"...It is confidently believed that our
system may be safely extended to the
utmost bounds of our territorial limits, and that as it shall be extended
the
bonds of our
~ From the inaugural address of James K. Polk, 11th President
(1845-49)
John Gast - "American
Progress," (1872)
"...To state the truth at once in its
neglected simplicity, we are free to say that were the respective cases and
arguments of the two parties, as to all these points of history and law,
reversed - had England all ours, and we nothing but hers - our claim to Oregon
would still be best and strongest. And that claim is by the right of our
manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which
~
John L. O' Sullivan, "Manifest Destiny" editorial, New York
Morning News on
Westward
the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (mural study,
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816 - 1868)
"This dramatic image of westward
expansion is a study for a mural in the United States Capitol, one of the most
ambitious statements of cultural nationalism during the mid-nineteenth century.
Leutze combined pioneer men and women, mountain guides, wagons, and mules to
suggest a divinely ordained pilgrimage to the Promised Land of the western
frontier. In the border, medallion portraits of explorers Captain William Clark
and Daniel Boone flank a vista of the
Source:
"The Mythic Landscape", Panoramas;
The North American Landscape in Art