nists used the concept to
justify their cruel treatment of those peoples, critics asserted. Manifest Destiny, with its talk of the need to "civilize" the "savages" who occupied the west, was also blatantly racist, they asserted.
Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, in a letter written to
former Senator Henry Clay (Whig, Kentucky) about the annexation of
Texas, described the impact of Manifest Destiny:
Indians have melted before the white man, and the mixed, degraded race
of Mexico must melt before the Anglo-Saxon. Away with this vile
sophistry! There is no necessity for crime. There is no fate to justify
rapacious nations, any more than to justify gamblers and robbers, in
plunder ... We talk of accomplishing our destiny. So did the late conqueror of Europe [Napoleon Bonaparte]; and destiny consigned him to a lonely rock in the ocean, the prey of ambition which destroyed no peace but his own.
Critics grew particularly incensed when the concept was used to justify
wars of expansion. God would not destine a nation to kill and subjugate
people, they argued. If the "war be right then Christianity is wrong, a
falsehood, a lie," Congregationalist minister Theodore Parker asserted
in opposition to the war with Mexico.
Many in particular portrayed the Mexican-American War as a land grab,
aimed at the conquest of a vulnerable neighbor with little ability to
defend itself. Critics argued that Manifest Destiny
was used to justify imperialism, and that the U.S. would never have
tolerated being treated the way it was treating other countries.
Senator Thomas Corwin (Whig, Ohio) was a particularly strong critic of
the war with Mexico. According to him: [See Senator Corwin Criticizes Concept of 'Manifest Destiny' (Excerpts) (primary document)]
one come and demanded Bunker Hill of the people of Massachusetts, had
England's lion ever showed himself there, is there a man over 13 and
under 90 who would not have been ready to meet him; is there a river on
this continent that would not have run red with blood; is there a field
but 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 w