A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872

"What Daniel does is very interesting. He looks at what became of Manifest Destiny after the U.S.-Mexico War, after the United States not only annexed Texas, but took an enormous chunk of territory that became California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah. From our point of view, we tend to want more order in the past than there really was. So we will say: ‘Well, there was this moment of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s, and then it was done.’ But people didn’t immediately know it was done. There was a lot of talk about what would happen next—if they were going to keep taking on new land. And there remained partisans of Manifest Destiny. This is why the United States buys Alaska in 1867. It’s why the Grant administration was looking to acquire Santo Domingo, and even before that the Pierce administration was trying to acquire Cuba. Those failed, in part, because there had always been resistance to Manifest Destiny. Resistance to expansion was more successful in those cases. So he talks about how Manifest Destiny was this very contested idea, and how over the course of the rest of the 19th century, it became increasingly thought of as not something the United States wanted to do any more. What Americans came to understand in the second part of the 19th century, after the Civil War , was the extent to which, up to and including the U.S.-Mexico War, expansion had been driven by slave-holding interests. They very much wanted to acquire Texas. They saw acquiring the rest of the Southwest as a place slavery could expand into. And so, in the second part of the 19th-century, that notion of expansion became delegitimised. I don’t think so. I mean, I hope not. I’ll put it that way. I think that Donald Trump belongs to a 21st-century context. If we go back 50 years, we can see how Americans have, consciously and subconsciously, disassembled a lot of institutions and norms that would have prevented someone like Donald Trump from getting anywhere close to the presidency. And since taking office, Donald Trump has set out to disestablish the international norms that were created after World War II to prevent nations from violating the sovereignty of other nations. What is happening now is about the corruptibility of the American political system and the weakness of liberal internationalism. That’s very different from how Americans were thinking in the middle of the 19th century. The United States was born as a republic in an age of Empire. It was on a continent with Spain—later Mexico—and Britain. It had to jostle for territory with these other, expansionist, empires. That’s a very different context."