The son of an American diplomat, John Louis O’Sullivan was born aboard a ship in the harbor of Gibraltar, over three thousand miles from the country he would call home. Accepted to Columbia University at the age of fourteen, he graduated in 1831 and after a time spent teaching passed the New York bar exam in 1835.
A staunch supporter of Jacksonian democracy, O’Sullivan and his brother-in-law, Samuel D. Langtree, founded the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1837 in Washington, DC, as a rival to the Whiggish North American Review. Later moved to New York City, the monthly periodical featured articles and editorials from O’Sullivan, and gave a platform to such writers as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. O’Sullivan also founded the New York Morning News in 1844. As a result of poor management, O’Sullivan lost control of the Democratic Review in 1846. The New York Morning News would cease publication that same year.
Convinced that the United States had a divine mission to spread democratic republican ideals across the continent, O’Sullivan declared in the Democratic Review’s inaugural issue, “Democracy is the cause of Humanity.” A vocal and eloquent advocate for American expansionism, he wrote in 1839: “We are the nation of human progress, “and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march?”
The term “manifest destiny” first appeared in an article published in the July-August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review in support of the annexation of Texas and acquisition of the Oregon territory. Alluding to the fear, widely held in Democratic circles, that Great Britain intended to block American expansion west of the Mississippi, he wrote: “Other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves … in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” He returned to the phrase again in an editorial written for the New York Morning News later that year, stating of the US claim to sovereignty over the Oregon Territory: “…that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given to us…”
Notwithstanding his faith in American expansion, O’Sullivan did not favor the acquisition of territories through force, believing American expansion to be inevitable. He did not initially support the US-Mexico War, although he later came to favor the acquisition of Mexican territory on racial grounds. In an editorial written in 1847, he declared: “The Mexican race…must amalgamate and be lost, in the superior vigor of the Anglo-Saxon race, or they must utterly perish.”
An early supporter of the antislavery Free-Soil political party, O’Sullivan increasingly came to espouse proslavery views. Under President Franklin Pierce he served as the US Minister to Portugal from 1853 to 1857, but his influence waned as the Civil War loomed. Aligning himself with the secession movement, he called upon the British government to recognize the Confederacy after 1861. O’Sullivan’s stand with the South was a disappointment to many of his former friends and colleagues.
After the Civil War, O’Sullivan made his home in Europe, where he lived in self-imposed exile. He returned to the United States in the late 1870s, living his remaining years in obscurity and poverty. When he died from influenza on March 24, 1895, the term “Manifest Destiny” was finding new adherents as the country debated its role as an imperial power on the world stage. He is buried on Staten Island.
Bibliography
Robert D. Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan and his Times, Kent State University Press, 2003.
John O’Sullivan, United States Democratic Review, Volume 20, 1847, p. 100.
John O’ Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” United States Democratic Review, Volume 6, Issue 23, 1839, pp. 426-430.
John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Volume 17 (New York: 1845), 5-6, 9-10.
Pratt, J. (1933), “John L. O’Sullivan and Manifest Destiny,” New York History, 14(3), 213-234.
Scholnick, R.J. (2005). Extermination and Democracy: O'Sullivan, the Democratic Review, and Empire, 1837-1840. American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 15(2), 123-141.
John O’Sullivan, “Introduction,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Volume 1, Issue 1, 1837, p. 11
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Title: John L. O'Sullivan
