John L. O'Sullivan

so once again we see two competing ideas american expansion and american liberty the united states was expanding geographically while native american nations were often losing their lands independence and political power and i want to just stop there for just a minute and remind people who may not have ever been taught this or have forgotten this was the time when the term manifest destiny came about.

And it was actually a term coined by a journalist, John O'Sullivan, who put the thinking of many in the leadership of the United States at the time into words, which he referred to as manifest destiny.

And manifest means obvious.

And destiny, of course, is kind of what you expect to happen in the course of events.

I mean, not like Hawaii west, but sea to shining sea west.

So you might remember that journalist John O. Sullivan coined the phrase Manifest Destiny to describe America's God-given right to take over all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, regardless of who happened to be living there.

Sorry, Native Americans, Mexicans, French fur trappers, beavers, bison, prairie dogs, passenger pigeons.

I'm not going to go so far as to give God credit for America's internal imperialism, but I will say that our expansion had a lot to do with economics, especially when you consider Jefferson's ideas about the Empire of Liberty.

Moving out west was a key aspect of American freedom, and the first half of the 19th century became the Age of Manifest Destiny, the idea that it was a God-given right of Americans to spread out over the North American continent.

The term was coined by a New York journalist, John L. O'Sullivan, who wrote that the people living out west, i.e., the Native Americans, must succumb to, quote, 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 in liberty.

Man, he actually wrote overspread! One thing I love about Providence is that it has like a 100% rate of give a thing unto us and take a thing away from them.

One of the results of this migration was that it was really difficult for factory owners to find men who could work in their factories.