A learned friend of rather retro views likes to muse from time to time on the North America that might have been: a balkanized continent without the miniature tribalisms that have plagued the actual Balkans, which, so said a Saki character, “produce more history than they can consume locally.” In this thought experiment we might now have a quilt of commonwealths: New England, Midatlantica, the Confederacy, New France in the Mississippi Valley, and perhaps even a New Spain in the Southwest.

General Stephen Watts Kearny

It was not to be, and just why it wasn’t is obviously a very complicated story. But one factor was a journalistic phrase that electrified American political discourse in 1845 and after: “Manifest Destiny.” An ideological notion that drew upon the contours of the map but also upon the idea that the United States owed tutelary responsibility to the world as the citadel of thrusting democratic experimentation. The phrase is usually attributed to a wordy New York editor, John L. O’Sullivan, who wrote of the annexation of Texas that it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” The ascription of this destiny to “Providence” added a pleasing metaphysical spin to raw ambition.