Manifest Destiny

“Manifest Destiny,” an Outcome archive entry by Robert Michael Ruehl. The entry belongs to the featured collection and connects readers to scholarship, public history, and organizing around the Doctrine of Discovery, Christian domination, Indigenous sovereignty, law, religion, land, memory, and accountability.

In brief, it addresses Manifest Destiny is a nineteenth century term designating an expansionist ideology grounded in the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and republican ideals that shaped the westward development of the. For readers arriving from the main Doctrine of Discovery site, this post functions as a pointer rather than a replacement for the full Outcome record. The canonical page preserves the complete context, metadata, author information, citation links, media, and neighboring materials in the archive.

The source text highlights terms and contexts including American lawyer and author John L. O’Sullivan promoted the ideology of “Manifest Destiny” twice in 1845 to justify U.S. expansion; on 27 December 1845, he wrote: Away, away with all these cobweb tissues of right of discovery, exploration, settlement, continuity, &c…. were the respective cases and arguments of the two parties as to all these points of history and law, reversed—had England all ours, and we nothing but hers—our claim to Oregon would still be best and strongest. And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of. Read the canonical Outcome page for the complete entry.

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