Manifest Destiny

Although he apparently did not coin the phrase, New York journalist John L. O’Sullivan popularized the use of the term “Manifest Destiny” to describe the United States’ effort to expand the country’s boundaries and share its system of democracy with people who did not already have a similar system. Politicians used this term to justify their efforts to acquire new lands in North America, particularly lands inhabited by people considered inferior to the “racially superior whites.” At that time, American Indians, Mexicans, and blacks fell into that “inferior” category. This expansionist destiny was seen as “manifest” because many Americans, with an evangelical fervor inspired by the recent Second Great Awakening, believed that the United States was ordained by God to found a nation that would be nothing short of the prophesized thousand-year reign of the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, the precursor to the Apocalypse.