A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872. By Daniel J. Burge

Abstract

Daniel J. Burge’s A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872 aims to adjust the way that historians understand the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Burge argues that historians have fundamentally misunderstood what nineteenth-century Americans meant by “manifest destiny” and that the supporters of this expansionist effort worked well past the 1840s and through the Civil War attempt to gain Canada, Cuba, and Mexico. He argues that when nineteenth-century Americans referred to manifest destiny this is what they meant, and that historians have conflated westward expansion with manifest destiny in a way that makes it seem as though it was a success. Burge also claims that manifest destiny was not a unifying ideology nor was widely supported. Burge begins with the outbreak of the U.S.-Mexican War and traces the objections of northern and southern Whigs as well as some Democrats to the push for obtaining all of Mexico. The various arguments they used, one based on the religious idea that the United States should not expand territorially, and one based on racist notions of Mexican peoples, succeeded in thwarting expansionist interests in obtaining the entire country of Mexico. During the election of 1848, Whigs attacked the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, for his support of the all-Mexico movement, which helped Zachary Taylor, an anti-expansionist, to be elected president. Burge argues that Taylor’s foreign policy was a clear break from James Polk’s and that he succeeded in stopping the nation from obtaining Cuba and Central American nations. Anti-manifest destiny Whigs branded filibustering to Cuba and later attempts to purchase the island as thieves, claiming that the United States must only gain territory through purchasing it legally. Burge then delves into the development of sectionalist critiques of Manifest Destiny, in which Republicans pushed the idea that this form of expansionism was primarily a southern creation, and anti-expansionists in the South claimed that it was northerners were primarily to blame for the creation of this ideology. During the Civil War, critiques of Manifest Destiny further splintered, as northerners blamed Civil War on land hungry southerners. After the war, Burge focuses on the racialized arguments against the inclusion of Native Alaskans as ways to mock William Seward’s efforts to annex Alaska.