Student Question
What did Emerson mean by "Mexico will poison us," and was he correct? Is "Manifest Destiny" a new idea in the 1840s?
Quick answer:
When Emerson wrote that "Mexico will poison us," he meant the acquisition of Texas would spread the poison of slavery to the western United States and increase tensions between slave owners and abolitionists. He was right, as tensions did rise, eventually leading to the Civil War. Manifest Destiny was a new term but based on an old idea: God giving America to whites had been a part of American history from the earliest Puritan colonization.
Emerson recorded these words in his journal. Like most transcendentalists, including Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay taxes to support the Mexican-America War, Emerson saw the acquisition of Texas as a dangerous expansion of slavery. By calling it poison, he indicated that this was an expansion that would increase tensions between slaveowners and abolitionists. On a deeper moral level, Emerson saw slavery itself as a poison destroying America and understood a vast new slave state as an added dose of this corrosive moral poison.
Emerson was right in his surmise, as the expansion of slavery to Texas only exacerbated the tensions that led to the Civil War.
'Manifest Destiny' might be a new term, but the concept was as old as the English colonization of America. From its earliest beginnings, English colonists understood the American continent as a gift given to them by God. Puritan Jonathan Winthrop, for...
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example, designated the Massachusetts Bay Colony a "city on a hill" that the entire world would look to as an exceptional experiment blessed by God, while the Plymouth Bay Colony's William Bradford saw the successful establishment of his colony as a sign of God's providence. From early on, colonists' fashioned the colonial narrative on God giving the Promised Land to the Israelites, arguing their occupation was similarly an act of destiny. This continued in the earliest days of the new republic after the break with England, as the country eagerly expanded westward.
What did Emerson mean by "Mexico will poison us"? Was he right? Was "Manifest Destiny" new in the 1840s?
As a term, Manifest Destiny was first used by a magazine editor in 1845. In 1844, James K. Polk was elected to the presidency. He was the personification of Manifest Destiny, and he sought to acquire Oregon, Texas, and California; California was coveted for its minerals, fecund farmland, and great harbors. Polk was a determined and hard-working president, and his presidency was a great success for proponents of Manifest Destiny.
In a sense, Manifest Destiny predated Polk's presidency. The acquisition of Florida, the Louisiana Purchase, and America's unrelenting push westward were clear manifestations of what would later be known as Manifest Destiny. In this way, Manifest Destiny was a part of American history long before its culmination in the 1840s.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was prescient enough to realize that the acquisition of vast territories from Mexico would exacerbate sectional divisions over the slavery question. The South was eager to expand slavery to new territories in the West, and the North was equally determined to prevent its expansion.
There was bitter debate in the United States over the status of lands won from Mexico in 1848. Finally, the Compromise of 1850 was reached. This only delayed civil war for a decade, though.