Westward — The Light and Shadow of Manifest Destiny

Last time, we looked at the young republic that set sail still carrying a deep contradiction at its feet — slavery — alongside the ideal proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, that ‘all men are created equal.’ This newborn nation did not remain confined to the thirteen states along the east coast. Before long its gaze turned to the west of the continent, and within just a few decades its territory swelled many times over. What we trace in this chapter is the story of that expansion. The exhilaration of acquiring a vast land, and the conviction of people who believed it was a mission granted by God. And just behind that radiant advance, we look at the far too heavy price paid by the people who had lived on that land from the beginning.

The Purchase That Doubled the Territory

For the United States that had won its independence, a vast continent that appeared untouched stretched out before it. In reality, Native societies had taken root across the land, but many people in the east pictured it as an ‘untamed land’ they were meant to open up. The impulse to head west was born where the desire of settlers seeking land overlapped with the ambition to grow the nation’s scale.

What set that current in motion was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The third president, Thomas Jefferson, bought from France the vast land west of the Mississippi River. With this single transaction the territory is said to have roughly doubled, and the young republic began at a stroke down the road to becoming a continental nation. For France under Napoleon as well, there were said to be reasons why obtaining funds was more realistic than maintaining distant North American land.

How vast the purchased land was, and what lay within it, was almost unknown to easterners of the time. Jefferson sent an expedition off to the west to survey the geography and nature of the unknown land. In this way the blank spaces on the map were gradually filled in, and the world stretching beyond the rivers and mountain ranges turned into a practical goal for people. Land was bought and sold, settlers headed west in covered wagons, and the frontier — the leading edge of settlement — moved deeper inland year by year.

What deserves attention is that there was debate, even at the time, over the legitimacy of this enormous transaction. Whether buying such a vast tract all at once was permissible under the Constitution was something Jefferson himself is said to have hesitated over. Even so, the judgment that there was no reason to let slip so favorable an opportunity for the nation is said to have been the deciding factor in the end. And above all, the region treated as ‘uninhabited land’ was already home to a great many Native peoples. Their existence was scarcely taken into account in the dealings of France and the United States as they bought and sold the land. A territory divided by a single line on the map was, in reality, the very world of the people who lived there.

The Idea of ‘Manifest Destiny’

As expansion to the west advanced, the ways of thinking that justified it also grew. Its symbol is the idea of ‘Manifest Destiny.’ Around 1845, the journalist John O’Sullivan is said to have popularized this phrase. Spreading across the entire continent was the natural mission granted to Americans by God — such a conviction pushed people forward.

This idea was woven with many emotions. The settler’s wish to live freely on new land, the pride that their own democracy was the very thing that ought to be spread to the world, and the assumption that they were more advanced than other cultures. These mingled together and colored the westward advance as ‘the right thing to do.’ Expansion came to be believed not as mere territorial enlargement, but as an act of carrying ideals.

Behind the spread of this thinking lay the rapid population growth that America faced at the time, and the influx of immigrants who wished to own land. As land in the east grew cramped, the western expanse looked like the very possibility of a new life. To the individual, settlement was a story of independence and hope; to the nation, it was proof of growth. That is precisely why the phrase ‘Manifest Destiny’ resonated so strongly in people’s hearts and further accelerated the movement west. Yet the fact that this story of hope was being told upon someone else’s land often slipped from the awareness of those telling it.

Through a war with Mexico, in 1848 a vast western land was newly incorporated into the United States. The skeleton of a territory running from east to west across the continent had, by this time, largely taken shape. Yet in the process of pushing that map step by step westward, the world of the people who had lived there from the beginning was rapidly driven into a corner.

The Trail of Tears — The Price the Native Peoples Paid

Beneath the feet of the expanding nation, the lands where Native peoples lived became, one after another, targets of settlement. With them, dealings over land by treaty, and at times clashes accompanied by force, were repeated. Before long the federal government strengthened its policy of moving the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi River together to lands in the west. What became the legal foundation for this was the Indian Removal Act, passed in 1830.

As a symbol of this policy, what is still passed down today is the ‘Trail of Tears.’ The Cherokee and other peoples who had lived in the southeast were forced to leave the land of their ancestors and move far to the west, toward the Oklahoma region. In the forced removal of the Cherokee that began in 1838, it is said that around fifteen thousand people were made to walk a distance of about a thousand miles (some three thousand kilometers). The harsh cold of a severe winter, along with hunger and disease, barred their way.

Why did such things happen? In the background lay the pressure of settlers seeking land, the heightened desire brought on by the discovery of gold, and the discriminatory consciousness of the time that did not regard the culture and rights of Native peoples as those of an equal counterpart. Among the Cherokee there were also people who tried to protect their rights legally by adopting the institutions of white society, but even that effort could not hold back the wave of expansion. What a nation that spoke of ideals did to the people it placed outside those ideals — the Trail of Tears presses that question upon us today.

In this way, in a little more than half a century since independence, America transformed into a continental nation. It was a story of the sweat and courage of settlers, and at the same time a story of the sacrifice of Native peoples. Light and shadow were carved into the foundation of this country as things that could not be separated. Yet the fact that, through expansion, new lands were added one after another also gave rise to another grave problem. In the regions newly joining the nation, would slavery be permitted, or not — ? Beneath the feet of the expanding nation, the greatest rift of all, tearing apart south and north, was beginning to widen — quietly, but surely.