![]() The act of Manifest Destiny didn’t sit well with those who shared the continent with the land-hungry young country. The Democratic Review and the New York Morning News, both owned by John O’Sullivan, posted editorials in the summer of 1845 coining the phrase Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny was on its way, but had yet to be fully realized as a concept that would properly define what the people of the United States were feeling. After the hard-won effort to admit Texas into the Union in 1845, politicians and their constituents were dead set on expanding to the west coast. At the same time, Lewis and Clark were opening up far-flung regions of the west all the way to the coast and plans to purchase land in Florida and Texas were well on their way. That land purchase of more than 800,000 miles nearly doubled the size of the young country and gave much needed elbow room to its growing population. The westward expansion began when President Thomas Jefferson approved the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Unfortunately, there were also two economic depressions twenty years apart that pushed people out of the crammed cities toward the hope of wide open spaces in the west. ![]() The population swelled from 5 million people in 1800 to more than 23 million just five decades later. ![]() The underlying concept of Manifest Destiny came from the belief in the 19th century that the United States had the God-given right to expand its territories across the entire continent. The party evolved into the Republican Party, which Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig, would eventually lead as president in 1860. The internal pressures of the expansion of slavery pulled the party apart as anti-slavery members vied for the rights of a growing population. They were General William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848. Surprise.While the Whig Party faltered in its quest to halt Manifest Destiny by its Democratic Party foes, it saw two presidents elected to further their cause during their 20-year reign. Most of Hawaii's natives were opposed to annexation because a couple of centuries of history told them everything they need to know about being Indigenous under white rule, but no one asked them, and their wishes didn't factor into the decision. decided to just annex the place already and be done with it. The white settlers formed a provisional government and for a while it was chaos - Hawaiian royalists tried to take back the government, the former queen was accused of treason, and the U.S. Marines and Navy sailors and forced the queen to capitulate. ![]() Well, the wealthy white settlers couldn't have that, so they formed a militia with 162 U.S. But when Lili'uokalani took over she was all, "Hmm, this constitution is racist crap," so she proposed a new constitution that restored the monarchy's power and gave voting rights back to native Hawaiians. A few years before that, American settlers forced the Hawaiian king to sign a constitution that gave voting rights to wealthy (white) non-citizens, while disallowing Asian voters and decreeing that native Hawaiians could only vote if they were literate landowners. ![]()
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