After the Civil War: Manifest Destiny Re-evaluated
Four years of Civil War (1861-1865) between the North and the South brought Manifest Destiny to a halt. In the era of Republican political hegemony that followed, commercial expansion appeared more appealing to most Americans than did territorial expansion, marking an important shift away from Manifest Destiny and toward America's long-term embrace of commercial empire.
The US Army was reduced in size from a wartime high of one million men, to 29,000 in 1871. In addition to fulfilling its traditional role as a police force on the Indian frontier, the army also engaged in the military occupation of the South, and suppressing labor unrest in urban areas. Expansionism took on a strictly commercial character in the later nineteenth century, with the Republican Party proving an enthusiastic proponent of the expansion of America's commercial might abroad by dominating international trade. They argued that commercial expansion was cheaper than annexation, and saved the United States from incorporating the undesirable populations of foreign lands into the US polity.[2362]The US Senate ratified William Seward's treaty to buy Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000 in 1867 over strong public objections to the expense, the seeming worthlessness of the land, and the Native American inhabitants of the region. Only three years later the Senate rejected a treaty negotiated by President Ulysses S. Grant to annex the Dominican Republic, largely because of public unwillingness to incorporate the mostly non-white population into the republic. In the 1840s racism had encouraged Manifest Destiny. In the post-bellum years, racism proved a barrier against it.
Many Democratic proponents of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s and 1850s had argued that non-white residents of newly annexed territories would amalgamate and blend into the multiplying white population of the United States.
From the start of the nineteenth century, opponents of territorial expansion questioned this reasoning and doubted that American political, social, and religious practices could survive with a diverse population spread over great distances. But after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, Northerners and Southerners showed an unwillingness to recognize the political rights of non-white people. Northern Republicans withdrew their support from Reconstruction in the 1870s and shifted to healing the “rift” between white Southerners and Northerners by asserting a shared white supremacy. They allowed Southern “redeemers” to disenfranchise and terrorize the black citizenry of the South.[2363]The collapse of Reconstruction and ensuing attempts to find common ground between white Northerners and Southerners inhibited expansionism. It also led to the retrospective reimagining by white Americans of the Manifest Destiny of the 1840s and 1850s as a peaceful process of family settlement, a national movement in which the North and South were partners before the horrors of Civil War. The violence of Indian Removal, the U.S.-Mexico War, and filibustering were forgotten. Instead, the myth of a “virgin West,” empty and waiting for US settlement, was propagated even as war against the Plains Indians heated up in the 1870s. While the United States proved more than willing to use military force to protect US business interests, particularly in Latin America, few politicians showed interest in annexing new territories.
Expansion abroad came to a standstill just as vast expanses of the US interior were finally being settled. Advances in farming and building technology enabled white farmers to cultivate land on the plains previously considered uninhabitable, and liberal federal land policies led to a land rush in the last three decades of the century. In 1864, US soldiers massacred the inhabitants of a Cheyenne village in Sand Creek, Colorado, while dealing with a general uprising by the Sioux that spread from Minnesota through the homeland of the Sioux in Dakota Territory and to Montana.
American losses were minimal until 1866, when a band of Sioux under the command of Red Cloud killed 81 men in Wyoming. In 1868 the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche agreed to move to specific areas from which whites were forbidden. Indians in California and Nevada were also settled in reservations after a decade or more of vicious treatment at the hands of white settlers.[2364]But US hegemony remained far from complete on the plains, and the ability of the army to secure transcontinental travel routes in the 1870s and to keep Indians isolated on their reservations was limited. After gold was discovered in Sioux territory in 1875, tens of thousands of miners descended on Sioux lands. The resulting Sioux War, in which George Armstrong Custer and 224 US soldiers were killed at the Battle of Little Big Horn, was the last major Indian war, and marked the near-total subjugation of Indian peoples within the continental United States. The ultimate willingness of tribes in the northern and southern plains to submit to the reservation system was the result of the near extinction of bison herds after the introduction of guns into the region, drought, and disease, more than the power of the US Army, and in absolute terms the Plains Wars, although of crucial importance to US territorial expansion, came at little cost to the United States, either in lives lost, or the buildup of military capability.[2365]
In 1890 the director of the US Census observed that the continent was settled, and the frontier was closed. Three years later, historian Frederick Jackson Turner introduced his “frontier thesis,” arguing that the “American” identity was forged on the frontier. This immensely influential formulation suggested the need for further territorial growth if the United States was to continue to grow and develop.