Manifest Destiny and Mass Immigration:

Manifest Destiny and Mass Immigration: 1820-1865

How did the United States acquire land from Hispanic-Americans and Native Americans?

Taking land from Hispanic-Americans: In order to accurately sum up the entire process of leading up to and fighting the war with Mexico, it can be generalized that Mexico had the misfortune of standing in the way of the "American Dream of Manifest Destiny," according to author John S.D. Eisenhower (xviii). And even though the term "Manifest Destiny" had only been coined in 1845, the author explains that "the idea of expansion westward to the Pacific" had been in the American consciousness a long time - even back to the inauguration of President Thomas Jefferson, who alluded to the territory west of the initial colonies as providing "room enough for our descendents to the thousandth and ten thousandth generation." And so, Americans were bound to move westward, and as that movement changed from a trickle of settlers to a flood, nations that claimed territory on the continent, including Mexico, were going to have to fight the U.S. To maintain sovereignty.

Further, many people assume the war flared up when the U.S. annexed Texas into the Union (July 4, 1845), but the author reminds readers that the annexation of Texas was "an artificial issue"; the truth is, Mexico had never recognized the 1837 "treaty" of Velasco - in which the president of Mexico, Santa Anna, who was in captivity in Texas, had agreed to Texan independence - and bad blood had simmered on both sides for years.

At the start of the war, in 1846, Mexico was a weak nation, made vulnerable by close to three hundred years of "autocratic Spanish rule" and by its own brutal war of independence. Mexico was a disorganized and corrupt country, and this created a "power vacuum" (xx) that was going to be taken advantage of by "some predator - if not the United States, then Britain," possibly France of even Russia. The stage for war was set when Santa Anna, angry that Sam Houston and other Americans were attacking Mexican army troops, marched into what is now Texas with six thousand men in January 1836. In March, 1836, Santa Anna's soldiers slaughtered all U.S. troops in the Alamo - and a few days later went further by massacring ("executing") 350 prisoners at Golidad (14).

Those events really stirred up the desire for ownership of Texas, and for war, among the Americans, and on April 21, 1836, eight hundred Texas soldiers "caught Santa Anna's inept army taking a siesta, and they visited bloodthirsty revenge on the Mexicans, killing many more than was necessary." This "battle" actually is the beginning of the independence of Texas, according to Eisenhower, but the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the war with Mexico, and "officially" establishing new boundaries between Texas, Mexico, California and New Mexico, Utah, among others, was not signed until February 2, 1848.

Did most Americans support the war and taking land from Mexicans? "The war was supported with enthusiasm" by most citizens, the author reports (xviii), although there was "moral disapproval" expressed by some citizens in New England and in the Midwest. In the Introduction, Eisenhower quotes General Ulysses S. Grant as saying the Mexican War was "the most unjust war ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation..." Grant went on to say it was "an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies..."

But historian / professor Justin Smith, whom Eisenhower calls "indisputably the most thorough researcher of the war," had a different opinion of the war; Smith wrote (in 1919) "...as a matter of fact, the hostilities were deliberately precipitated by the will and act of Mexico." Smith claims "Mexico wanted [war]; Mexico threatened it; Mexico issued orders to wage it." Others take differing viewpoints, notably Bernard DeVoto, who refers to Smith as "consistently wrongheaded," in Eisenhower's words (xvii).

What was the cost taking Mexican land from them through war? The Americans suffered 13,780 deaths (p. 369) and "thousands more [were] wounded beyond recovery." And in the field of battle, at various places in Mexico, the losses from diseases for volunteers "far exceeded the rate for regulars," and overall, about one death out of eight was actually the result of enemy action. In the end, in financial terms, America paid out $15 million for the territories the U.S. had seized and won through battle, and also paid $3 million to American citizens that Mexico had owed to those citizens.

The war was a "dirty war," Eisenhower writes (370-371); "the sufferings of the individual soldiers - Americans and Mexicans alike - exceeding today's imagination."

Taking land from Native Americans: In 1881, President Chester Arthur said that the U.S. had to deal with "the appalling fact that though thousands of lives have been sacrificed and hundreds of millions of dollars" have been spent on "the Indian problem," nothing has been permanent or satisfactory. And so, he proposed: one, apply state laws to the Indians living on reservations within each state; and two, give the Indians land in the West in turn for their agreement to "sever their tribal relations and to engage at once in agricultural pursuits" (after all, "their hunting days are over" and its best for them to "conform...to the new order of things...") (www.pbs.org).

In 1835, the policy of the United States towards Native Americans was explained in President Andrew Jackson's 7th Annual Message to Congress. The proposal for "removing the aboriginal people who yet remain" east of the Mississippi to lands "west of the Mississippi" was adopted "on the most mature consideration of the condition of this race." The policy was basically conjured up "...Independently of the treaty stipulations into which we have entered with the various tribes for the usufructuary rights they have ceded to us..." (www.pbs.org).

The way in which the Indian "problem" was "solved" is closely tied into the American policy of "Manifest Destiny." Some American leaders even promoted the idea that "there was a divine sanction" giving the U.S. The moral and spiritual "right" to expand its territory across North America and beyond. America had a "mission" in the world to spread its way of life; and there was a belief in the "natural superiority" of the "Anglo-Saxon race."

Manifest Destiny was not the officially stated U.S. foreign policy, but it was the operative attitude when the U.S. took over the Philippines in 1899 (another Hispanic group), after the Spanish American War. America needed rubber, and sugar, which the Philippines had, but rather than buy it from the Filipino people, the expansion of the American way of life had a lot of appeal, and hence, the U.S. became an imperialist nation, taking over territories because we could; and, as author Stanley Karnow writes, "There's a kind of intangible, evangelical reason for doing it - like a crusade" (www.pbs.org).Many people feel that the U.S. still to this day has a unspoken policy of "Manifest Destiny"; Karnow writes, "When you listen to President George W. Bush talk about getting involved in Iraq...he's actually used the word 'crusade.'"

QUESTION #3: How did African-American slaves and free blacks live in the south prior to the Civil War, and what were the conditions they lived under?

Slaves worked terribly hard, and suffered; but they also had leaders to inspire them, people like Maria Stewart (1831) who called upon the African-American slave community to stand up and prepare for a better life, a free life. She had sarcasm for those who could not or would not reach for higher ground, notwithstanding their captivity and chains. She cried out for action in her speech, "Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build" (Black History Month, 2006)

O, ye daughters of Africa, awake! Awake! Arise! No longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves....what have ye done to immortalize your names beyond the grave?" Our sons, she wondered, "do they bid fair to become crowns of glory to our hoary heads? Where is the parent who is conscious of having faithfully discharged his duty?"

And if the slave has "a thirst for knowledge," and rightfully holds "in abhorrence and contempt" when their ears were "polluted with [slavery's] vile accents," would that slave not "become ambitious to distinguish" himself? And yes, Africans were "endowed with noble and exalted faculties," and so, they must, Stewart continued, "become fired with a holy zeal for freedom's cause." And when knowledge thus flows, the "chains of slavery and ignorance" will begin to "melt like wax before the flames." Religion, she added, "is pure; it is ever new; it is beautiful; it is all that is worth living for..."

Informal religion - through the form of Negro Spirituals - was practiced daily by many African-Americans, and played a very important role in their lives. The spirituals "trumpeted loudly the enslaved community's insistence that they too - like their white slave holders - had a right to partake of the 'tree of life'..." (the Spirituals Project, (www.spiritualsproject.org).

Most scholars believe that the Negro Spirituals "proliferated near the end of the 18th century and during the last few decades leading up to the end of legalized slavery in the 1860s," the Spirituals Project explains on their Web site. In Africa, "music was called on to mark and celebrate virtually every event in tribal life, no matter how significant."

Those traditions and values were brought over to the North American continent on the slave ships, and became the foundations for Negro Spirituals song on the plantations. Yes, Africans from many diverse religious backgrounds were impressed with Christianity, albeit they reluctantly got involved with Christianity, the Spirituals Project reports, because they (rightly) viewed it as "hypocritical" when a slaveholder "espoused love and brotherhood." And yet many slaves were "fascinated with the Biblical stories, which seemed to parallel many of their own experiences."