Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States

"Yes. I know when Tommy was writing this book originally, he thought about calling it ‘The Texas Moment.’ He’s looking at Americans who moved to places such as California, Oregon or Utah in the 1830s, when Texas had rebelled. For about 10 years, it was an independent republic, because the United States was not initially very eager to annex it. All these other Americans, in these other places, had serious discussions and took concrete steps towards emulating Texas and creating republics for themselves. They might all—particularly Utah—have broken off and become independent republics. To a lot of American politicians in the first part of the 19th century, that seemed totally understandable and normal to them. They had trouble visualising an American republic that spread across the entire continent. How, logistically, would you manage that in 1800? It just didn’t seem possible. They were also quite concerned that if the United States expanded that way, it would simply become an empire. There’s no other way to control that much territory, except by assuming imperial form. So Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hart Benton—a Missouri senator—all publicly talk about what will happen: Americans will move west, they will establish ‘sister republics’ populated by Americans, which will be allied to the United States and which will share some of the same institutional forms, but which will be sovereign. Because there’s no way to have a single state across the entire continent. For a lot of Americans who started moving west—particularly in a place like Oregon—US institutions were so slow in getting there, particularly in establishing title to the land, immigrants to Oregon started setting up their own republic. They thought: ‘We need title to the land. The United States isn’t doing this. If we declare ourselves independent, we can start nailing this down.’ The Mormons who went to Utah were very much trying to get away from American institutions, and took a lot of concrete steps towards creating their own independent republic. That might have worked out for them in the 1850s. So what Tommy does is challenge this idea that when Americans moved west, they were expanding the borders of the United States. He’s very careful to distinguish between Americans and the United States, as their interests did not align all the time. In fact, most of the time, as they moved west, they didn’t align. That’s the question everybody’s thinking about right now. There are two schools of thought. One is that Manifest Destiny is this transcendent idea in the United States, one that is obviously animating the current administration right now. This is the idea that the United States has a God-given right to go wherever the hell it wants, and to take over territory. The other one, which I lean towards, is that we need to talk about Manifest Destiny in context. In the context of the middle of the 19th century, it means particular things to particular people. I don’t think it had anywhere near the purchase that people think it had. It was by no means a consensus. There was considerable opposition to the idea of Manifest Destiny, or to any expansion. The Whig party wanted to keep the United States where it was, and just internally build up. Donald Trump invoked the idea of Manifest Destiny in his second inaugural address. And he has obviously done aggressive and illegal things the same way that James Polk did. Does that make it the same thing, though? I don’t think so. I think they each belong to their particular historical context. Though he invoked the idea, it’s too simplistic to say that Manifest Destiny is the enduring trans-historical idea of American history, that keeps popping up, and Americans will always want to do this. The Texas annexation is maybe one of the best cases. Texas became independent in 1835 and immediately wanted to be annexed. There was opposition to it for the next ten years. Each time the issue came up, anti-annexationists successfully defeated it. They kept turning down annexation until one time, in 1845, the pro-annexationists succeeded, and Texas became part of the United States. And that’s kind of how it works. There’s a lot of opposition to expansion, but pro-expansion supporters hammer at it and hammer at it. And they only need to succeed once. Opponents of expansion need to succeed every single time. If you step back and look at the whole picture, it looks as if the United States is just inexorably expanding. We forget about how contested the whole idea was."