Manifest Destiny: Life In Antebellum America

Life in antebellum America was full of opportunity. What makes the antebellum period enriched with opportunity different from the other periods of possibility is that this opportunity did not just extend to or benefit privileged, white males. The Irish, who were not yet considered to be what we as a people would now classify as white in present day, The Texans, Women, Intellectuals, the Americans in general, and even the American slaves had at least some window of opportunity during the antebellum period. However determining exactly how big or small the window of opportunity is for a group of people mainly depends on who you are, a woman, a slave, an immigrant or otherwise. The hierarchy of which groups of people had to most or the least window …show more content…
Emotion is what this movement was driven by, rather than calculations or what is considered rational thinking. Romanticism plays into the theme of expansion because it was the expansion of emotion and possibility. These authors wrote about dreams being achieved and love being fulfilled. They expanded their minds past the science of everything and let their emotions run wild and go to places where the science would hold them back from. This was also an expansion for women, as more female authors could contribute and more female readers …show more content…
Manifest Destiny is the idea that America was destined to expanded from the east coast all the way to the west coast. People believed that God made it America’s destiny to expand and therefore, by God’s will, America was chooses to expand their civilization coast to coast below Canada’s border. John O’Sullivan, a journalist, coined this term and the name only increased the wanting for pioneers to expand further towards the western frontier. Unlike Romanticism and the Women’s movement, this movement is mainly just physical. However one can argue that it is not completely physical because of the heavy emphasis on God being the source of this expansion, therefore the heavy emphasis of religion being the driving factor for this physical expansion. Also, since one of the reasons given for expanding westward was to expand the ideas of America’s civilization, one could argue that this is also a movement and expansion of America’s culture. Nevertheless, although this movement could connect to Romanticism and the Women’s movement because they all expand and spread different ideologies, Manifest Destiny is unique in the way that it involved the physical movement of over a quarter of a million people and in the way it incorporates