Pacific Historical Review/Volume 1/Manifest Destiny and the Pacific

by Dan E. Clark

[Vol. 1, no. 1]

Manifest Destiny and the Pacific^[1]

Dan E. Clark

The launching by this association of a new quarterly, devoted in its scope to the history of the entire basin of the Pacific, indicates an appreciation of the importance of the Pacific Coast of the United States and of its close relationship to the other lands in and bordering on this great ocean. Consideration of the significance of the forthcoming publication suggested to the writer that it would not be inappropriate on this occasion to review briefly some of the many predictions made in the past regarding the destiny of America, both on this coast and across the Pacific Ocean.

The term Manifest Destiny is here used in a broad sense. It includes, in the first place, the emotion which prompted Elkanah Watson, prophesying in 1778 for the year 1900, to speak of "the decrees of the Almighty, who has evidently raised up this nation to become a lamp to guide degraded and oppressed humanity";^[2] or Albert J. Beveridge in 1900 to call America "trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world."^[3] This is the chosen-people, beacon-to-mankind interpretation of—America's mission and duty. This is the view of which Carl Schurz wrote, although without adding his approval, when he referred to the "youthful optimism . . . inspiring the minds of many Americans with the idea that this republic, being charged with the mission of bearing the banner of freedom over the whole civilized world, could transform any country, inhabited by any kind of population, into something like itself simply by extending over it the magic charm of its political institutions."^[4]

Then there is the doctrine of pre-ordination or inevitability governing the westward progress of the "star of empire." For some it was divine command and the superintending guidance of Providence that furnished the irresistible impulse. Others based their prophecies on the ceaseless inward urge which had for so long been impelling Anglo-saxon peoples westward. Still others referred to the certainty that American dominion and American enterprise must seek their natural boundaries, as water seeks its level. All these are included in the meaning of Manifest Destiny as here used.

The writer feels no necessity to pass judgment on the sincerity or motives of those who eloquently propounded the views, hereafter mentioned or quoted, in regard to the unavoidable rôle which America was destined to play on both shores of the Pacific. Most of these men lived long before the day of the modern cynic and de-bunker. If there was dross mingled with the gold in their exaltation and enthusiasm, few of them were conscious of it. America was still the land of the free and the home of the brave. At the same time it is true that there were always those who denied the force of predestinarian logic; and at the close of the last century there were many critics who exposed selfish economic imperialism lurking behind finesounding phrases.

The definite formulation of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny no doubt belongs to the decade of the roaring forties. With respect to the Pacific Coast and the Pacific, however, it seems certain that the essential features of that idea were in men's minds at a considerably earlier date. Even Coleridge in his later years was constrained to say: "The possible destiny of the United States of America, as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakespeare and Milton, is an august conception."^[5] The writer will not pretend to say when the idea of the possibility or desirability or certainty of American control on the Pacific first entered men's minds. Some part of it no doubt occurred to the hardy New England sea captains who sailed around the Horn and up the western coast after the close of the Revolution. Some such vision probably animated the restless John Ledyard. Apparently it was in the thought of John Adams when, in his Defense of the American Constitution in 1787, he wrote: "Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone . .. and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind."^[6] Whatever may have been the hopes and purposes of Thomas Jefferson in his long-continued efforts to promote far western exploration, he apparently went no further than to look forward, as he wrote to John Jacob Astor, to the time when the descendants of the first settlers on the Pacific slope should "spread themselves through the whole length of that coast, covering it with free and independent Americans, unconnected with us but by the ties of blood and interest."^[7]

Before Jefferson passed from the stage, however, others were to express views that were far less hesitating. "Nothing can or will limit the immigration westward, but the Western Ocean," declared Timothy Flint in 1825. "Alas! for the moving generation of the day, when the tide of advancing backwoodsmen shall have met the surge of the Pacific. They may then set themselves down and weep for other worlds."^[8] The accumulating information in regard to the Oregon country and the Treaty of 1818 with Great Britain providing for joint occupancy directed

attention to the importance of the mouth of the Columbia. “Upon the people of Eastern Asia,” said that ardent advocate of western measures, Thomas Hart Benton, in 1820, “the establishment of a civilized power on the opposite coast of America could not fail to produce great and wonderful benefits. Science, liberal principles in government, and the true religion, might cast their lights across the intervening sea.^[9]

The debate in the House in 1822-3 on Floyd’s bill to occupy the mouth of the Columbia brought out from rather unexpected sources the full idea of Manifest Destiny, even if the actual words were not used. Although George Tucker of Virginia opposed the bill, he was bound to admit that “we cannot arrest the progress of our population to the West. In vain may the Government attempt to set limits to its course. It marches on, with the increasing rapidity of a fire, and nothing will stop it until it reaches the shores of the Pacific.” ^[10] But it was Francis Baylies of Massachusetts who preached the doctrine most fully and eloquently. Even, said he, if the settlers who went to Oregon should later decide to form their own separate government, “with a nation of kindred blood, governed by laws similar to yours, cherishing your principles, speaking your language, and worshipping your God, you may rear a monument more magnificent than the Arch of Trajan, more durable than the pyramids; a living, animated, and everlasting monument of your glory and your greatness.”’ Addressing the timid and reluctant, he predicted that if they passed the bill they might in later life “cherish delightful recollections of this day, when America, almost shrinking from the ‘shadows of coming events,’ first placed her feet upon untrodden ground, scarcely daring to anticipate the grandeur which awaited her.” Returning to the discussion at a later point in the debate, he said: “Gentlemen are talking of natural boundaries. Sir, our natural boundary is the Pacific ocean. The swelling tide of our population must and will roll on until that mighty ocean interposes its waters, and limits our territorial empire.” Finally, to conclude these rather extended excerpts from this early apostle of Manifest Destiny, Baylies reached his climax when, in his peroration, he exclaimed : “To diffuse the arts of life, the light of science, and the blessings of the gospel over a wilderness, is no violation of the laws of God; it is no invasion of the rights of man to occupy a territory over which the savage roams, but which he never cultivates. . . The stream of bounty which perpetually flows from the throne of the Almighty ought not to be obstructed in its course, nor is it right that his benevolent designs should be defeated by the perversity of man.”^[11]

During the ensuing two decades, little happened to elicit similar exuberant predictions regarding the Pacific Coast and its destiny. And yet the idea lay not far below the current of thought and appeared occasionally on the surface in western newspapers. For instance, in 1825 the Ohio State Journal, speaking of the Oregon country, said: “One fourth part of this territory, that part which contains the Oregon harbor, will, at a future day, enter the Republican Confederacy as Oregon State; and the City of Oregon, will arise on its banks, which shall rival New York or Philadelphia in their wealth and population. Then the busy hum of commerce and the shouts of freemen, shall re-echo from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans.”^[12] Five years later the Buffalo Journal reviewed the irresistible westward march of American pioneers. “This course of empire,” said the editor, “may—must be stayed, when the shore of the Pacific has been reached.”^[13] In a speech in the House of Representatives Caleb Cushing rejoiced in “the spectacle of the Anglo-American stock extending itself into the heart of the Continent . . . advancing with, as it were, the preordination of inevitable progress, like the sun moving westerly in the heavens, or the ascending tide on the seashore, or, in the striking language of a foreign traveller, as a deluge of civilized men rising unabatedly and driven onwards by the hand of God.” When the settlers should reach the Pacific he desired them to “carry along with them the laws, education, and social improvements, which belong to the older states . . . worthily fulfilling the great destiny reserved for this exemplar American Republic.”^[14]

Then carne the “fabulous forties” when American buoyancy reached its highest point. Now it was that the desire for territorial expansion came out into the open, unashamed and aggressive. During this decade the Oregon question was settled, after there had been set up that “redoubtable line” of 54° 40’, up to which, in the words of Benton, “all true patriots were to march! and marching, fight! and fighting, die! if need be! singing all the while, with Horace—‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’”^[15] Before the ownership of Oregon was determined there were abundant opportunities for enthusiasts to portray the inevitability of our possession and the wonders that were to follow. Benton, himself, though scorning our claim up to 54° 40’, was an ardent advocate of our right to the entire valley of the Columbia. “Such a country is formed for union, wealth, and strength,” he said in a speech in 1842, which dims into dullness the most glowing prognostications of the modern chamber of commerce promoter. “It can have but one capital, and that will be a Thebes; but one commercial emporium, and that will be a Tyre, queen of cities. Such a country can have but one people, one interest, one government: and that people should be American—that interest ours—and that government republican. . . Accursed and infamous be the man that divides or alienates it!”^[16] A year later he declared that the white race had always gone for land and, said he, “they will continue to go for it, and will go where they can get it. Europe, Asia, and America have been settled by them in this way. All the States of this Union have been so settled. The principle is founded in their nature and in God’s command; and it will continue to be obeyed.”^[17]

It was in the debate on the termination of joint occupancy in Oregon in January, 1846, according to J. W. Pratt, that Congress first heard the doctrine of Manifest Destiny expressed in those exact words. Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts spoke of this ‘“‘new revelation of right” justifying expansion over the whole continent. He apparently referred to an editorial which had recently appeared in the New York Morning News. The editor pushed aside all the time-honored rights to territorial possession and based our claim to Oregon on a manifest destiny originating in a divine purpose and command that we should extend far and wide the blessings of liberty and self- government.^[18] This concise and convenient formula met with ready acceptance. We may well imagine with what gratitude it was seized upon by some of those advocates of expansion who had been troubled by secret misgivings that national aggrandizement was not a wholly altruistic ambition.

Oregon was not the only Pacific project during the forties to which this formula or a similar viewpoint might be applied. Caleb Cushing’s mission to China in 1843 was undertaken, according to his own words, “in behalf of civilization.” The amazing letter from President Tyler, attributed to Webster, which he bore to the Emperor of China, breathed condescension and cited “the will of Heaven” that a treaty should be the outcome of the mission.^[19]

During this decade also the pioneer promoters of a railroad to the Pacific, like John Plumbe and Asa Whitney, were painting alluring pictures of the great development of commerce with the orient that would follow the fruition of their plans. They did not neglect to call attention to the attendant opportunities for the dissemination of the light of American civilization. Benton became a convert to the plan and made his famous speech in which he suggested that the completed line should “be adorned with its crowning honor, the colossal statue of the great Columbus, whose design it accomplishes, hewn from the granite mass of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, overlooking the road, the mountain itself the pedestal, and the statue a part of the mountain, pointing with outstretched arm to the western horizon, and saying to the flying passenger, “There is the East! There is India!” ^[20]

Last, but not least, it was during this decade that California came within the scope of practical politics and Manifest Destiny. “California,” declared Benton in 1846, “become independent of Mexico by the revolt of the Picos, and independent of them by the revolt of the American settlers, had its destiny to fulfill — which was, to be handed over to the United States. So that its incorporation with the American Republic was equally sure in any and every event.”^[21] In a political letter in the same year, William H. Seward announced his belief that “Our population is destined to roll its resistless waves to the icy barriers of the North, and to encounter oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific.”^[22]

Thus early did Seward enter upon his grandiloquent career as perhaps the most persistent exponent of the doctrine of America’s unescapable and all-including destiny. To him no prospect was more exhilarating than that offered by the opportunities on the shores of the Pacific and across its waters. “The Atlantic states, through their commercial, social, and political affinities and sympathies,” said he, during the debate on the admission of California in 1850, “are steadily renovating the governments and the social constitutions of Europe and of Africa. The Pacific states must necessarily perform the same sublime and beneficient functions in Asia. If, then, the American people shall remain an undivided nation, the ripening civilization of the West, after a separation growing wider and wider for four thousand years, will, in its circuit of the world, meet again and mingle with the declining civilization of the East on our own free soil, and a new and more perfect civilization will arise to bless the earth, under the sway of our own cherished and beneficient democratic institutions.”^[23] Later in Page:Pacific Historical Review, volume 1, number 1.djvu/13 Page:Pacific Historical Review, volume 1, number 1.djvu/14 Page:Pacific Historical Review, volume 1, number 1.djvu/15 Page:Pacific Historical Review, volume 1, number 1.djvu/16 Page:Pacific Historical Review, volume 1, number 1.djvu/17 Page:Pacific Historical Review, volume 1, number 1.djvu/18 Page:Pacific Historical Review, volume 1, number 1.djvu/19 Page:Pacific Historical Review, volume 1, number 1.djvu/20 lack something of his faith, these words hold for us a challenge to separate the genuine idealism from the all too evident jingoism in our great American emotion of Manifest Destiny.

Dan Elbert Clark

University of Oregon

1. Presidential Address delivered before the Pacific Coast Branch of The American Historical Association at Berkeley, California, December 29, 1931.
2. Quoted in Jesse Lee Bennett, The Essential American Tradition (New York, 1925), 296.
3. Congressional Record, 56 cong., 1 sess., 704.
4. Carl Schurz, "Manifest Destiny" in Harper's Monthly, LXXXVII, 737 (1893).
5. >Coleridge's Table Talk, quoted on the title page of Robert Greenhow, The History of Oregon and California (Boston, 1845).
6. Charles Francis Adams (ed.), The Works of John Adams, (Boston, 1850-56), IV, 293. Eighty years later, in his speech on the Alaska treaty, Charles Sumner referred to this statement by Adams, and interpreted it to predict the spread of the United States to the Pacific. "Thus," said Sumner, "according to the prophetic minister, even at that early day was the destiny of the Republic manifest." The Works of Charles Sumner (Boston, 1874-83), XI, 222.
7. Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1892-99), IX, 351.
8. Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years (Boston, 1826), 203.
9. Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years’ View (New York, 1854-56), 1, 13.
10. Annals of Congress, 17 cong., 2 sess., 422.
11. Annals of Congress, 17 cong., 2 sess., 421, 422, 682-3, 688.
12. Quoted from the Ohio State Journal in the Detroit Gazette, January 3, 1826.
13. Quoted from the Buffalo Journal in The Arkansas Advocate, June 9, 1830.
14. Claude Moore Fuess, The Life of Caleb Cushing (New York, 1923), 1, 246-7.
15. Benton, Thirty Years’ View, II, 669.
16. Benton, Thirty Years’ View, ui, 430.
17. Benton, Thirty Years’ View, tl, 474.
18. Julius W. Pratt, “The Origin of Manifest Destiny” in American Historical Review, XXXII, 795-6.
19. Fuess, The Life of Caleb Cushing, I, 414-415, 419-420.
20. J. P. Davis, The Union Pacific Railway (Chicago, 1894), 136.
21. Benton, Thirty Years’ View, II, 693.
22. Frederic Bancroft, The Life of William H. Seward (New York, 1900), II, 470.
23. G. E. Baker (ed.), The Works of William H. Seward (New York, 1853-1884), I, 58.