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Manifest Destiny, 1836-1848
Overview
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President Martin van Buren proclaimed the nation to be "singularly happy." The sanguine attitude did not take into consideration the growing and increasingly obvious fractures between the nation’s competing political economies: one based on slavery, the other on wage labor. President van Buren could not bind these factions together nor could he bind the divisions in the Democratic Party. Manifest Destiny, a belief that white Americans had a providential right to as much land on the North American continent as they wanted, was an old American attitude by the 1830s. But as much as the concept related to land, it also related to an ethnocentric American attitude than anything or anyone not white and not American was somehow inferior. Manifest Destiny was territorial and racial. Expansion west was never far removed from the issue of slavery and old festering grudges were brought into the conflict. Both Northerners and Southerners worried about the future.
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