Sail On! Sail On! O Ship of State
Sail on O UNION strong and great
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Building of the Ship” (1849)
Visiting America from France in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by the restless energy of Americans and their apparent lack of attachment to place. “No sooner do you set foot on American soil than you find yourself in a sort of tumult,” de Tocqueville wrote. “All around you, everything is on the move.” From the Louisiana Purchase onward, much of that 19th century movement was westward and American freedom was linked with availability of land in the west. In 1843 Jacksonian politician George Bancroft began his history of the United States not with the revolution of 1776 but with Columbus’s voyage of 1492, a longer timeframe with which he hoped “to make America’s founding appear inevitable and its growth inexorable.” The spread of evangelical Christianity, new technology and American-style democracy convinced Bancroft that the United States was bound by God to carry these improvements across the continent.
Irish-born New York journalist John L. O’Sullivan argued that democracy was “Christianity in its earthly aspect” and he first used the phrase “manifest destiny” to mean the United States had a divinely appointed mission to occupy all of North America. Americans, said O’Sullivan in 1845, had a far better title to western lands than any international treaty, right of discovery, or long-term settlement could provide and the people of the United States were fated to “possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given for the great experiment of liberty.” At its core was the idea that Native Americans in the West were either irrelevant, or needed to be civilized.
In the decades leading up to the civil war, 300,000 settlers headed west to Oregon and California. Inspired by expansionist fever most Americans supported the war against Mexico in 1846 (Lincoln and Henry David Thoreau among the few notable voices of objection) after which one million square miles of California, New Mexico and Texas joined the Union. The discovery of gold in California took the clash of Free Soilers and Slavery across the continent and laid the foundation for the civil war. As future Secretary of State William Seward put it, America was destined to “roll its resistless waves to the icy barrier of the north, and to encounter Oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific.”
As America came to grips with the sectional crisis in the 1850s caused by its vast new territories, expansionist fever waned. Thomas Francis Meagher was a willing and eager recruit for the cause of manifest destiny from the time he was first invited to California in 1854. With no safe overland way across the continent, Meagher had to take a ship to Central America and cross the narrow isthmus before taking another ship up to California. Meagher went from New York to San Juan Del Norte on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast which the British captured in 1841 and renamed Greytown. After the California Gold Rush in 1849 America secured a treaty with Nicaragua for a transit route. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company promised to build a canal and carried thousands each month from Greytown to the Pacific coast. In 1850 Britain and America signed the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty under which Britain maintained control of the port while the US owned the vessels, hotels and land transportation along the route. Meagher was concerned Britain would annex Central America and believed America needed to get in first to secure the route between its east and west coast states.
Meagher’s Irish News quoted with approval an 1856 piece in the Nation which described manifest destiny as “legitimate annexation” and meant “England must yield every inch of territory she has unjustly gained and every pretense of authority she has presumed to put forward in Central America.” Meagher also supported the filibustering regime of Walker in Nicaragua, and defended Walker and his lieutenants in American courts in 1857. When Meagher made his first trip to Costa Rica in 1858 to promote Irish immigration, he promoted Costa Rica’s climate and landscape which he thought potential immigrants would find comfortingly similar. “English wheat and clover, the Irish potato, the American pumpkin, peaches, apples, plums, quinces and strawberries” all found “the most encouraging nurture” in Costa Rica, he wrote. His visit amounted to little except for rowdy sessions in the mountains where they “ate, drank, talked preposterous politics, shouted the Marseillaise, spread ourselves on Manifest Destiny and ox hides, smoked, drank again, and finally fell off to sleep.” His two visits in 1860 in 1860 were more openly political, first delivering state papers to the US minister and then acting as an agent for Andrew Thompson’s planned railway through Chiraqui, which again was a failure.
After the civil war Meagher once again promoted Manifest Destiny, this time looking westward. In 1862 Congress passed the Homestead Act which allowed citizens to acquire parcels of undeveloped land of up to 160 acres free of charge after improving and living on the land for five years, and in the decades that followed the war, millions of predominantly white homesteaders claimed land across western America. Arriving in Saint Paul, Meagher told locals he was there to “improve his condition” and set an example to returning soldiers for whom “the untapped resources across the Mississippi” would give them a more satisfactory life.
But Meagher and other settlers failed to take into account those who had already tapped those resources. Steeped in notions of racial superiority and the John Locke philosophy that property in land derived from agricultural improvement, American authorities did little to prevent the mass displacement of Native peoples that followed. Indian tribes had been forcibly ejected from the eastern states and now the discovery of gold was making life difficult in the west. Nineteenth century American politicians, Lincoln included, had no idea how to stop the extermination. According to Dee Brown, Manifest Destiny was invented to justify breaches of the Indian frontier, “a term which lifted land hunger to a lofty plane.” America’s Irish population were also unable to imagine the parallels with their own country. The Boston Pilot saw the Indian wars as a “struggle between civilization and barbarism that has agitated the world forever” while Meagher told an Irish-American audience America’s colonial history was a time “when it was a prey to the Indians.”
Meagher had misgivings about the fairness of the Fort Benton Treaty in 1865 but he believed it was the Indians who reneged on the treaty not the whites. In his message to the first 1866 Montana legislature he referred to Indian “rascalities and crimes—the robberies and murders” which showed a “costly and wasteful policy with which it was believed in Washington the Indians could be tamed and subsidized,” while the whites at Fort Benton were “harassed and hemmed by these savages.” After the Fetterman Massacre later that year, settler paranoia about Indian “depredations” increased. Sherman told Grant “both races cannot use this country in common and one or the other must withdraw.” While Sherman was annoyed by frontier whites outrunning his efforts to force Native peoples onto reservations, to him it only underlined that the process of dispossession needed to be hastened. Sherman was no fan of Meagher but he reluctantly agreed to provide the rifles to him to help him force that withdrawal. But the delivery of these guns led to Meagher’s own death, the Irishman becoming a victim of his own stampede.
Woolly Days 
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