Coleton Grossman

Manifest Destiny PSA

When reading John O’Sullivan’s “Declaration of Manifest Destiny”, his vision of the
United States is made abundantly clear by just two words: “Anglo Saxon”. Contrasting his grand
visions of a entire continent, populated exclusively by “Anglo-Saxons”, are the three other
source documents, each a portrait of what life was like for people who had every right to call
themselves American, but were not considered so simply on the basis of their not being “white”.
The Pacific railroad which O’Sullivan imagines “binding and holding together in its iron clasp
our fast-settling Pacific region” will not be constructed by the “overcrowded populations of
Europe”, but rather by poor Chinese immigrants who are treated as a scourge upon the state of
California. Chinese laborers who were recruited by US shipmasters who “lauded the equality of
your laws”, who are paid only a dollar and a half a day for tiring and dangerous work building a
railroad which will generate immense profits for everyone involved, except for them of course.

This same railroad will cut across Cherokee land, a people who were here long before us,
and force them to relocate. It seems ironic that the Cherokee tribe still had enough faith in the
power of such a uniquely “American” concept, the petition. The Cherokees were one of the
tribes that made the greatest efforts to assimilate to the “American” way of life and yet they were
to be “despoiled by their guardians, to become strangers and wanderers in the land of their
fathers, forced to return to the savage life.” Manifest Destiny was never about securing land or
wealth for all “Americans”, it was about giving those under the nebulous term “Anglo-Saxon”
land and jobs at the expense of anyone who fell outside of that group.