frontier )) Jefferson could not have been clearer in his directions. He believed that for American commercial interests, westward expansion would offer a greater access to a lucrative foreign market. In the 1840’s, American politicians, anxious to compete with Great Britain over the Asia trade, were also convinced of the strategic and commercial advantages of San Francisco and other ports on the Pacific coast of the Mexican-owned California. Most important of all, perhaps, was the growing sense of anxiety that the Americans felt towards Great Britain. Inevitably, this fear had grown as the USA began to define its strategic and economic interests, which of course now extended the limits of its own borders. Indeed, the United States view Great Britain as their only rival for control of the Pacific coast. For instance, by the mid 1840’s, rumours about Great Britain plotting with Mexico to prevent Washington from annexing the Texas Republic gradually arose. So, US expansionism took a greater sense of urgency, and Democrat James K. Polk, elected on a pro-expansionist platform, moved quickly to annex Texas as the twenty-eighth state of the Union. ***** ***** ***** In the mid 40’s, westward expansion found a new justification in a doctrine coined by John O’Sullivan in 1845 : “Manifest Destiny”. Indeed, in an attempt to explain America’s thirst for expansion, he wrote in the New York Morning News, in a editorial headed “ the true title”, that “ [the American claim] is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self-government entrusted to us ”. He even goes a step further, adding that “ it is a right such as that of a tree to the space of air and earth suitable for the full expansion of its pr...
