Manifest Destiny was a belief that the United States had a divinely-inspired right to expand across North America, and that this expansion was inevitable. The ideology was not universally accepted at the time, with notable individuals such as Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant rejecting it. Nevertheless, the notion that the USA had a right to expand westwards found significant support and proved particularly popular with Jacksonian Democrats. Journalist John L. O’Sullivan first used the phrase ‘manifest destiny’ in the July–August 1845 issue of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, in an article supporting the annexation of Texas. However, it wasn’t until later that year that the phrase found a larger audience thanks to one of his articles in the New York Morning News that addressed the ongoing Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain. In this article O’Sullivan argued in favor of ‘the right of 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.’
The article clearly attracted attention in Washington, where the Whig Representative Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts criticized the concept of manifest destiny in Congress during a debate about President Polk’s policy toward Oregon. Nevertheless, the idea struck a chord with Democrats and was often used to support and justify foreign policy in the nineteenth century. This saw the United States’ defeat of Mexico in the Mexican-American War, and the brutal mistreatment of Native Americans and other non-Europeans.
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