Скачать или смотреть US Had Manifest Destiny

Imagine a journalist claiming that the United States was entitled to an entire region that stretched from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains. That is what happened on December 27, 1845, when John L. O’Sullivan wrote in the New York Morning News about the Oregon Country and declared that the United States had the right to claim all of it.

O’Sullivan had already introduced the phrase “manifest destiny” a few months earlier. He first used it in connection with the annexation of Texas, arguing that it was the nation’s responsibility and natural path to expand across the continent. By the time he wrote about Oregon, the idea had grown into something larger. He presented expansion not only as practical but as a mission tied to national identity and democratic values. His writing framed continental growth as both legitimate and beneficial.

The United States and Britain both claimed rights to the territory, and the land was already inhabited by multiple Indigenous nations whose presence and sovereignty predated both powers. O’Sullivan did not address these realities in his argument. Instead, he focused on the belief that settlement and control by the United States would fulfill what he saw as a historical purpose.

O’Sullivan’s editorial raised the stakes of ongoing negotiations between the United States and Britain. It did not create federal policy, but it influenced public opinion by suggesting that any compromise would be a failure. His words helped shape the political atmosphere that later led to the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which divided the region along the forty ninth parallel. That agreement avoided war, but O’Sullivan’s writing demonstrated how rhetoric could pressure diplomacy.

Manifest destiny became a guiding idea that justified territorial expansion, even as it ignored the consequences for Indigenous peoples and complicated international relations.

Follow the page for more daily history!

#ManifestDestiny #OregonCountry #JohnLOSullivan #HistoryOfExpansion #USHistory