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Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History

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The words "Manifest destiny" are associated, in the popular mind, with the whole conquering outburst that, in less than a century, managed to expand the area of white English-speaking settlement in what are now the United States of America from a group of thinly settled communities on the East Coast to a continent-wide nation numbering in the hundreds of millions. It associates this conquering outburst with the taint of nationalistic and bellicose arrogance, of chauvinism and brutality; and may therefore be said to taint even further the already inevitably bloody business of conquest and settlement.
At the height of American self-confidence and belief, at the beginning of the sixties, Frederick Merk set out to disprove this popular image; and showed, with a wealth of documentary evidence, that the actual jingoistic "Manifest Destiny" episode was nothing more than a short-lived craze, such as the US are seized with from time to time, peaking, but also falling apart, with the notorious 1848 war against Mexico. Merk observes that, while in the light of events the superiority of the USA over Mexico seems obvious, it was by no means so clear to contemporaries: the military establishment of Mexico was considerably larger than the peacetime US army, and the Mexicans would be fighting on their own soil. Yet the American army, thanks largely to a stiffening of the officer corps with civilians trained in the numerous American military academies and recalled to arms, proved the more efficient and effectively conquered Mexico. At that point, the vociferous "Manifest destiny" lobby, which had supported President Polk's cold and deliberate move towards war, was faced, not with the opportunity to spout about unifying (in some remote future visible only to rhetoricians and fools) a whole continent, but with the real choice: was an American Union of twenty million largely Protestant English speakers to absorb the indigestible morsel of a Mexico of eight million Spanish-speaking Catholics, spread over an enormous territory, naturally tumultuous, and separated from the main areas of Anglo settlement by prairies, mountains and deserts? Faced with this choice, the Manifest Destiny lobby fell silent; and that, argues Merk, was by and at large the end of it. He can trace no direct influence of any sort from the copious pamphleteering of the early forties on later American debate and politics; the Manifest Destiny craze, as crazes do, had died out.
The objection to this picture is fairly obvious. There is one absolutely silent partner at Merk's party - one of which, indeed, he never makes mention, who does not even appear in the Index: the Indians. At all times, before, during, and after the Manifest Destiny craze, the Western frontier was rolling inexorably forwards, plowing under its farmsteads and its cattle all the earlier inhabitants of the land. Does this not fall under the tag of brutality and arrogance of Manifest Destiny? Well, no. Manifest Destiny, as such, was a movement aimed more at the Western element in North America - not only the successor states of the old Spanish empire, but also Britain's remaining colonies in Canada and the Caribbean - than at any Indian. The destruction of the Indian tribes was the background to it, rather than its core: its argument was that BECAUSE the inexorable Anglo wave was rolling over every Indian tribe in North America, THEREFORE it was its "destiny" to sweep over Mexico and Canada as well. As for the destruction of the Indians, it was not the product of any craze - even of any intellectual or political theory at all - but of desperately objective conditions. Most Indian tribes did not farm, living typical hunter-gatherer tribes; therefore, to the citizens of a Republic of farmers - industrialization was only beginning in America at the time - their land appeared empty. (It is significant that the Indian tribe that has most successfully survived American conquest, the Navajo, is a farming one, famous for their orchards.) To a farmer, to bring a tract of grassland under the plough is the natural business of life; it does not impinge on his consciousness, let alone on his conscience, that there is someone else who claims the land, making what he regards as an idle and wasteful use of it. Given the contact between any population of farmers, American or not, and a population of hunter-gatherers settled on potential farming land, the result is inevitable; and while it may SHAPE a mentality of conquest, it does not ARISE from one.
Merk insists that Manifest Destiny is no fundamental component of the American mentality; that the really fundamental component of American attitudes to world politics can be summed up in the word "Mission". To some extent this may be seen as too optimistic, not so much in the matter of Manifest Destiny as in the more general one of crazes - McCarthyism will be the one that springs to everyone's mind, though in actual fact Senator McCarthy was a kitten compared to the really cruel and savage "Red scare" of 1919. Crazes and witch-hunts are frequent and apparently inevitable features of the American mind. But having said all that, I still find Merk's argument, within certain limits, quite convincing; for crazes come and go, but the American itch for Mission seems permanent.

I love this book. I first read it as an undergraduate who thought history was boring. This book and my diplomatic history professor completely changed my mind about history almost 20 years ago. The book is very readable and the focus, which tries to look at whether average americans really believed in Manifest Destiny before, during, and after the Mexican-American War, gives the book a social history flavor that one certainly did not see in Diplomatic History back in the early 80's when I first read this book. I highly recommend the book!

Oh boy, this is the worst book I've ever read. I consider myself to be well read and an intelligent human being. And this is just about the most boring book I've ever had to read. Well, I also am not much of a fan of American history, so that may influence my opinion a bit, but the fact remains, I really didn't like this book. At all. Seriously. If your looking for a very long winded book that while the language is understandable, it radiates boredom, then this is for you...or something.

Oh boy, this is the worst book I've ever read. I consider myself to be well read and an intelligent human being. And this is just about the most boring book I've ever had to read. Well, I also am not much of a fan of American history, so that may influence my opinion a bit, but the fact remains, I really didn't like this book. At all. Seriously. If your looking for a very long winded book that while the language is understandable, it radiates boredom, then this is for you...or something.