Have you ever wondered how a single catchy phrase
managed to actually draw the physical map of
an entire continent? Oh, it really is wild when
you think about it. Right. A phrase that sparked
multiple wars, justified taking land, justified
refusing to take land, and somehow still echoes
in presidential speeches nearly two centuries
later. It is the ultimate example of how words
can literally become geography. I mean, we often
think borders are drawn by surveyors and generals.
But in this case, the borders were drawn by an
ideology. OK, let's unpack this, because today
our mission for this deep dive is to explore
the Wikipedia article on Manifest Destiny. And
we are going to track how this highly influential
and obviously deeply controversial concept evolved
from a 19th century expansionist slogan all the
way to a modern 21st century geopolitical talking
point and to do that we really have to look past
the mythology of it all right we need to examine
the why so we'll be unpacking the underlying
political racial and you know economic engines
that actually drove this ideology forward yeah
and the real world consequences it had on the
people who are already living on that land exactly
so we need to start with the anatomy of the idea
of itself like what does manifest destiny actually
mean and where did it come from Well, just looking
at the words manifest means obvious and destiny
means certain. Obvious and certain. Right. It
implies this 19th century belief that US settlers
expanding across North America was simply going
to happen no matter what. Which is such a bold
assumption, but I know it wasn't just like a
blind land grab. I saw historian William Earl
Weeks mentioned in the sources. What were the
actual mechanics of this belief? So Weeks points
out there were three basic tenets to this ideology.
First, The assumption of the unique moral virtue
with the United States Okay, second a mission
to spread Republican government basically spreading
the American way of life, right? And third a
deep unwavering faith that this mission was divinely
ordained by God It sounds like manifest destiny
was the ultimate 19th century corporate mission
statement But you know one backed by divine providence.
That is a perfect analogy But here is the massive
irony of that so -called mission statement The
origin of the phrase. Most historians credit
a newspaper editor named John O'Sullivan with
coining the term in 1845. Okay, in 1845. Yeah,
in an essay titled Annexation. Yeah. Though it
should be noted, there is some historical debate.
A few historians suggest the term was actually
coined by a journalist named Jane Casano. Interesting.
Either way, it emerges in print in 1845. But
O'Sullivan's original conception was not a call
for military conquest. Wait, really? No, not
at all. He believed expansion would just happen
naturally and peacefully. Peacefully? How does
that work? He envisioned American settlers moving
into new regions, setting up democratic governments,
and then politely asking to join the U .S., kind
of like how the Republic of Texas was pushing
for annexation at the time. Wait, if the person
who supposedly invented the phrase it peacefully,
how did it become the ultimate battle cry for
military expansion? Well, it gained traction
because the opposing political party actually
started using the phrase to make fun of it. You're
kidding! Nope. So the Democrats, led by President
James K. Polk, were pushing these really aggressive
expansionist policies. And the opposition party,
the Whigs, completely rejected that approach.
Let me pause you there. The Whigs, just to clarify
for anyone listening who hasn't, you know, taken
a U .S. history class recently, who were they?
The Whig Party was the major political rival
to the Democrats during this era. They generally
favored modernization, banking, and economic
protectionism over rapid, chaotic territorial
expansion. Got it. So Representative Robert Winthrop,
a prominent Whig, basically threw the phrase
manifest destiny back in the Democrats' faces
on the House floor. Oh, wow. He was mocking the
idea that America had some new revelation of
right to just take whatever territory it wanted
from other nations. So they were basically saying,
oh, sure, it's your manifest destiny. How convenient.
Exactly. They weaponized the mockery. But instead
of being shamed, The expansionists loved it.
Of course they did. They embraced the insult,
adopted the slogan, and it just caught on like
wildfire. So it worked beautifully as a political
slogan. But how did this theoretical divine right
actually hold up when it collided with the physical
armies of other global empires? Because negotiating
a map requires a lot more than writing a newspaper
editorial. Right. And this is where the theory
violently clashed with harsh reality. Let's look
at the Oregon boundary dispute. OK. You had American
expansionists screaming for all Oregon, demanding
the border be drawn all the way up into what
is now British Columbia, literally touching Russian
Alaska. Yeah, I saw the slogan for that in the
sources, 5440 or fight. What did those numbers
actually refer to? 5440 refers to the latitude
line, 54 degrees, 40 minutes north. The expansionists
were publicly declaring they were ready to go
to war with the British Empire over the entire
Pacific Northwest. Ready to fight the British
Empire? That seems incredibly risky for a young
country. It was. And President Polk knew a two
-front war would be disastrous because he was
already looking south toward Mexico. So despite
all the public manifest destiny bluster, he quietly
compromised with Britain. They just split the
territory at the 49th parallel, which is the
border between the US and Canada today exactly
So the destiny was surprisingly negotiable when
it came to fighting the British But I'm guessing
it was a very different story down south completely
different the annexation of Texas in 1845 paved
the way for the Mexican -American War in 1846.
Expansionists used the rhetoric of manifest destiny
to justify taking massive amounts of land from
Mexico territory that eventually became California,
Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Reading
through the sources, I saw there was an all -Mexico
movement. Like, after the US military achieved
massive successes, a lot of politicians wanted
to just annex the entire country of Mexico. Yes,
they did. But it failed. And this is where I
have to push back on the logic of the time. Wait,
if the whole point was this noble mission to
spread the American way and democracy to everyone,
why did they suddenly pump the brakes when it
came to absorbing all of Mexico? Well, this raises
a really important question. And the answer reveals
the absolute darkest contradiction of manifest
destiny. Which is what? The high -minded ideals
of spreading democracy were heavily, heavily
tangled up with extending slavery and maintaining
white racial supremacy. Wow. When it came time
to potentially annex all of Mexico, Southern
politicians suddenly balked. Let me guess, because
annexing all of Mexico would mean granting US
citizenship to millions of Mexican people. That
was their exact fear. To understand the mechanics
of this, we have to look at a shocking quote
from Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.
What did he say? He stood up in Congress in 1848
and explicitly protested annexing Mexico. He
said, and I quote, we have never dreamt of incorporating
into our union any but the Caucasian race, the
free white race. Oh my God. Yeah. He went on
to argue that incorporating an Indian race or
a mixed race was a great mistake. That is just
blatant white nationalism. I mean, it completely
shatters the illusion of a universal democratic
mission. It does. Identitarianism was fundamentally
baked into the politics of the era. Let's define
identitarianism here, meaning they were defining
American political identity strictly by race.
Yes, the belief that the nation's identity is
inextricably linked to a specific racial or ethnic
group. in this case, white Americans of European
descent. Right. What's incredible is how this
framework was used on both sides of the expansion
debate. How so? Well, proponents used racial
superiority to justify taking the land, arguing
that Mexicans or Native Americans weren't using
it properly. But opponents, like Calhoun, use
that exact same racial prejudice to stop the
annexation of the people living on that land.
So the destiny was only meant for a very specific
demographic. Exactly. So because the government
was paralyzed by this racism and by the fierce
domestic division over whether new territories
would be free states or slave states, official
expansion southward just kind of stalled out.
It stalled officially at the federal level, yeah.
But the deep -seated desire for land and the
belief in this destiny didn't just evaporate
because Washington gridlocked. Here's where it
gets really interesting. Because the government
stopped expanding, private citizens decided to
take matters into their own hands. They sure
did. The sources talk about the filibusters.
And obviously we aren't talking about politicians
talking for 20 hours to delay a Senate vote.
No, no. This is actually the original use of
the word. The etymology comes from the Dutch
word fraybooter, which referred to buccaneers
or pirates in the West Indies. So these filibusters
were basically heavily armed. freelance nation
builders going rogue. That's a great way to put
it. They were private military expeditions. In
the 1850s, without any official government backing,
wealthy American expansionists began financing
illegal private armies to conquer parts of Latin
America. That is insane. They were trying to
bypass the political gridlock in Washington by
stealing countries outright. often with the specific
goal of creating new slave states. That is wild.
The sources mention guys like William Walker.
Can you explain what he actually did? So William
Walker is the prime example. He launched private
military expeditions into Mexico and he actually
managed to take over and rule Nicaragua for a
brief time. He ruled Nicaragua. Yeah. He literally
installed himself as president, legalized slavery
there, and tried to conquer neighboring Central
American states before a coalition army finally
captured and executed him in Honduras. And he
wasn't the only one. There was also Narciso Lopez,
who repeatedly tried to seize Cuba from the Spanish
Empire. Right, because Cuba was the ultimate
prize for Southern expansionists. They desperately
wanted to annex it as a new slave state to balance
the political power in Congress against the northern
free states. OK, I see. campaign culminated in
a massive scandal in 1854 called the Austin Manifesto.
I want to make sure I understand this. The Austin
Manifesto was a secret diplomatic dispatch, right?
Yes. But it got leaked to the public and it basically
revealed that the US government was seriously
considering seizing Cuba by force if Spain refused
to sell it. Exactly. And when the northern public
read the details of the Ostend Manifesto in the
newspapers, the illusion of manifest destiny
as the benevolent cause was permanently shattered.
It pulled the mask off. Completely. The public
instantly linked to the concept with the expansion
of the slave power. It was no longer seen as
this divine unifying mission for the entire country.
It was exposed as a brutal partisan land grab
designed to protect the institution of slavery.
So we've been talking a lot about borders, foreign
wars, treaties with Britain, and these rogue
mercenaries in the Caribbean. But Manifest Destiny
wasn't just an international policy. No, not
at all. It was a domestic machine that fundamentally
and permanently altered the North American landscape
and devastated the people who already live there.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, we
have to look at how the ideology literally terraformed
the continent. In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead
Act. This act encouraged massive westward migration
by giving families 160 acres of land almost for
free, provided they lived on it and proved it
for five years. The scale of this is staggering
to think about. Over its lifespan, there were
200 million claims made. That accounts for 10
percent of all the land in the United States.
Massive. But that level of rapid aggressive settlement
came with catastrophic costs. The environmental
impact alone was devastating. The grape plains
were covered in native grasses with root systems
that went 10 -sheet deep, which allowed them
to survive harsh droughts. But the homesteaders
plowed all of it up to plant shallow -rooted
crops like wheat. So when the droughts eventually
came, there was nothing holding the earth down,
which directly led to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
Furthermore, the native bison population was
intentionally hunted down from tens of millions
to just a few hundred animals. And the environmental
cost was intrinsically tied to the human cost,
because you cannot give away 270 million acres
of land without taking it from someone else first.
The Homestead Act and the broader push of Manifest
Destiny required the forced removal and sometimes
extermination of indigenous peoples. I saw a
reference to Thomas Jefferson's 1803 letter to
William Henry Harrison in our sources. Yes, that
letter is really revealing. This is decades before
the phrase Manifest Destiny was even coined.
What was Jefferson proposing? Jefferson outlined
a very calculated economic trap. He proposed
that the government should draw the Native Americans
to agriculture and establish trading houses where
they would purchase goods on credit. Okay. And
when the debts got too high, they would be forced
to pay by selling off their ancestral lands.
Jefferson explicitly wrote that the goal was
to surround them. So they would either incorporate
with us as citizens of the U .S. or remove beyond
the Mississippi. It's essentially predatory lending
at a state level. Yes, like trapping workers
in a company town where they owe their soul to
the company store. But the currency is their
physical homeland. That's a very apt comparison.
And the legal justification for all this actually
predates the United States by centuries. It goes
back to the 15th century doctrine of Christian
discovery, which was what it was a Catholic decree.
distinguishing Christians from non -Christians
to justify European colonization globally. Wait,
an American court was using a 15th century Catholic
decree? Yes. In the famous 1823 Supreme Court
case, Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John
Marshall explicitly used this doctrine to rule
that indigenous peoples only had occupancy rights
to the land. So they didn't own it? Right. This
meant their lands could legally be claimed and
taken by the powers of discovery. With all of
this calculated policy, from predatory debt traps
to legal loopholes, did anyone at the time realize
the sheer devastation this was causing? Some
certainly did. Because I know figures like Abraham
Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant oppose these actions.
Grant even served in the Mexican -American War
and later wrote that it was one of the most unjust
ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.
He was very vocal about it later in life. So
with major figures speaking out, Was the destiny
narrative just too blinding for the general public?
That is the tragic power of the ideology. For
many, the narrative of a divine, inevitable mission
completely blinded them to the reality of the
violence. It was framed as bringing light to
the darkness. Right. Think of that famous 1872
painting, American Progress, with a giant angelic
woman stringing telegraph wire across the plains
while indigenous people and wildlife are pushed
into the shadows. I know exactly the painting
you're talking about. When a society believes
God has ordained its actions, it becomes terrifyingly
easy to excuse a atrocities as unfortunate necessities.
But as the descent from Lincoln and Grant shows
us, it wasn't a blind spot for everyone. So the
continent is eventually conquered. The frontier
officially reaches the Pacific Ocean. But an
ideology this powerful doesn't just pack up and
go home, does it? No, it mutates. By the 1890s,
the North American continent was fully claimed,
so the United States looked overseas. Right,
the oceans. This is the shift into global imperialism,
highlighted by the Spanish -American War in 1898.
Suddenly, the US is annexing the Republic of
Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and
American Samoa. But how do they justify that
legally? Because taking a piece of land connected
to your border is one thing, but taking islands
halfway across the ocean feels entirely different.
The legal mechanics shifted dramatically. When
Texas or California were annexed, the assumption
was that they would eventually become equal states
in the union. Right. But with these new island
territories, the Supreme Court ruled in a series
of decisions known as the insular cases that
these were essentially colonies. Really? Yes.
The ruling established a new category of unincorporated
territories, meaning the Constitution did not
automatically and fully apply to the people living
there. So the core mission changed from spreading
democratic republics to just straight up empire
building. Exactly. And it mutates again 20 years
later. In 1920, President Woodrow Wilson pivoted
the phrase entirely. He moved it away from physical
territorial expansion and redefined America's
destiny as a global moral mission. He led the
U .S. into World War I, arguing that it was the
manifest destiny of the United States to lead
the attempt to make the world safe for democracy.
No, looking at the sources from 2025, it's fascinating
to see how the exact same 19th century vocabulary
is being deployed in modern geopolitics. It really
is. And before we get into this, I want to be
crystal clear to you listening. We are completely
impartial here. We take absolutely no sides on
the politics of this. Right. We are simply reporting
the facts exactly as they are presented in the
Wikipedia source material. Exactly. We are purely
observing how this historical phrase is being
utilized today. So the Wikipedia article notes
that Donald Trump became the first president
to actually use the phrase manifest destiny during
an inaugural address. Yes, the 2025 address.
The text states that he declared an extension
of American influence into the stars with ambitions
to plant the U .S. flag on Mars. And the source
also states that at various points he has suggested
annex in Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal
and taking over the Gaza Strip. Applying a framework
coined in an 1845 newspaper essay about Texas
to the literal planet Mars is a massive leap.
How does the rhetoric still function? It demonstrates
the incredible resilience of the underlying psychological
mechanism, the core tenets that William Earl
Weeks identified American exceptionalism, a unique
mission, and a sense of inevitability. They remain
deeply embedded in the political vocabulary.
So the mechanics haven't changed? Not at all.
The mechanics of the rhetoric function the exact
same way today as they did for John O'Sullivan.
The exceptionalism justifies the expansion, whether
the target is a neighboring country, an overseas
colony, or another planet entirely. So what does
this all mean? To bring this all together for
you listening, we've been on quite a journey
today. We really have. We started with John O'Sullivan's
theory of peacefully absorbing Texas. We watched
that idea collide with reality leading to the
Mexican -American War and the massive contradictions
of the All -Mexico movement. The filibuster is
going rogue. All right. Private filibusters bypassing
political gridlock in the Caribbean. We trace
the catastrophic domestic toll of the Homestead
Act from predatory debt traps to the Dust Bowl.
And finally, we followed the ideology overseas
to island colonies, global democracy crusades
and now outer space. It really proves that history
is rarely just in the past. It is a vocabulary
we are still using today. And that leaves us
with something critical to consider. Throughout
this deep dive, Manifest Destiny has almost always
been tied to physical space, a continent, an
island, a planet. Right. But consider the modern
world of the 21st century. As tech giants and
billionaires raise to claim absolute dominance
over the internet, over artificial intelligence,
and over digital metaverses, is the fundamental
impulse of Manifest Destiny still alive right
now? Have we simply traded the physical frontier
for a digital one, still believing it is our
destiny to conquer it? That is a fascinating
question to leave on. Are we still drawing maps
just with code instead of covered wagons? Keep
questioning the destinies you are sold, everyone.
We'll see you next time.