Manifest Destinies

Steven E. Woodworth's sweeping, accessible, and insightful examination of the Mexican-American War era adds a fresh dimension to the origins and unhappy consequences of western expansion during the 1840s. Woodworth maintains that Texas annexation was “merely one more step in the fulfillment of the nation's God-given destiny of overspreading the continent with its free—if, perhaps for the moment, imperfect—institutions” (p. 121). Public opinion on annexation was divided along party lines. Whigs opposed it because they feared that a too-rapid expansion into the West would weaken the republic, while northern Whigs based their opposition on antislavery grounds. Solid Democratic support seemed to indicate that “Manifest Destiny still reached across the sectional divide” (p. 141). Yet northern Democrats viewed annexation as national expansion, while southern party members considered it a proslavery measure. More ominously, as Henry Clay discovered to his chagrin in 1844, western expansion and the implicit question of slavery extension began to eclipse and overshadow the economic issues—a national bank, tariff, internal improvements—that had given rise to and shaped the second-party system

Annexation · Democracy · Destiny (ISS module · Economic history · Manifest destiny · Opposition (politics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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