Whats the big deal about Manifest Destiny?
President Polk’s vision of a country that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific was not a new idea, but soon after his election, Americans received a well-phrased rationale to justify expansion. In 1845, John L. O’Sullivan, publisher of the Democratic Review, wrote that it was the nation’s “manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.
