The Great Destiny Of White Americans

We can still fulfill the prophecy. As the Commander said, “This time the world!”

The leaders of the Young Americans did not think of themselves as Anglo-Saxonists. They delighted in twisting the lion’s tail and argued that British power should be reduced and that the United States should resist British power pretensions. They did not want the Americans to be the supreme Anglo-Saxons, but rather a unique blend of European Caucasians; the Caucasus, said a writer in the Democratic Review in October 1852, was the ‘land of heroism and adventurous spirit, where man has attained the highest degree of external perfection, and whence the principal nations of Europe are supposed to derive their descent.’ 

Yet, like others who defended a distinct ‘American’ race while finding it difficult to accept pure Anglo-Saxonism, the Young Americans gave to the American race all the attributes usually given to the Anglo-Saxons. George Fitzhugh saw the Young Americans, for all their talk of universal regeneration, as part of the Anglo-Saxon movement. He said that the congressional members of the Young Americans ‘boast that the Anglo-Saxon race is manifestly destined to eat out all other races, as the wire-grass destroys and takes the places of other grasses. Nay, they allege this competitive process is going on throughout the all nature, the strong are everywhere devouring the weak; the hardier plants and animals destroying the weaker, and the superior races of man exterminating the inferior.’ The Young Americans often used a rhetoric of republicanism and world freedom, but the general tone of the Democratic Review  while it was under their influence revealed the extent to which they envisioned world dominated by the white American race. Lip service was paid to old ideas of regeneration, but the arguments were blended with a hard-core belief in the innate superiority and future American world dominance…

Asia became of particular interest to the expansionists because it appeared to offer limitless commercial opportunity while fulfilling the age-old dream of the westward movement of civilization. The American thrust into the Pacific was to be the grand culmination of the movement that had begun so long ago in the highlands of central Asia. Those Aryan tribesmen who had begun their march with the sun thousands of years before were now to return home. What had so long been prophesized was to come to pass: arts, sciences, religion, the whole of civilization were to return to their original birthplace after completing a circuit of the globe. 

Assumptions of overwhelming growth in population and power were a commonplace of expansionist writers in the 1850s. William H. Seward of New York prophesied an American population of two-hundred million by 1950 and thought that the sheer mass of white Americans would grow so large that it would swallow alien elements without a trace. In time Americans would settle in great numbers in the valley of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America. Only the inferior masses of Africans and Indians would remain unassimilated. Seward believed in a distinct American race—a race composed of the best elements of the Caucasians. This race was using the sea to create the greatest commercial empire the world had ever seen. ‘The world.’ He said, ‘contains no seat of empire as magnificent as this.’ 

William Gilpin, who was an impassioned believer in the westward movement of civilization, argued the ‘our North America will rapidly attain to a population equaling that of the rest of the world combined.’ Commodore Robert F. Stockton, who after his service in the navy and California flirted with a number of political movements including Young America and the America Party, said that even within its existing boundaries the United States would within fifty years ‘acquire more wealth and power than any sovereign potentate or dominion which now sways or ever before swayed any portion of the destiny of mankind.’ But he was unwilling that the ‘Anglo-American race’ should recoil from any boundary. 

Ultimately, as the Anglo-Saxons multiplied, many inferior races would disappear. As early as 1843 a writer in the Merchants’ Magazine suggested that the name Hawaii should be retained—’the indigenous population after they have disappeared before, or become absorbed in, the tide of western civilization, should yield a trace if their former existence, though it be but a name.’ The superior American race, said a writer in De Bow’s Review in 1852, was to achieve world dominance through replacing other peoples. Already by rapid colonization, the United States had supplanted the ‘inferior’ race on the Pacific coast. The same process would take place in Mexico, South America, Asia, and the Pacific as the American race advanced: ‘wherever they go, this inferior native population, as a result of amalgamation, and that great law of contact between higher and lower race, by which the latter gives way to the former, must be gradually supplanted, and its place occupied by the highest of races.’

Eventually, without wars of conquest, but through the laws of contact between superior and inferior races, the United States would in all probability ‘will occupy the entire extent of America, the rich and fertile plains of Asia, together with the intermediate isles of the sea, in fulfillment of the great purpose of heaven, of the ultimate enlightenment of the whole earth, and the gradual elevation of man to the dignity and glory of the promised millennial day.’ This, of course, was not the regeneration of the peoples of the world, but the creation of a better world by the replacement of a variety of other races by a superior race. 

-excerpt from “Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism” by Reginald Horsman (1981).