Summary Of Manifest Destiny And American Territorial Expansion

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The United States was a very young nation when the first signals of Manifest Destiny began to appear, and only a few decades after independence when the first significant migrations of settles began heading west. While life on the frontier is often glorified in books and movies, westward expansion was built upon challenges, brutality, and struggles that were extremely complicated. In her book, Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion, Amy S. Greenberg was very astute to describe that “Manifest Destiny was a political and intellectual creation of the 1840’s…”(Greenberg 2). However, the national tendencies that led to this description began to take form years earlier. The daily lives of many Americans were transformed by the politics, nationalism, economics, racial, and religious fervor which became known as Manifest Destiny. Years before …show more content…
The belief that “civilized” people were superior to others and that “civilized” was synonymous for whiteness was at the heart of national policy. The desire to take lands west of Georgia and into the southwest became the justification to kill or displace thousands of Native Americans. (Greenberg 12) Similarly, slavery in the South continued to thrive unchecked as white Americans placed their own economic interests above those of slaves and Native Americans. However, the national debate over slavery began to slow the race west. President Andrew Jackson resisted adding Texas as a state due to concerns about sectional tensions over a new slave state (Brinkley 291). Likewise, many saw the Missouri Compromise as a breakpoint that furthered the radicalization of southern politics (Ambrose 903). The acceptance of nonwhites as inferior led to the mistreatment and often death of thousands of African Americans and Native
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