| Reading Guide for Week 8 | |
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“Manifest destiny” is a phrase associated with American expansion westward across the North American continent in the 1840s and 1850s, until the states and territories of the United States spanned from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. But the phrase was also applied to possibilities that some Americans entertained of more global expansion. As the American South was confronted by augmenting anti-slavery activism by the British empire, the American North, and newly independent Latin American countries, some Americans in the South (and allies in the North) eyed expansion to Cuba, Nicaragua, and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America. While this coveting of new territories for slavery sometimes involved more orthodox means, such as proposals to purchase Cuba from the Spanish empire, it also tempted more renegade constituencies: “filibusters.” These were mercenary military forces recruited in cities like New Orleans and New York which sought to annex Cuba, Nicaragua, and elsewhere into an expansionary, imperial United States. Tuesday Perhaps the most famous American filibuster was William Walker, a medical doctor who tenaciously strove, in different moments in the 1850s, to take over Alta California and Nicaragua, in order to re-install slavery there, and to usurp and then parcel out land for the benefit of the kinds of white Americans who might fantasize about operating slave plantations in the tropics. Touting his mission to expand the global domain of slavery, Walker justified both slavery and imperialism as supposedly civilizing forces. Thursday Various other Americans had their own reasons to object to “filibusters” like William Walker or Narciso Lopez. Some themselves coveted Cuba or Nicaragua, but believed in diifferent tactics more consistent with the U.S. Constitution and the “law of nations.” Some objected vigorously to the expansion of slavery in particular. They summoned their own political and ideological arguments against filibustering, and against slavery, but more rarely against the “manifest destiny” of American imperial expansion. |