Cherokee Nation has its own written language — the syllabary invented by Sequoyah in 1821 — its own newspaper, its own constitution modeled on the United States’. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the US Supreme Court ruled that Georgia had no jurisdiction over Cherokee territory; President Jackson reportedly answered, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Federal troops arrive. The family is given days to pack. They are marched to a stockade, then west across Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Mississippi. A grandparent dies of pneumonia in Arkansas. A child dies of dysentery near the Mississippi. By the time the survivors reach Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, roughly a quarter of those who set out are dead. The legal system that produced the Bill of Rights, the same year, ordered this march and carried it out. Both facts belong to the same United States.
Related lessons
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