ut would have been piled high with the unburied bones of slaughtered
Americans before these consecrated battlefields of liberty should have
been wrested from us? But this same American goes into a sister
republic and says to poor, weak Mexico, 'Give up your territory—you are
unworthy to possess it—I have got one-half already—all I ask of you is
to give up the other!'....
critics asserted, overexpansion was a threat to the country; it risked
spreading the nation's institutions too thin, they warned. "Possessed
of a domain, vast enough for the growth of ages, it is time for us to
stop in the career of acquisition and conquest," Channing wrote to
Clay. "Already endangered by our greatness, we cannot advance without
imminent peril to our institutions, union, prosperity, virtue, and
Other critics echoed Channing's belief that the U.S. already had enough land, and should stop seeking more. Supporters of Manifest Destiny
exaggerated the stresses of a growing population, they asserted. Corwin
argued that the U.S. had enough land, and that it was not worth waging
war for "room." He asserted:
your country, extending from the Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific
Ocean, capable itself of sustaining in comfort a larger population than
will be in the whole Union for one hundred years to come. Over this
vast expanse of territory your population is now so sparse that I
believe we provided, at the last session, a regiment of mounted men to
guard the mail from the frontier of Missouri to the mouth of the
Columbia; and yet you persist in the ridiculous assertion, 'I want
room.' One would imagine, from the frequent reiteration of the
complaint, that you had a bursting, teeming population, whose energy
was paralyzed, whose enterprise was crushed, for want of space.
Opposition to Manifest Destiny
was also strong among the "Conscience Whigs," a small group mostly from
the New England states who saw expansion as facilitating the spread of
slavery. That would only increase the tension between a precariously
balanced North and South, they warned. In opposing war with Mexico,
Corwin presciently claimed, "Should we prosecute this war another
moment, or expend one dollar in the purchase or conquest of a single
acre of Mexican land, the North and the South are brought into
collision on a point where neither will yield. Who can foresee or
foretell the result!"
Not only was Manifest Destiny
morally wrong, critics argued, but its realization through territorial
expansion was unconstitutional. Those critics, called "strict
constructionists," maintained that the Constitution never expressly
gave the country a right to acquire new lands, so the government did
not have the right to acquire territory. That view had also been
expressed by opponents of the Louisiana Purchase.
In short, opponents questioned both the ideal of Manifest Destiny and its practical consequences. "I spurn the notion that patriotism can only be manifested
by plunging the nation into war or that the love of one's country can
only be measured by one's hatred to any other country," declared
Representative Robert Winthrop (Whig, Massachusetts) in congressional
debate in January 1846. He warned of the "danger of fixing our views so
exclusively on our own real or imagined wants as to overlook the rights
When O'Sullivan wrote the following words in the article "The Great Nation of Futurity," in The United States Democratic Review in 1839, he was giving voice to a sentiment that many American agreed with:
far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American
greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of
many nations is destined to manifest to
mankind the excellence of divine principles... [H]er high example shall
smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and
carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure
an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field.
Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great
nation of futurity?
At the time O'Sullivan
wrote the article, many Americans fel