History Rap

The spirit of "Manifest Destiny" pervaded the United States during the Age of Reform—the decades prior to the Civil War. John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the influential United States Magazine and Democratic Review, gave the expansionist movement its name in 1845, when he wrote that it is "the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Manifest Destiny was stimulated by nationalism and an idealistic vision of human perfectibility. It was America's duty to extend liberty and democratic institutions across the continent. Underlying this divine American mission was a feeling of cultural—even racial—superiority. Anglo-Saxon Americans believed that they had a natural right to move west, bringing with them the blessings of self-government and Protestantism. Americans gradually had been moving westward for two centuries, but in the 1830s and 1840s they pushed across the continent.