And with that, journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny.” He was writing about the ongoing dispute with Britain over boundaries and the right of the United States to claim Oregon, but his words had much more far-reaching implications.
O’Sullivan was an outspoken member of the group of intellectuals and politicians who developed a new, voracious ideology of American expansionism in the 1840s. By the following year, 1846, theirs had become the dominant national position with the Manifest Destiny-fueled policies of President James K. Polk and the Mexican American War, when the United States invaded Mexico and took half its territory. That seized territory became much of what we think of today as the American West: including California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, plus parts of what we now know as Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.
Driven by assumptions about the morality, divinity, freedom, and presumed superiority of a white America, through the lens of Manifest Destiny, western expansion was viewed not only as a triumph for the spread of liberty, but it was also seen as foreordained and inevitable. In the face of the claims of divine providence, the legal claims of other nations, let alone the unmentioned claims of American Indians who lived on western lands, were mere “cobweb tissues” to be brushed away.
Manifest Destiny is thus foundational to the origin story of the American West, California, and San Francisco. A rich body of humanities scholarship has critically analyzed the histories and legacies of western expansion that the ideology of Manifest Destiny enabled. But Manifest Differently takes the position that much of the general public, while likely familiar with the phrase Manifest Destiny, has lacked the tools to think deeply about its historical and contemporary meanings and implications. To remedy this, Manifest Differently combines the insights of cutting-edge humanities scholarship and the powerfully evocative work of visual, literary, and media arts, to wake people up to the history of Manifest Destiny, how it was expressed in California, and how it impacted, and continues to impact, California’s multi-ethnic and multi-cultural communities. Manifest Differently flips the script from the still often typical focus on railroad barons, industrialists, and hardy, white pioneers to all the people on the other side of the story, to grapple with their complex experiences and responses to Manifest Destiny’s realities and legacies, providing much-needed tools for manifesting a different future.
The 1619 Project is one very powerful response to this need, albeit with an East Coast focus. With similar intent, Manifest Differently seeks to both reveal and revise America’s origin story on the West Coast, to give people a wide variety of ways to connect with and explore the history of Manifest Destiny, from a range of diverse perspectives, what it meant in the past and what it means today, and to motivate people to engage with the past in ways that open their eyes and reshape how they see and relate to the present and the future.
Differing opinions about expansion were evident in the refusal, between 1836 and 1844, of the United States to annex Texas. The Mexican American War, with its explicitly expansionist aims, was the source of bitter divisions and conflicts over the extension of slavery into new territories that culminated in the Civil War. And since most of the people living on the western lands were people of color, in a country that was loudly and proudly racist, the absorption of large numbers of nonwhites was not a popular proposal. Fear of incorporating non-whites into the American body politic – either through the expansion of slavery or the annexation of areas of Mexico (and later Hawaii and other Pacific Islands) – was ultimately resolved by Manifest Destiny’s entrenchment of white supremacy and accompanying beliefs in the inferiority of the conquered and colonized.
With the United States’ conquest of California in 1848, San Francisco and Manifest Destiny essentially grew up together.
The assumptions embedded in Manifest Destiny not only justified the territorial acquisition, but they also drove California’s economy, the race and labor relations that would prevail in the new state under American rule, and the population boom that gave birth to San Francisco as a city. From a small Mexican pueblo of roughly 900 people in 1848, San Francisco by 1875 had become the most important city in the West with a population near 150,000.
The state’s earliest legislation quickly began delineating who belonged in this new society and who did not. In 1849, California’s State Constitution decreed that Mexicans could be granted citizenship because they fell under the rubric of the category “white,” whereas California Indians were considered nonwhite and thus could not be citizens.
A few years later, in 1854, the California Supreme Court in People v. Hall denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants by decreeing that they “were generically ‘Indians’ and therefore, nonwhite.” The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, passed by the state legislature in 1850, denied California Indians the right to testify in court and allowed them to be held as indentured servants—which was nothing but a euphemism for varying types of slavery. In 1856 California’s government issued a bounty of $0.25 per Indian scalp that was raised to $5.00 in 1860. Foreign Miners’ Taxes, aimed at Chinese and Latin American immigrants, were passed as early as 1850. And Mexican land grants were no match in American courts for the miners, squatters, and homesteaders who overran Californio land.
Certainly, tens of thousands of California Indian people died in the Spanish missions, and by the time the United States took control, they had already been subjected to close to 80 years of enslavement and dislocation. But it is crucial to understand that under U.S. governance, California Indians died at an even more alarming rate.
The people who poured into California mined, logged, and otherwise appropriated Indigenous Californians’ remaining places of safety in their homelands. American civilians—supported by the state and, at times, the nation’s military—inflicted organized vigilante violence and outright massacres. Pollution of ancestral lands from mining and other industries was also a form of violence.
Between 1846 and 1870, the population of Indigenous Californians plunged from around 150,000 to only 30,000. By 1880, census takers recorded that just under 17,000 Indigenous people remained. But, in the face of this genocide, indigenous Californians survived and, with strength and resilience, kept alive their cultures and traditions. They did not disappear. They defied the Manifest Destiny-infused evolutionary logic of the day.