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Manifest destiny was a widely held cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny:
The special virtues of the American people and their institutions
The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of the agrarian East
An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty
Historian Frederick Merk says this concept was born out of "a sense of mission to redeem the Old World by high example … generated by the potentialities of a new earth for building a new heaven". In contemporary culture many have condemned manifest destiny as an ideology that was used to justify genocide against Native Americans.
Historians have emphasized that "manifest destiny" was a contested concept—Democrats endorsed the idea but many prominent Americans (such as Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and most Whigs) rejected it. Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes, "American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity … Whigs saw America's moral mission as one of democratic example rather than one of conquest." Historian Frederick Merk likewise concluded: "From the outset Manifest Destiny—vast in program, in its sense of continentalism—was slight in support. It lacked national, sectional, or party following commensurate with its magnitude. The reason was it did not reflect the national spirit. The thesis that it embodied nationalism, found in much historical writing, is backed by little real supporting evidence."
Newspaper editor John O'Sullivan is generally credited with coining the term manifest destiny in 1845 to describe the essence of this mindset; some historians believe, however, that the unsigned editorial titled "Annexation" in which it first appeared was written by journalist and annexation advocate Jane Cazneau. The term was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the Mexican–American War and it was also used to negotiate the Oregon boundary dispute. However, manifest destiny always limped along because of its internal limitations and the issue of slavery in the United States, says Merk, and never became a national priority. By 1843, former U.S. President John Quincy Adams, originally a major supporter of the concept underlying manifest destiny, had changed his mind and repudiated expansionism because it meant the expansion of slavery in Texas.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia, Adolf Hitler's Lebensraum was the "Manifest Destiny" for Germany's romanticization and imperial conquest of Eastern Europe. Hitler compared Nazi expansion to American expansion westward, saying, “there's only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins."
