Existing comment:
United and Divided:
Manifest Destiny and the Civil War:
In the mid-19th century, Americans' vision of Manifest Destiny seemed to unite the states in a shared destiny to settle and cultivate the trans-Mississippi West, while the volatile issue of slavery threatened to divide the existing union and the new frontier territories.
Linking his vision of American empire with the spread of democracy, New York journalist John L. O'Sullivan proclaimed in 1845, "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 federated self-government entrusted to us." Political and economic factors such as the Oregon Treaty (1846), the Mexican American War (1846-1848), the California Gold Rush (1849) and the completion of the transcontinental railroad (1869) fueled the expansion of American settlement in the West. Fine and popular art portrayed the landscape as being abundant in natural resources that supposedly were not being maximized by Native Americans, and it depicted pioneering frontiersman and river boatmen as idealized surrogates for the settlers who followed in their paths.
The American Civil War (1861-1865), which cost more American lives (600,000) than any other conflict, exposed deep regional, racial, and class differences and seriously undermined the nation's unity. Sectional differences over slave labor dominated American politics for several decades preceding the conflict and revealed an inherent moral flaw in a nation founded on the principle, "all men are created equal." The Civil War was a relatively rare subject for painters and was generally confined to the popular press and to the medium of photography, which captured the horrors of the conflict with unparalleled realism. In the century following the war, Southern resistance to assimilation by the victorious Union fostered romanticized nostalgia for a mythical antebellum culture, while ongoing civil rights struggles increasingly defined the South in terms of Jim Crow racism. |