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A belief that God wanted the U.S to expand westward.

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The Manifest Destiny brought more land for agriculture.

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The Manifest Destiny brought money, land, and resources to the Americans.

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Manifest Destiny also had a substantial impact on the people of the United states, it is what made the people themselves decide to "Go West!" Manifest Destiny inspired people to explore and settle in the west. The abundance of land in the west, along with new markets, and personal economic problems of people in the east were reasons that people liked this idea, it was an answer to their problems. People were convinced that they would be better off attempting a fresh start in the West. After the last expansion, gold was discovered at Sutter's' Mill, bringing many more Americans from the East, and benefitting them greatly, even bringing in people from outside America. This revolutionized America's economy. Manifest Destiny brought money, land, resources, and a strengthened economy to the Americans.

There were also negative effects of Manifest Destiny. This idea that it was their destiny to expand caused Americans to disregard the territorial rights of Native Americans, wiping out many tribes and causing a cultural divide, tension and wars. The negative effect that this had on Native Americans were lasting effects. Manifest Destiny also caused war and tension with Mexico for the same reasons. Manifest Destiny caused americans to feel entitled, greedy, power hungry, they wanted to be the best, which are poor qualities to have. Another negative effect was the affect this had on slavery. With the expansion came more farms, which in turn meant a greater need for slave workers, although Manifest Destiny later brought on debates about slaves, helping to end slavery.

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Manifest Destiny also had a substantial impact on the people of the United states, it is what made the people themselves decide to "Go West!" Manifest Destiny inspired people to explore and settle in the west.

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Started wars over land.

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Manifest Destiny - the term used to describe the inevitability of American domination of the North American continent - has always been ill-defined and somewhat vague. It was and is based in the belief that the American people possessed a divine blessing and that it was a moral and spiritual duty to spread democracy and Christianity across the continent and the world. It was not as popular a concept as most believe today, Abraham Lincoln opposed it, as did Henry Clay, Ulysses S. Grant, Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, Mark Twain, and many other prominent leaders. Even the origination of the term is somewhat vague.

The concept was originally called divine destiny by John L. O'Sullivan, a journalist who wrote of the duty of the United States "to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man." Six years later he called his concept of America's duty to spread its divine blessings manifest destiny. Cited through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by expansionists, manifest destiny led to wars with Mexico and Spain, border disputes with England and Mexico, and the acquisition of overseas territories. It was far more than simply settling the continental United States.

Here are ten consequences of the concept of manifest destiny and the belief that it was America's divinely appointed mission.

The Louisiana Purchase and the beginning of expansion

The concept of manifest destiny was not uttered by that name until 1845, but it really began with the Louisiana Purchase. The area of the United States doubled in size, and the idea that American democracy should and would be expanded into the new territory took hold. Political leaders in Washington of both parties seized upon the idea that such expansion was a moral imperative. The Louisiana Purchase also led to the increase in sectionalism that eventually led to the American Civil War. Not all politicians supported expansion into the West because of the slavery issue.

Northern Whigs opposed the idea of the creation of additional slave states while Southern Democratic-Republicans were eager to move into the territories of the West. The issue was largely dormant until the War of 1812, during which the United States sought to invade and conquer parts of Canada to secure its northern borders from future British transgression. The War of 1812 ended on the basis of Status Quo Antebellum, meaning there were no changes to borders or cession of territory by either belligerent. The United States also rejected a British proposal to establish an Indian state below the Great Lakes.

One reason the British proposed the Indian State was to stop American expansion across the continent, where they had significant fur trading interests in the Oregon Country. American victories in the war effectively ended the Indian threat east of the Mississippi River in the North and South and the settlements of the Midwestern and Southern states grew rapidly. By the 1820s American settlers were pouring into Texas, then a province of Mexico, at the invitation of the Mexican government. Many of these settlers were slaveowners from the Southern states of Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi.

In 1829 the President of the United States of Mexico, as it was then styled by its constitution, abolished slavery by presidential order, freeing all slaves in the Republic, including those in the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas. It became one of the leading issues of the Texas Revolution, when leaders in Texas claimed that the Mexican constitution did not address the issue of slavery nor give the President the authority to abolish the practice. The Mexicans were preoccupied by Spanish attempts to reconquer Mexico and did not have the manpower to intervene in Texas, as more and more Americans immigrated to the Mexican state.

In 1836 the Texas Revolution, with its battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto, established its independence from Mexico. The Republic of Texas drafted its own constitution, following the requirements which would make it eligible for statehood, and allowing slavery within its boundaries. It then requested annexation by the United States. The annexation of Texas would be one of the early tests of the concept of manifest destiny, and led to some of the strongest arguments for and against its existence as a divinely assigned duty of the United States. Texas and the debates over its annexation generated began the political decline of the United States into Civil War.

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10 Events in the Path of Manifest Destiny

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Manifest Destiny - the term used to describe the inevitability of American domination of the North American continent - has always been ill-defined and somewhat vague. It was and is based in the belief that the American people possessed a divine blessing and that it was a moral and spiritual duty to spread democracy and ...

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Indians was getting their land taken from them.

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The Manifest Destiny expanded the U.S.

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The Manifest Destiny was unconstitutional and slavery was still going on around this time so it spreaded.

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Like most people uprooted by the Cherokee Trail of Tears, Eliza Whitmire experienced terrible trauma.

In 1830, the U.S. government passed the Indian Removal Act. Eliza was about five years old when more than 3,000 armed militia arrived in Cherokee country in 1838. The militia companies forced her, her family and her community to march more than 1,000 miles west-through Northern Georgia, across the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, to present-day Oklahoma.

Her mother described "the bitter memory" of "women and children...driven from their homes, sometimes with blows." The sick, young and elderly sometimes rode in wagons, but the majority of the tens of thousands being displaced traversed the rugged territory on foot. Along the way, starvation posed a constant threat. It was a "time filled with horror and suffering for the unfortunate Cherokee and their slaves," Eliza later recalled.

She and her family were among those enslaved people. Their removal story differs slightly from traditional Trail of Tears narratives because they were of African descent, enslaved and forcibly removed along with their Cherokee owners.

Eliza Whitmire's story highlights the underreported complexities of slavery and the American frontier. Few historical narratives, for example, tell the story of a Georgia plantation owned and operated by Cherokee enslavers. And few chronicles of the frontier account for its human diversity. Often depicted as territory "discovered" and "tamed" by heroic white men, the frontier was, in many ways, America's first melting pot. It was a place where indigenous people, and those of European, African and Mexican descent came into contact and tried to sort out their roles. And it was, for many who came there, a place shaped more by slavery than by freedom or opportunity.

Pushing Slavery Into New Regions for Farming and Ranching

To understand the story of enslavement in the West is to understand the history of land acquisition, cotton production and gold fever. Leaving coastal states in search of farmable land and natural resources, settlers pushed their way west-and once they crossed the Mississippi River-into newly acquired Louisiana and later Texas. The fever of Manifest Destiny, a term coined in 1845 by American journalist John O' Sullivan, justified territorial expansion. White settlers believed it was their duty and right to conquer the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific, to spread their democratic ideals and "civilized" ways.

Sometimes, husbands went first to secure a place, and then sent for wives and children. Other families traveled together to the West. Many brought their enslaved laborers, pushing slavery into new regions and breathing new life into an institution that had been increasingly under legislative and moral attack. While ephemeral records make an accurate count impossible, historians estimate that close to 200,000 slaves traveled and worked the American frontier between 1830 and 1860.

One such migrant family was George Paschal and his wife, Sarah Ridge, whose story underscores the diversity of Western settlers-and their dependence on slavery. Sarah was the daughter of Cherokee leader Major Ridge, a wealthy slaveholder in the Cherokee Nation in Georgia before Indian Removal. Paschal came to Georgia with a voluntary militia sent to enforce Cherokee removal. They married, and by 1838, settled in Van Buren, Arkansas, where he worked as an attorney.

By the 1840s, however, enticed by his brother's claims that Texas was the land of opportunity, the couple moved their growing family and their slaves to Galveston. In 1850, Ridge and Paschal divorced, with Ridge retaining their house in Galveston and their 12 slaves. By the mid-1850s, she moved her family to Chambers County, Texas in the southeastern part of the state, remarried a man 20 years her junior and set up a thriving cattle ranch dependent on enslaved labor. Paschal moved to Austin and became known for his opposition to Texas secession and to its siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Explorers Traveled With Enslaved

Like settlers, explorers of the American West also brought enslaved people to the frontier. Perhaps the most famous examples: York and Sacagawea, who journeyed across the continent as part of the Lewis & Clark expedition. In 1803, when President Thomas Jefferson authorized the Louisiana Purchase from France, and the new nation doubled in size, he asked Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to study the landscape, assess its economic potential and scout a passage to the Pacific coast.

Like many enslaved people brought along on journeys west, York provided invaluable support for Lewis and Clark's expedition. Accounts from expedition reports and Clark's letters reveal that York served as a scout, assisted in cooking, hauled supplies and helped construct shelters and forts. And unlike most in bondage, he was permitted to handle a gun and hunt.

Another valuable enslaved person on the expedition was Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman sold into marriage to a French trader. Her knowledge and understanding of the environment helped the expedition navigate unfamiliar territory and avoid starvation during the harsh Rocky Mountain winter. And her skills as an interpreter helped ease the explorers' interactions with native groups they encountered. Not only did she facilitate communication, but her presence in the exploring party no doubt helped Lewis and Clark avoid armed conflict with the Native peoples in the region, since Native women rarely accompanied Plains Indian war parties.

The Gold Rush Fostered Slavery

Perhaps no other region in the West illustrates the dichotomy between opportunity and bondage more than California. In 1848, " gold rush fever" swept the region when gold nuggets were found at Sutter's Mill. Thousands of people, enslaved and free, flooded the region, hoping to strike it rich.

Generally, owners severely limited their slaves' mobility or handling of money. But for some, the enticement of easy riches loosened those strictures. William Campbell, for one, a white man who lived in Indian Territory, sent his slave, Green, to California with instructions to bring back 1,200 dollars' worth of gold. Perhaps because he sent Green along with his brother-in-law and a diverse group of men, Campbell might have thought Green would be less likely to escape.

But to Green, freedom was more precious than gold. Much to Campbell's dismay, he found his opportunity to liberate himself: After a quarrel with some of the men in the group while passing through Texas, he escaped to Mexico, where slavery was illegal.

If Green had made it to California, he would have encountered other enslaved people working in the gold mines and on ranches in the Sonoma Valley-as well 300,000 migrants of all nationalities who had arrived to this region by 1860. The slave population included not just African Americans, but Native Americans as well. In fact, Native American slavery was legalized in California in 1850 with the state legislature's passage of the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. Through this legislation, Native Americans had to provide documentation of employment or they would be arrested for vagrancy and sold to the highest bidder.

While the traditional history of the American frontier has long been one of white settlers in conflict with indigenous people, recent scholarship has rewritten that narrative, revealing it to be a far more complex place. Settling new territory required hard labor, and even as the Abolitionist movement grew back East, economic incentives on the frontier outweighed moral imperatives.
Daina Ramey Berry is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a scholar of the enslaved and the award-winning author/editor of books on slavery including The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, the Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Follow her on twitter @DainaRameyBerry. Nakia D. Parker is an assistant professor of history at the Michigan State University. Her research is on the history of gender, slavery and migration in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations.

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How U.S. Westward Expansion Breathed New Life into Slavery | HISTORY

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The 19th-century American West has long been described as a land of opportunity. But for many, it was little more than another place of bondage.

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I think the Manifest Destiny was a good thing for the most part. I don’t agree with everything that they did but it helped make the west side of the U.S. Not every plan is going to go perfect. I didn’t think it was fair that they took Native Americans land again.