ABSTRACT
Although the term “manifest destiny” was first printed in the Democratic Review in 1845, manifest destiny existed as a concept long before editor and politician John Louis O'Sullivan penned the words. The decree of God's design characterized many arguments for colonization issued by other European nation-states, whose own sense of nationhood and nationalism developed alongside imperialist ventures in Africa, Americas, and Asia. 1 Within the grander scope of history, O'Sullivan seems to be an accidental inventor of a clever slogan that prompted one American reviewer to complain: “Every folly is to be covered by this manifest destiny” (“American Institutions” 590). But to overlook the transnational issues that prompted O'Sullivan's catch phrase is to overlook valuable situational clues in which manifest destiny— as it was articulated and dreamt of by Democratic expansionists—developed as a concept and policy during the era of Jackson. That is to say, the emergent rhetoric of U.S. manifest destiny carried an oblique challenge to Great Britain's reign as North America's leading empire. In the decade of the 40s during which the United States annexed Texas, settled the Oregon territory, acquired California and New Mexico and deliberated about attaining Cuba, Canada, and Mexico, manifest destiny did not merely rationalize the terms of America's expansion westward. When O'Sullivan first employed the term, he introduced manifest destiny as a contrary impulse defying the “hostile interference” of nations—specifically “England, our old rival and enemy” (“Annexation” 5). Jacksonian “manifest destiny,” thus, was a creation of nationalism and transatlantic rivalry. 2
