American Lexicon

The term ‘manifest destiny’ has long been part of the American lexicon when describing the culture of westward expansion that was born in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Existing as a label for the embodiment of what the Founding Fathers envisioned for a young, yet burgeoning republic, it is often the first thing that comes to mind when discussing ‘the west’ or ‘the frontier’, partly because it is often he first way it is taught to students first learning the subject. While that is all good and well intentioned, and it is pleasant to associate the term with that beautiful image of the divine spirit guiding settlers across the continent, it is a misguided representation of the true history of American westward expansion. The history of the American, especially the dynamics of its steady expansion to the Pacific is rich, diverse, complicated, and controversial. What the stereotypically rosy pictorial depiction glosses over is, quite literally, the blood sweat and tears that went into the settling of Western lands. From the end of the American Revolution until 1912, when Arizona became the final state admitted to the contiguous Union, thus largely ending the geographic settlement of the continent, there were many winners, and even more losers, so to speak, as a result of the political, social, economic, and cultural evolution of the States’ expansion.

To fully appreciate the formative history of the United States, it is imperative to understand that just as how there is competition in various aspects of daily life, so too was there competition for the expansion of the West, with some contests certainly being stacked from the beginning. While the idea of egalitarian opportunity and freedom of action guaranteed by the Revolutionary settlement might not be finite or quantifiable, the physical space in which one can pursue such noble ideals certainly is, and, coupled with preexisting cultures and economic resources, made this competition inevitable. Not every living soul had an equal opportunity to reap the benefits of the opportune independence that came with expansion westward, Native Americans and African Americans especially. What was frequently touted as the natural and inevitable expansion of the moral purity that is the American experiment, in reality, manifested itself in confrontation between the haves and have-nots, English Americans and Native Americans, and economic opportunists and subsisters. This is the course America would take, this was its destiny.

The origins of conflicting social change on the American continent can be traced back to far before the Revolution, in fact. One could go as far as to say the first instance of this occurred when the first Europeans ‘discovered’ and then began settling the North American continent, in what was the first true westward expansion. While this occurred across an ocean instead of a land migration, the trend of uprooting and displacing existing inhabitants