| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. By Amy S. Greenberg. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xviii, 323 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 0-521-84096-1. Paper, $25.99, ISBN 0-521-60080-4.)
Even in the heyday of antebellum America's expansionist initiatives, the gaseous doctrines of "Manifest Destiny" played an uncertain role in the nation's public policies. Tellingly, for instance, President James K. Polk—a hard-headed practitioner of realpolitick—was often willing to disappoint his own Democratic party's expansionist zealots, as when he rebuffed their "All Mexico" and "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!" campaigns.	1
The journalist John L. O'Sullivan popularized the term "Manifest Destiny" in 1845. As the historian Frederick Merk once observed, "It meant expansion, prearranged by Heaven, over an area not clearly defined. In some minds it meant expansion over the region to the Pacific; in others, over the North American continent; in others over the hemisphere" (Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, 1963; 1966, p. 24). The very vagueness of the term proved a boon for stump demagogues, for circulation-boosting editors, and for schemers eager to enlist mercenaries into their filibuster armies bound for foreign—usually Latin American—climes. In the end, Manifest Destiny proved as much, perhaps more, a social force in America than an effective agent of territorial expansion. And, ironically, as Amy S. Greenberg notes, the phenomenon, in many ways, saw its most robust era during the 1850s—a decade when the nation added virtually no new territories to its realm.	. . .

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