Manifest Destiny

By the 1830s the notion that America was destined to absorb the whole of the West of the continent, as well as its core, was taking hold. This was a religious impulse as well as a nationalist and ideological one - a feeling that God, the republic, and democracy alike demanded that Americans press on west, to settle and civilize, republicanize and democratize. In 1838 an extraordinary essay in the Democratic Review, entitled 'The Great Nation of Futurity,' set out the program: The nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles: to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High - the Sacred and the True. Its congregation shall be the Union, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling and owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood - of 'peace and goodwill among men.'

One congressman put it thus in 1845: 'This continent was intended by Providence as a vast theater on which to work out the grand experiment of Republican Government, under the auspices of the Anglo-Saxon race.'

An editorial in the United States Journal, October 15, 1845, asserted: 'We, the American People, are the most independent, intelligent, moral and happy people on the face of the earth.'

In the years 1851-5, California produced over 45 percent of the world's entire output of gold.

The great California gold rush of 1849, attracting as it did adventurers from all over the world, was the first intimation to people everywhere that there was growing up, in the form of the United States, a materialistic phenomenon unique in history, a Promised Land which actually existed.

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!