CHAPTER EIGHT
Manifest Destiny and Its Discontents

MISSIONARIES WERE NOT THE only antebellum Americans with their gaze fixed on the distant horizon. Seeing their prosperity growing, their power gathering, and their confidence surging, Americans of the era did not see why their country could not keep expanding, too. It would be futile, silly even, to resist expansion, for it was destined to happen. Expansionists believed that America had a duty to conquer and civilize the North American continent—and possibly beyond—because God’s providence had decreed it. They, and thus presumably God, had their eyes on the Republic of Texas and vast swaths of lightly populated territory governed by Mexico—nothing short of present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and California—as well as the Oregon Country.

This belief had a name—“manifest destiny”—that had overtones of the same Calvinist millennialism that had succored the colonial wars against the French and Indians and during the American Revolution. And the name had an author, John O’Sullivan, a partisan Jacksonian Democrat, ardent expansionist, newspaper editor, and talented writer. To him, the United States was a “vigorous” nation “fresh from the hand of God” that had been sent on a “blessed mission to the nations of the world,” while American democracy was “Christianity in its earthly aspect—Christianity made effective among the political relations of men.” In 1845, as the nation argued over the merits of expansion and Congress debated how much of Oregon to claim, O’Sullivan pointed to “the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self government.”¹

The idea was not new, of course. From the very first colonial settlements in Virginia, Plymouth, and Massachusetts, Americans had been looking to expand. When they did, they almost always justified it in the name of God, as in the Puritan “errand into the wilderness.” As traders extended their networks throughout the Western Hemisphere and beyond, to Europe, Africa, the Mediterranean, and China, as the domestic economy boomed, and as the colonial population grew, Americans believed they could not help but expand into the vast “empty space” that hemmed them in against the Atlantic coast. Yet the space was hardly empty, filled not only with hundreds of thriving Indian tribes but also other European colonizers. But when matched against the American colonists’ relentless hunger for land, their greater numbers, and their growing economic power, these neighbors posed little challenge to American expansion. Religious ideas and values, foremost providence and the conceit that America was a chosen nation, the New Israel, had given expansionism an emotive power and righteous justification long before O’Sullivan put his pen to paper.²

Expansion, then, had long been portrayed as central to the American and Christian civilizing mission. For many, the territorial imperative was a more important goal, a higher calling, than the rights of Indians or slaves because it meant the spread of liberty—republican and Christian—to a barren land and its benighted people. Some of the more thoughtful expansionists realized there was a contradiction here, between the spread of republican liberty alongside the spread of slavery. Methodist home missionaries in Alabama and Mississippi, for example, acquiesced in and even defended the slave system but tried to reform its worst abuses and excesses; they also sought to educate slaves. But such moral compromises were at best only marginally effective, and rarely that, and instead of sowing doubt among the faithful they led to a fuller embrace of expansionism. The mission board of the Episcopal Church was unsure about slavery, but it was certain that acquiring Texas could only be a good thing. “To earnest, devoted, self-denying men, capable of ‘enduring hardness’ in the cause of Christ, there is scarcely a more promising field in the whole range of our Missionary operations than that presented by Texas,” reported the bishop responsible for missions to the national church body in 1847.³

But most others could not even see a contradiction, or, if they could, did not care. Southern whites were a diverse lot, especially in terms of class and wealth, and had few common causes to bind them together. White supremacy was important, but not all Southern whites owned slaves. Many white Southerners were evangelicals, though, and so when evangelicalism embraced slavery—or at least defended it from Northern interference—the South’s social bond became an unholy mix of faith-based racial superiority. Southerners had once felt defensive about their peculiar institution, but by the 1840s they proudly boasted about the benefits of slavery’s civilizing influence on an otherwise savage, unchristian people. This was a significant development, for racialized theories of manifest destiny had never been all that comfortable with the Christian doctrine of a universal humanity in which all men and women, created in God’s image, had descended from Adam and Eve; indeed, this reading of scripture was precisely the ground on which black abolitionists argued for racial equality. In response, Southern clergy such as the Virginia Baptist Thornton Stringfellow deployed scripture to argue that slavery was not an unfortunate evil—Thomas Jefferson’s view—but a positive good. The “conviction is forced upon the mind, that from Abraham’s day, until the coming of Christ,” Stringfellow wrote in reply to an antislavery Baptist in Rhode Island, “this institution found favor with God.” Slavery was Christianizing Africans who would otherwise be condemned to a life of sin and darkness, and Southern planters treated their slaves better than Northern industrialists treated their workers; rather than being a system of oppression, “slavery is full of mercy.” South Carolinian James Henley Thornwell, perhaps the South’s most renowned theologian, flatly declared that Southerners “cherish” slavery “not from avarice, but from principle.”⁴

Stringfellow and Thornwell were not alone in their indignation. Angered by their Northern members’ hostility to slavery, Southern Baptists and Methodists anticipated the sectional split of 1860–61 by breaking away from their national organizations in the 1830s and ’40s; Southern Presbyterians followed suit in 1861. Both halves of these once-national bodies could now pursue what one historian has aptly called “the foreign policy of slavery” in states of ideological purity. Presciently, John C. Calhoun feared that after the church schisms “nothing will be left to hold the States together except force.” Each side saw itself as the true heir to the American republican tradition. But for all sides of the dispute, the foreign policy of slavery was fundamentally about territorial expansion, which in turn posed fundamental problems of war and empire. For Southerners like John Rice, a contributor to the Southern Presbyterian Review, the opening of the westward settlement at precisely the moment the invention of the cotton gin rejuvenated the stagnating institution of slavery was nothing short of providential. Simply put, God favored slavery because he had made it possible. Thus the South must “never to consent that her social system … be confined and restrained by any other limits than such as the God of nature interposes.”⁵

Likewise, many religious Americans supported Indian Removal as a way to gain territory as well as an extension of Christian benevolence without necessarily seeing a clash between the two. Home missionaries pursued Indian assimilation through American education by bringing southern Indians to schools up north. This would, a Connecticut-based missionary with the ABCFM explained to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, serve both “the cause of humanity and national policy” by reconciling “Christian Benevolence … with the best policy of the Government.” Many missionaries, from virtually all denominations, believed that by stubbornly standing between Americans and free land, Indians were simply ensuring the death of their own way of life. Through education and moral uplift, they sought to Christianize, civilize, and save Indians. In the 1820s, a Baptist missionary, Isaac McCoy, was one of the first to argue that the only place left to do so was west of the Mississippi, paving the way for Andrew Jackson’s policy of Indian Removal in the following decade.⁶

Jackson himself couched expansion in terms of divine inevitability. A morally imperfect yet profoundly religious man, Jackson believed in America’s God-given manifest destiny. Two of the great influences in his life, his mother and his wife, were both devout Presbyterians, and from them Jackson constructed a worldview based on a strict fundamentalist interpretation of Calvinist predestination. Like his great rival John Quincy Adams, Jackson attended a variety of Protestant churches (though he naturally steered well clear of Congregationalists and Unitarians). He justified Indian Removal by noting that the “god of the universe had intended this great [Mississippi] valley to belong to one nation.” Who could withstand such a force? Apparently not even the indomitable Jackson—in which case the messiness of expansionism, such as war and Removal, could be explained, even justified, as unavoidable byproducts of the inevitable. Jackson packaged this theme with another powerful religious trope, America as a chosen land, in his final remarks as president. “You have the highest of human trusts committed to your care. Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number, and has chosen you as the guardians of freedom, to preserve it for the benefit of the human race,” he said in his farewell address in 1837. “May He who holds in His hands the destinies of nations make you worthy of the favors He has bestowed and enable you, with pure hearts and pure hands and sleepless vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time the great charge He has committed to your keeping.”⁷

Few Americans were as genuinely committed to expansion as the Reverend Jedidiah Morse. An orthodox Congregationalist minister and charter member of the ABCFM, Morse was also the early republic’s foremost geographer. His book The American Geography was the standard work on the subject for Americans and Europeans alike and went through several revised editions between its first appearance in 1789 and his death in 1826. A protégé of Reverend Timothy Dwight, Morse was a staunch Federalist who believed that democracy simply could not function properly without a Christian foundation. Morse was also a proud patriot, a nationalist who foresaw America’s boundaries expanding across the continent—and with them its enlightened systems of religion and government. The first edition of American Geography informed readers that “it is well known that empire has been travelling from east to west. Probably her last and broadest seat will be America.” Americans “cannot but anticipate the period, as not far distant, when the AMERICAN EMPIRE will comprehend millions of souls, west of the Mississippi.” As an orthodox Calvinist, Morse believed this as a matter of faith: God had made it so. In 1820, Morse received a commission from Secretary of War Calhoun to survey the Indian nations that lived along what was then the northwestern frontier, near the Great Lakes. Though he believed in the capacity of Indians to receive God’s grace, Morse did not believe that they could continue living their traditional life and also be citizens of the United States. The only way to reconcile American expansionism with Indian welfare, Morse reported to Calhoun, was to Christianize the Indians. And the only way to do that was to remove them to sovereign zones of safety west of the Mississippi, where they could receive a proper tutelage in American Christian republicanism.⁸

Protestant clergy and missionaries, such as Isaac McCoy, continued to promote Jedidiah Morse’s plan for territorial expansion after his death, but it was actually his son, Samuel Morse, who smoothed America’s westward passage. Best known as the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse was also a Romantic painter, devout Calvinist, anti-Catholic nativist, defender of slavery, and fervent expansionist imbued with an inordinate sense of religious mission and a grandiose vision of America’s future. His artwork aimed to inspire Americans to fulfill their God-given manifest destiny. In art and literature, the early nineteenth century marked the emergence of Romanticism in the United States, an aesthetic that questioned Enlightenment rationalism just as rationalism had once questioned faith. Samuel Morse’s art reflected this Romanticism, as did other American painters of the era. Epitomized by the Hudson River School, Romanticist landscape paintings portrayed a boundless, bountiful, mythic America, a latter-day Garden of Eden. The Romantic sensibility overlapped considerably with evangelical theology and manifest destiny ideology, and few captured all three strands more perfectly than Samuel Morse.⁹

It was not Morse’s paintings, however, but his invention of the telegraph in 1844 that helped enable Americans to realize their manifest destiny. For thousands of years, communications could travel only as quickly as the fastest form of transportation. The telegraph revolutionized communications by making them nearly instantaneous across the greatest of distances. Almost immediately, Americans grasped the importance of the new device, and telegraph wires soon crisscrossed the nation. Morse certainly realized what he had done—or rather, in the famous words of his first message, WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT. The telegraph would enable the United States to spread its sovereignty and American Protestants to spread their faith. Morse’s dream was on the cusp of fulfillment as a holy trinity of patriotism, Christianity, and innovation would march together westward.¹⁰

But manifest destiny, in all its various forms, was not the antebellum era’s only faith-based imperial project. The fervent enthusiasm and energetic voluntarism sparked by the First Amendment’s religious libertarianism and fueled by the Second Great Awakening led to a wave of innovation in American Christianity. New denominations, such as the Disciples of Christ, popped up across the religious landscape to add to the already bewildering diversity of American Protestantism. Another new Christian faith that emerged at this time, Mormonism, became intimately, if independently, bound up in westward expansion. From its earliest beginnings in the 1830s in western New York’s “burned over district”—so-called because it had been charred by raging fires of religious passion—to its westward migrations, Mormonism was a millennial, prophetic faith with an expansive earthly vision. Joseph Smith, the Mormon founder, led his Latter-day Saints west, first to Ohio, then Missouri, and then to the muddy banks of the Mississippi, where they founded the town of Nauvoo, Illinois. Like the Puritans before them, the Mormons kept moving because of their tendency to attract violent opposition. Also like the Puritans, Mormons conceived of their journey as part Genesis, part Exodus, and part New Israel. After a series of pitched battles and Smith’s murder in 1844, Brigham Young led the Mormons further west to the ultimate safety of Great Salt Lake, then a part of Mexico. There the Mormons settled permanently, cultivating the land, warding off any other Americans who also thought of settling near them, and blazing the Mormon Trail that would lead thousands more of the faithful out west. Following earlier patterns of white migratory settlement, the Mormons dealt with the local Ute Indian nation with a mixture of “noble savage” wonderment, acceptance and embellishment of their traditions, and, finally, violent conflict that resulted in American settler dominance. In 1850, the United States organized the land as the Utah Territory; in 1852, Young was appointed its first governor. Mormon history is a peculiarly American tale of religious diversity and innovation, Christian revivalism and millennialism, and westward expansion and imperialism—and yet another interpretation of manifest destiny.¹¹

AS GLORIOUS AND inevitable as it seemed, however, not all Americans were expansionists. Some were anti-expansionist or would support expansion only under certain conditions. In an era when benevolent reform dominated social and cultural politics, the cause of antislavery dominated benevolent reform. More than temperance, more than education, more than pacifism, more even than missions, the goal to end American slavery was the greatest reform movement of them all. The antislavery cause made for strange bedfellows, bringing together emotive evangelicals and unemotional Unitarians. In turn, opposition to slavery provoked a popular response to manifest destiny and a rival to the territorial ambitions of politicians, diplomats, and farmers: the foreign policy of abolitionism. In opposing the annexation of Texas, Eli Hawley Canfield, a low-church, evangelical Episcopal minister from Brooklyn, spoke for most abolitionists: “There is such a thing as over-growth.” It was time instead to perfect what Americans already had.¹²

Emerging out of New England but found widely throughout the antebellum North, evangelicals and other religious reformers opposed westward expansion because it would almost certainly lead to the expansion of the two great evils of American society: war and slavery. The causes of peace and antislavery were often inseparable: for many Christian abolitionists, such as the influential editor of The Liberator magazine William Lloyd Garrison, pacifism led to abolitionism, which in turn led to anti-expansionism, itself already a cause embraced by pacifists. This progressive Christian view of equal human nature and a firm belief in universal humanity led many to equate antiviolence with antislavery, an innovation Garrison called “nonresistance,” as in nonviolent resistance. Such an egalitarian worldview also led pacifists and abolitionists to oppose Indian Removal and support women’s rights; indeed, women comprised a disproportionate share of the peace and antislavery movements. In mobilizing an implacable hostility to slavery, then, abolitionists also applied their fearsome moral energy to resisting territorial expansion as America’s manifest destiny. This applied theology influenced many Americans as they decided whether slave-suitable lands, such as Texas, should be brought into the Union. Using Matthew 16:26 as the scriptural basis for his sermon—“What Shall a Man Give in Exchange for His Soul?”—during the controversy over Texas, one Ohio Presbyterian undoubtedly spoke for many: “It is the extreme of folly to barter away our souls for the purpose of gaining the world.” In 1837, in an open letter to Senator Henry Clay, William Ellery Channing disputed America’s right to annex Texas mostly because he damned slavery as unchristian, immoral, and a violation of divine, natural rights. Stunned by Channing’s “arrogance and presumptuousness,” Clay complained to a friend that he was being asked to exchange “the sober practical wisdom” of logic and custom “for the vain and visionary theories of Dr. Channing” and his allies. But Channing had won the argument, for now, and Texas remained independent, outside the Union.¹³

Benevolent reformers proposed foreign policy initiatives as well. In an era when Britons and Americans were first constructing their fitful “special relationship” through cordial diplomacy and cooperative missionary work, evangelical abolitionists called for Washington and London to mount a joint effort in humanitarian intervention to eliminate, once and for all, the now-illegal but still thriving Atlantic slave trade. Ineffectual in stopping slave trading but successful in raising public awareness and applying popular pressure, the World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London in 1840, symbolized both the potential and the limitations of a “foreign policy of antislavery.” Moreover, on their own British and American evangelicals joined forces to advance transatlantic theological, political, and social concerns. The result, at a conference in London in 1846, was the formation of the Evangelical Alliance. The Alliance solidified ties between reform-minded evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic and advanced the cause of a progressive U.S. foreign policy.¹⁴

Naturally, African Americans, freed and enslaved, shared the religious reformers’ emancipatory vision. Free blacks, many of them antislavery preachers, intellectuals, and activists affiliated with the emergent black Protestant churches, traveled throughout the North and pursued their own foreign policy of antislavery by carrying their message on speaking tours of Great Britain. They also seized on Swedenborgian theories of the millennium that centered on Ethiopia and African Christianity as the “true church” that would eventually redeem the world and end slavery. But in the South, black opposition to slavery and expansion had to be covert. Those who spread its subversive message were usually the articulate and literate slaves who had received their informal education from missionaries, preachers, and stray Bibles. Subjected to the horrors of bondage, they were hardly enthusiastic about its spread.¹⁶

By the middle of the antebellum period, American slave communities had stabilized. With the African slave trade outlawed in 1808, slave living conditions improved as their owners realized they could not replace valuable slaves with cheap imports; in turn, the slave population began a steady upward climb through higher birth rates and longer life expectancies. As brutal and dehumanizing as it remained, American slaves now possessed a measure of stability and permanency they had never known: kinship networks formed, slave couples secretly married, and tightly knit slave families grew. Slave churches—often informal and open-air, because they were usually illegal—also grew. One of the most important consequences of the Second Great Awakening was the vast expansion of the Christian religion among slaves, who embraced evangelicalism, synthesized it with African traditions, and built it into a formidable support network of cultural autonomy. Christianity, the faith of the masters, had also become the slaves’ salvation.¹⁷

But the closing of the slave trade also brought about a new trauma: the Second Middle Passage. The original Middle Passage had been the name for the slaves’ horrific Atlantic crossing from West Africa to the New World; its successor described the involuntary journey of slaves from the upper South—Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, and especially Virginia—to the booming cotton plantations of the Deep South. Slave auctions did a brisk trade as masters of smaller tobacco farms in Virginia found themselves with more slaves than they needed and an eager market of cotton farmers in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. As a result, wives were separated from husbands, children from parents. The Second Middle Passage was a main cause of the most serious slave revolt, in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. Its leader, Nat Turner, an unchurched but literate Baptist slave preacher who believed he was a prophet who spoke to God, had lost his wife to the Second Middle Passage. In retaliation and the hope of liberation, Turner led a fire-and-brimstone uprising that ultimately failed but killed sixty whites in the process. Despite lacking a political voice, religious blacks also found a way to oppose American expansionism.¹⁸

Yet sympathy for the plight of black slaves led some antislavery activists—among them Abraham Lincoln—to support an altogether different, but no less racist kind of expansionism: African colonization. Not all opponents of slavery believed that freedom for blacks in American society was the solution. Slaves, they argued, were not only an inferior race, they had been brutalized for over a century by whites. How could the two races possibly live together in peace? Their opposition to slavery was based on a fear of what slavery was doing to America rather than a humanitarian concern about the conditions of forced servitude. Slavery must end, they argued. But how? The solution was to resettle freed slaves as semi-Americans in Africa or Central America, “to convey,” in the words of Unitarian Jonathan Blake, “the African race back to the land of their nativity and to the home of their Fathers … where our Beneficent Creator at first located them.” The problem was that very few blacks actually wanted the freedom of permanent exile. They were Americans, born and raised for generations, and understandably did not see Africa, much less Central America, as “the home of their Fathers.” A group of freed American slaves did establish Liberia, in West Africa, as a U.S. colony in 1822, but it marked the end rather than the beginning of the colonization experiment. While African colonization was not an exclusively religious initiative, Christian antislavery activists gave it a critical boost of moral fervor. Their religious imprimatur was important, for it was evangelicals who had been pushing hardest the arguments that slavery was immoral and colonization was a morally acceptable alternative. In colonization, religious abolitionists also saw an opportunity. Samuel Hopkins, the divine who had scolded John Wesley that the American Revolution would bring an end to slavery for colonials and their African slaves, envisioned African colonization as a grand missionary enterprise to spread American Christianity.¹⁹

Moreover, not all antislavery activists were opposed to expansion. Manifest destiny exerted a strong pull on America’s religious imagination, especially the notions that the United States was a blessed land, that its citizens were God’s chosen people, and that America was providentially ordained to spread its blessings of liberty far and wide. These ideas had been embedded in the religious mind of virtually every Protestant denomination, including Unitarians, with the notable exceptions of Quakers and Moravians. Surprisingly, the prince of the indefatigably abolitionist Beecher family, Henry Ward Beecher, believed in the divinity of manifest destiny, even after the Mexican War had reopened the wound of slavery. As one of the most famous men in the nation and probably his era’s most renowned religious figure—and, not least of all, as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s younger brother—Beecher’s opinion carried tremendous weight. And on this occasion, Thanksgiving Day 1847, he preached a message of manifest destiny. “I rejoice that Christians are disposed to take the West to their hearts,” he told his congregation at Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn as the Mexican War drew to a close, for the “fate of the West is to be the fate” of the United States. “We cannot circumscribe the territorial bounds which God hath appointed, nor diminish the swelling flood of population which rushes there to find its level.” Education was critical—and something of a family crusade, begun by his father Lyman—and Beecher gloried that benevolent societies ensured that proper Christian schools followed the settlers out west. Yet while expansion was part of God’s plan, slavery was not. The result would be calamitous, Beecher warned, if slavery accompanied the spread of an otherwise virtuous America. “It is not by accident that evil accompanies despotism, and that good attends upon liberty. So God ordained it to be.” While Beecher may have distrusted the slave-neutral ideology of manifest destiny, he had no doubts about America’s providential mission to spread civilization and education across the continent.²⁰

Because it was so perfectly suited to the Romantic spirit of the age, the notion of a providentially guided, expansive United States was simply impossible to resist, even for many antislavery and anti-Removal religious intellectuals. Evangelicals, such as James Knowles of Boston’s Second Baptist Church, believed expansion would bring the United States—and the world—immense spiritual and material rewards, but not if slavery played a part. The Reverend George Cheever of the Church of the Puritans in Manhattan offered a particularly shrill version of an antislavery manifest destiny in his book God’s Hand in America. “Our whole existence shall be a lofty course of freedom and piety,” exulted Cheever, “expansive as the world, and lasting as the continent we inhabit.” Though he had opposed the annexation of Texas in 1845 and worried that the anarchy of the frontier would corrupt the virtues of America’s Christian republicanism, Horace Bushnell, a theological liberal, antislavery activist, and preacher of national renown, announced in 1847 that Americans “will not cease, till a Christian nation throws up its temples of worship on every hill and plain; till knowledge, virtue and religion … have filled our great country with a manly and happy race of people, and the bands of a complete Christian commonwealth are seen to span the continent.” Just not with slavery.²¹

Though they were often loathe to admit it, even the Transcendentalists and Unitarians were susceptible to the lure of manifest destiny. Emerson hated slavery and Removal, yet he too embraced an almost mystical vision of America as master of the continent and redeemer of the world. He believed in fate and that it was America’s fate to tame and civilize all of North America. In 1844—after Removal and in the midst of manifest destiny fervor—Emerson gave a celebrated lecture on the “Young American,” the name of a Romantic expansionist movement of American youth. On behalf of Young America, he proclaimed confidently that the “bountiful continent is ours, state on state, territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea … and new duties, new motives await and cheer us.” Americans must “appreciate the advantages opened to the human race in this country, which is our fortunate home.” Contrasting a stagnant and static Europe with a dynamic America, Emerson noted that because of the railroad, “the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the natural mind …. It seems so easy for America to inspire and express the most expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land of the laborer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, she should speak for the human race. It is the country of the Future.” His prediction that fate would also ensure the gradual death of slavery and that future generations of Americans would be racially mixed tempered but could not disguise his ardent imperialism. Other Romantically inclined Unitarian and Transcendentalist abolitionists, such as William Henry Channing (nephew of William Ellery) and Theodore Parker, shared Emerson’s conflicted vision of America’s mission.²²

And they were not alone. In one of history’s more pointed ironies, their vision was essentially the same as that of the author of manifest destiny himself, John L. O’Sullivan. While he was his era’s most effective propagandist of expansion, O’Sullivan was no less a reformer than the evangelicals, Unitarians, and Transcendentalists—and no less a pacifist. Under his editorship, the Democratic Review supported the cause of peace by publishing articles on Christian pacifism by Protestant clergy. O’Sullivan promoted arbitration as an antidote to war and called, in 1841, for the creation of a “Congress of Nations.” His expansionist ideology was not rooted in conquest; as the embodiment of the future and God’s chosen nation, America would never need to go to such trouble. He was instead a true believer in providence, arguing consistently that America’s superior culture, politics, and religion would irresistibly, inevitably—and peacefully—overwhelm the continent. Just like Emerson and Parker, O’Sullivan opposed war and the spread of slavery but welcomed the expansion of America. Little could any of them appreciate, however, that such carefully calibrated impulses would be impossible to control. “Representative government is really misrepresentative,” a disillusioned, betrayed Emerson would complain, in 1856, about the turmoil in Kansas. “Manifest Destiny, Democracy, Freedom, fine names for an ugly thing.” But by then, it was too late.²³

WAR OR PEACE, empire or republic, slavery or abolition—these were the explosive political, sectional, and religious choices that had been lingering, unresolved, since the War of 1812. They erupted once more in 1846, having again been provoked by a controversial war. War with Mexico officially lasted for two years, from 1846 to 1848, though most of the fighting was over in little more than a year. The Mexican War was America’s first modern war, the conflict in which the modern weapons and tactics that would define warfare until World War II were first tested. It also marked a watershed, the culmination of old forces and the introduction of new dynamics, in how domestic politics and culture affect the course of war and diplomacy. The issue of slavery, the lure of manifest destiny, the role of immigrants, the reemergence of Catholicism in America’s foreign relations, the protests of Christian pacifists, and the bitterly partisan nature of the war all combined to produce an ideologically explosive, divisive conflict that ensured Mexico’s ruin and nearly led to America’s. By reopening the link between expansion and slavery, the Mexican War was actually the first skirmish in the Civil War.²⁴

Mexico had suffered a turbulent early history since winning its independence from Spain in 1821. Its most northeasterly province, Texas, fought and won its own war of independence with Mexico in 1835–36. If the residents of Texas had had their way, they would have been annexed almost immediately by the United States. Many Americans shared the same goal, but slavery, which was widespread in Texas by the time of independence, complicated matters, for annexing Texas would also mean expanding slavery within the United States. For nearly a decade, no president would endorse annexation for fear of the tensions and emotions it would unleash. What was more, in 1836 the Mexican government announced that annexation would be a cause for war. Though war did not immediately follow in 1845, when Texas finally did join the United States, a year later the two largest countries in North America found themselves in battle for control of the continent. By that time, having absorbed Texas, President James K. Polk decided America should also conquer California and everything in between. In this, he was fantastically successful. Though the war was somewhat more treacherous than Americans had expected, the United States quickly took possession of California and the disputed borderlands between Texas and Mexico. When Mexican authorities still refused to surrender, the U.S. Army marched deep into Mexican territory and occupied Veracruz and the capital, Mexico City, in 1847. Stung by these humiliating defeats, Mexico agreed to the even more humiliating Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 that forced it to relinquish more than a third of its national territory.²⁵

Unlike his predecessors going back to Andrew Jackson, Polk was an unequivocal expansionist. Slavery did not affect his stance; as a Southerner from Tennessee and slave master himself, Polk had no qualms about its extension or enhancement. But Polk’s expansionism was driven more by his extreme nationalism than by slavery. From the British he wanted all of the Oregon Country, a goal supported by most Northerners, and from the Mexicans he wanted California, which most Americans hoped for. And of course he had also supported the annexation of Texas, wildly popular in the South. Elected in 1844 on a platform of manifest destiny, Polk was determined to expand the Union, and expand he did. Tensions with Britain and Mexico arose almost simultaneously in 1845–46. Despite his bluster, Polk was reluctant to go to war with Britain over Oregon, especially considering that the British were willing to settle for half of the territory and leave the southern half, where Americans had settled, to the United States. Britain in fact seemed to provide the key to unlocking the entire expansionist deadlock, because it was assumed that London had its own designs not only on Oregon, but also on California, Texas, and Cuba. A settlement with Britain over Oregon thus paved the way for a war against Mexico that would in turn block Britain’s own designs in Mexico and Cuba. It was no coincidence that these events occurred almost simultaneously.²⁶

Polk was a devoutly religious man and he did not hesitate to invoke providence in service to his cause. Sacred logic also made for good rhetoric that would draw wide acceptance as Christian as well as American doctrine. The piety of manifest destiny, in other words, made for good politics. And it fit with an aspect of his Calvinist upbringing that he still very much believed in: predestination. “No country has been so much favored, or should acknowledge with deeper reverence the manifestations of the divine protection,” Polk declared in his Third Annual Message, in 1848, with victory in sight. “An all-wise Creator directed and guarded us in our infant struggle for freedom and has constantly watched over our surprising progress until we have become one of the great nations of the earth.” As Polk had made plain, the Mexican War, and with it the acquisition of California, was the culmination of the manifest destiny impulse.²⁷

Advocates for war also couched their support in terms of God’s plan for his people. On June 1, 1846, Captain R. A. Stewart, a Louisiana planter and ordained Methodist minister, preached the war’s first American sermon on Mexican soil. Using Jeremiah 7:7 as his text—“I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers for ever”—Stewart rejoiced in the “blessings of freedom” and true Christian civilization the U.S. Army was importing into Mexico. That it could happen at all was an “order of Providence” fulfilled by the “children of destiny.” Conquering Mexico’s sovereign territory seemed little different than Indian Removal, as some of the war’s supporters pointed out. Even Unitarians could be swept up in the crusading fervor of wartime. Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows, pastor of the First Unitarian Church in New York and one of the nation’s leading Unitarian voices, said he had little respect for the Mexicans’ “weaker blood,” which Americans could “regard with as much certainty as we do the final extinction of the Indian races, to which the mass of the Mexican population seem very little superior.” The Mexicans of course practiced a weaker religion, too, which promised to open up vast new missionary opportunities for American Protestants.²⁸

MANY OF THE war’s participants also viewed it through the lens of faith. Mormons placed the war within the context of their prophetic faith and formed their own battalion—the only faith-based regiment in American military history—as a way to strengthen their church. Others saw it as another battle in a war between Protestants and Catholics. Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists championed it as a straightforward crusade against Latin Catholicism. Echoing the colonial Black Legend and fears of Catholicism’s purported corrupt and authoritarian tendencies, many U.S. soldiers who invaded and occupied Mexico wrote home contemptuously about the backwardness of Catholic mysticism and superstition and justified America’s cause in these terms. While the Mexican people starved in destitution, Private Ralph Kirkham informed his wife, the “rascally priests live well enough.” They “might dress in rags,” but it was still “easy enough to recognize them by their fat, well-fed bodies. They are a grand set of rogues.” In another letter, Kirkham complained that “the more I see of Romish religion in this country, the more I am convinced that it is real idolatry” that did nothing but keep the people “in a state of perfect ignorance.” Not surprisingly, many Mexicans feared they faced a war of religious extermination and forced conversion, an invasion of Yankee Protestants determined to wipe out Mexican Catholicism.²⁹

But while disdain for Catholicism spurred many Americans to support a Protestant crusade against Mexico, others feared that conquering Mexican territory would bring a great Catholic horde into the United States. The influence of religion, then, could cut both ways. If the United States took Mexican land, shrieked the Daily Star of Philadelphia, scene of some of the worst anti-Catholic nativist riots, Americans would unwittingly welcome “eight millions of foreigners, not only entirely ignorant of our institutions, but ignorant of everything, uncultivated in mind, brutal in manners, steeped in the worst of all superstitions, and slaves to the tyranny of monks.”³⁰

Anti-Catholicism had of course motivated “American” foreign policy under British colonial rule, but it now had a new urgency. Thanks to the arrival of large numbers of Catholic immigrants (especially Irish Catholics), by the eve of the Civil War Americans were no longer a Protestant people. Protestantism retained its dominance, but not its monopoly. Rising immigration, the revival of Protestantism in the Second Great Awakening, and a resurgent American nationalism that identified closely with Protestantism reawakened anti-Catholicism and thrust it once again to the front ranks of American public life. Protestants, the vast majority of the population, worried about the compatibility of the new immigrants’ Catholicism with republicanism, especially the lack of separation between church and state in traditional Catholic thought and practice. The Reverend Lyman Beecher, a titan of American Protestantism and architect of reform, issued “a plea for the West” in 1835 that urged Americans to push westward but ensure that Catholics and their authoritarianism did not follow along. Alexander Campbell, leader of the Restoration movement, advanced similar arguments. By the 1850s, with the founding of the American Party, a political front for the nativist movement, anti-Catholicism was threatening to hijack the national agenda—or at least a significant portion of it. In the antebellum North, Protestant angst and social instability were reflected by violent anti-Catholic riots in several American cities that accompanied the rise of nativism in the 1850s. As a contrast to Irish Catholics, who mostly joined the Democrats, anti-Catholicism became an important aspect of the newly formed Republican Party’s appeal in the 1850s. The Mexican War unfolded within this context and, in turn, contributed to the nativist return of anti-Catholicism.³¹

Some Catholics reacted forcefully to the politics of prejudice, opposing an imperialist war against their fellow Catholics. The most vocal was Orestes Brownson, editor of the Boston-based Quarterly Review. But nowhere did Catholics—namely, Irish Catholics—resist more dramatically than on the battlefields of Texas and Mexico. Though their role has become embellished in myth, it is clear that some Catholics deserted the U.S. Army out of anger at nativist mobs in the North and in frustration with being forced to do battle against their coreligionists in the name of a Protestant-themed manifest destiny. “As they were Roman Catholic,” one immigrant soldier recalled, “they imagined they were fighting against their religion by fighting the Mexicans.” Moreover, Catholic soldiers in the U.S. Army received degrading treatment that included punishments for refusing to worship in Protestant services. Mexican authorities encouraged these desertions with religious appeals against the “heretic country” of the United States. “Irishmen! Listen to the words of your brothers, hear the accents of a Catholic people,” pleaded one of the Mexican Army’s surrender leaflets. “Can you fight by the side of those who put fire to your temples in Boston and Philadelphia? … If you are Catholic, the same as we, if you follow the doctrines of Our Saviour, why are you seen sword in hand murdering your brethren? Why are you antagonistic to those who defend their country and your own God?” The leaflets worked surprisingly well. Led by John Riley, a tall Irishman who had emigrated from County Galway to Michigan via service in a British Army regiment stationed in Canada, several hundred Catholic deserters formed the St. Patrick’s Battalion in the Mexican Army, known to their comrades as los San Patricios.³²

Nonetheless, most American Catholics supported the Mexican War. Standing firmly behind the Polk administration was a way of blunting nativist charges and Protestant stereotypes of dual loyalty by affirming their allegiance to America. It was also an act of partisan political solidarity with the Democratic Party. If the interests of church and state clashed—a distinct possibility given the Vatican’s open hostility to the war—the Catholic Telegraph urged every American Catholic to “enter with all his heart into the conflict” on America’s side, even “if war should be proclaimed by the United States against the Sovereign Pontiff.” For American Catholics, there would be no divided loyalties.³³

EVEN AMONG PROTESTANTS, the conflict was proving to be every bit as contentious as the War of 1812. As the most reliable bellwether of antebellum values and morals, religion was an important factor in expressing and measuring dissent. In this sense, the St. Patrick’s Battalion was emblematic of deep divisions among Americans that exceptionalist ideologies like manifest destiny could not conceal. While supporters perceived the war as the fulfillment of manifest destiny, opponents damned it as an immoral abomination, an act of rapacious aggression, and a blasphemous affront to the very principles of Americanism and Christianity. No government would tolerate such “sins” from one of its own citizens, Reverend Eli Hawley Canfield charged in an emotional 1847 Thanksgiving sermon. How could there be one code of morals for people and another for nations? “There is no concealing the fact that our war with a feeble sister republic is iniquitous in every point of view,” for not only had Americans launched an unjust war, they were also strengthening the South’s slave power. Contrasting Polk’s treatment of Britain over Oregon with his war against Mexico, Canfield railed that the president would not have gone to war if “Mexico had been in a northern instead of a southern latitude.” Unease simmered throughout the nation. A divinity student at Yale worried about the effects of Mexico’s “sickly climate” and violent people who “never gave or took quarter.” An Episcopal priest in Washington belittled Polk’s “war for a wilderness” and feared that the president was inviting upon America “the deep damnation sooner or later to be visited in the retributive justice of God.”³⁴

Providence, then, cut both ways. While expansionists used religious arguments to support the fulfillment of America’s manifest destiny—providentialism writ large—opponents feared that the nation’s avaricious lust for land would come back to haunt it. Statesmen not normally known for millennialism or piety invoked the wrath of God when protesting the war. In his polemic Peace with Mexico, former Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin accused Polk of abandoning America’s true mission and distorting its destiny. Senator John C. Calhoun, who had only recently been secretary of state and had earlier served as secretary of war, was a more surprising antiwar partisan given his affection for slavery, but the South Carolinian feared competition from new slave states and the depressive effect on the price of land that acquiring vast new territories was bound to have. He also feared the war would not unfold as smoothly as Polk had promised. “Providence has cast my lot,” Calhoun said of his opposition to the war, and warned of the “disastrous consequences” that would befall an aggressive and prideful America should it attempt to conquer and acquire so much Mexican land.³⁵

Some religious opponents believed in America’s exceptional virtue and criticized the war for its betrayal of the nation’s democratic, Christian promise. To wreak destruction upon Mexico was bad enough, lamented Henry Ward Beecher, “but to do it for the sake of civilization and religion,” as the war’s supporters claimed, was simply rank “hypocrisy.” Here, the intellectual and spiritual journey of Theodore Parker is most illustrative. This Congregationalist who became a Unitarian minister and prophet of Transcendentalism had long been a pacifist. Through the 1840s, he became an increasingly vocal abolitionist; not coincidentally, he also became a strident opponent of expansion to the south and west. Even in America’s moment of triumph, with the war and the west won, Parker condemned it as expensive, bloody, and unjust. The war had been an immoral enterprise from the beginning, he claimed; victory, no matter how rewarding, could not erase that simple fact. Parker’s opposition was an important litmus test, for while his pacifist convictions had been firm his abolitionism had not always been so robust. But as slave power seemed to grow, his American exceptionalism diminished—or at least, he divorced it from causes that would enhance or entrench slavery. By 1848, his opposition to militaristic expansion was complete.³⁶

By the time of the Mexican War, Parker’s fellow Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau had retained little of his own faith. But like the New England Transcendentalists who had made a spiritual journey from Congregationalism to Unitarianism, his views retained a profoundly religious framework and his morality re mained grounded in a system of Christian ethics. Thoreau was fiercely opposed to both slavery and war in the abstract, and the reality of the Mexican War appalled him. With his “resistance to civil government”—what later became known as “civil disobedience”—Thoreau refused to pay taxes that would help fund the war. Though he went to jail for his act of defiance, Thoreau had established a precedent that would shape the peaceful resistance movements of later reformers and antiwar activists like Martin Luther King Jr. Stemming from a faith-based moral and political climate that divided issues into sharp distinctions of right and wrong, Thoreau’s protest was an expression of antebellum Christian values even if they were completely devoid of Christian spirituality and religious belief.³⁷

But ideas and values often follow facts on the ground, and after victory—and the seizure of California and all the land between it and Texas—it was very difficult to resist reveling in the triumph of American righteousness. A naval commander was asked why the United States had won. “It is because the spirit of our pilgrim fathers is with us,” he replied. “It is because of the God of armies and Lord of hosts is with us.” America’s mission had been sanctified, its horizons perhaps now extended even further. As Amariah Kalloch of the West Rockport Baptist Church preached to the Maine state legislature in 1849, “Our territory now stretches from sea to sea, and from the river in the south, almost to the Arctic regions of the north, with the strong prospect that the whole of British America will yet swell the number of our States; and even Mexico may yet find her chords of sympathy so frequently and sweetly touched by our own, as to induce her to become a part and parcel of this nation.” But it was Polk, in one of his last speeches as president, who put it best. Americans had triumphed “under the benignant providence of Almighty God,” he announced in December 1848. “The gratitude of the nation to the Sovereign Arbiter of All Human Events should be commensurate with the boundless blessings we enjoy.” America was now a model for everyone. “Peace, plenty, and contentment reign throughout our borders, and our beloved country presents a sublime moral spectacle to the world.”³⁸

If the Mexican War vindicated the advocates of manifest destiny and apologists for slavery, it also galvanized and then radicalized antislavery and anti-expansionist forces in the North. Ironically, it was the end of war and the coming of peace between Mexico and the United States that actually hastened the demise of the American peace movement and smoothed the path to the outbreak of war in 1861. Christian pacifists and abolitionists did not welcome war, but as they began to realize that peaceful, nonviolent resistance could only go so far in bringing about the end of slavery, they also began to compromise their pacifist principles. Some, pledging their allegiance to the redemptive “violent messiahs” Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, abandoned their pacifism in support of armed rebellion. Theodore Parker helped arm and supply Brown for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, while Emerson declared that Brown “joins that perfect puritan faith” with the “ardor of the Revolution. He believes in two articles … The Golden Rule, and the Declaration of Independence.” Even Garrison’s peace advocacy buckled after Harpers Ferry; he called for “Success to every slave insurrection” and envisioned slaves “breaking the head of the tyrant with their chains.” Others, truer to their pacifist witness, could only provide comfort and sympathy, but even they could sympathize with revolutionary violence. Lydia Child, a radical Unitarian abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, wrote to Brown in prison. “Believing in peace principles, I cannot sympathize with the method you chose to advance the cause of freedom,” she chided the abolitionist revolutionary. “But I honor your generous intentions—I admire your courage, moral and physical. I reverence you for the humanity which tempered your zeal. I sympathize with you in your cruel bereavement, your sufferings, and your wrongs. In brief, I love you and I bless you.”³⁹

Out of such love, smashed against the hate of slavery, would spring the Civil War. American religion’s moral vision—from humanitarian intervention to manifest destiny—now turned the nation upon itself.

CHAPTER EIGHTManifest Destiny and Its Discontents

CHAPTER EIGHT
Manifest Destiny and Its Discontents