Manifest Destiny Webquest - Part 1

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way by Emanuel Leutze

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What is Manifest Destiny?

Directions: Answer the Questions in your packet by reading the secondary source below. Explain your responses in detail. No response should be one (1) sentence. You must only use the reading to respond to the questions. Outside sources will not be given credit.

Manifest Destiny & American Exceptionalism

The phrase “manifest destiny” originated in the nineteenth century, yet the concept behind the phrase originated in the seventeenth century with the first European immigrants in America, English Protestants or Puritans. The destiny is that the United States' “concept of American exceptionalism, is the belief that America occupies a special place among the countries of the world.” The definition of Manifest Destiny is firmly established by the idea that The United States should occupy all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Puritans came to America in 1630 believing that their survival in the new world would be a sign of God’s approval. As their ship the Arbella neared shore, group leader John Winthrop gave a sermon entitled “A Modell [sic] of Christian Charity,” in order to prepare his fellow passengers for what lay ahead. His sermon stressed the importance of this experimental religious settlement in the new world, and how it would come to serve as an example for all settlements thereafter, stating; “For wee [sic] must consider that wee [sic] shall be as a citty [sic] upon a hill. The eies [sic] of all people are upon us.”

Winthrop also recalled God’s instruction in the Bible about the need to expand and prosper, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” The ideology of manifest destiny continued through the eighteenth-century as victorious America won independence from Great Britain, an event that many occasioned to be preordained and lauded by God and an example of American exceptionalism. The use of the term “manifest destiny” did not enter conventional conversation until 1845, when journalist John Louis O’Sullivan wrote that it was “our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” Nineteenth-century expansionism went hand in hand with the concept of manifest destiny, each signaling that there was a God-given, sanctioned right to conquer the land and displace the “uncivilized,” non-Christian peoples who, it was believed, did not take full advantage of the land which had been given to them.

This ideology served as justification for the violent displacement of native peoples and the forceful takeovers of land by military means. Nineteenth-century Americans expanded upon Winthrop’s notion of “a city upon a hill” to encompass the idea that all countries should look to the United States as a model nation. Just as sixteenth-century Puritans had seen it as their divine right to “tame and cultivate” the frontier, so too did nineteenth-century capitalists and politicians see the expansion of the frontier as providential, their personal and professional profit in harmony with the nation’s economic development.

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