Manifest Destiny: The Expansion Of America

When the shape of America first started to grow from just land to the 13 colonies to the westward expansion of our country in less than a century, it sure feels like hopes and dreams came true. Though it might have seemed like an easier task, it took luck, labor, and intense warfare. The long process of American territorial expansion was justified by a mid-century ideology known as Manifest Destiny (pg 1). The one people we seem to forget about when we discuss the growing settlement of our country are the Native Americans. They had inhabited the country long before Columbus had discovered America, and still play an important part in today’s society. Manifest Destiny justified the displacement and domestication of Native Americans all while

It is known that Indians moved month by month to accommodate for the weather. When they would leave one spot, they would leave their camps set up, as they would be coming back when the weather allowed. Squatters (people who could not afford to buy land) would come across this land and claim it as their own as there was nobody settled on it. In Andrew Jackson’s State of the Union Address (Document 10), he states, “The consequences of a speedy removal will be important to the United States, to individual States, and to the Indians themselves…It puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the General and State Governments on account of the Indians/ By opening the whole territory between Tennessee on the north and Louisiana on the south to the settlement of the whites it will incalculably

Document 5 of the Council of 1973 states that the federal government had directed U.S. troops to destroy squatters homes and other structures but the commissioners pointed to the existing crops and homes of settlers as justification for U.S. ownership of Indian land. The commissioners had said that the time had come for the Indians to sign over that land to the United States (pg 50). They see this as a go-ahead on taking and controlling the Indian’s land. Thomas Jefferson in the Second Inaugural Address states, “humanity enjoins us to teach them (Indian’s) agriculture and the domestic arts: to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence and liberally furnish them with the implements of husbandry and household use” (pg 56). He is trying to say that the Indian’s do not know how to survive on their own and that they need the help from the settlers on how to survive, when in reality they have already been surviving for so long without their help. He also tries to domesticate them saying that they “furnished them with the implements of husbandry and household use.” He wants Indian’s to live by the white mans mean of life and not live how they have been living for already so many years. In Andrew Jackson’s State of the Union Address, he shows similarities of wanting to domesticate and change the way the Indians live. He says,