American Literature of the Southwest
Introduction
1. Manifest Destiny

The term Manifest Destiny was first coined by the journalist John L. O'Sullivan in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review (July-August 1845), though the general idea goes back to the early colonial period. The extracts that follow are from O'Sullivan's piece, written in the context of the annexation of Texas from Mexico to the US. (All emphases are mine).

It is "the right of our manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federaltive development of self government entrusted to us. It is a right such as that of the tree to the space of air and the earth suitable for the full expansion of its principle and destiny of growth."

"Texas has been absorbed into the Union in the inevitable fulfilment of the general law which is rolling our population westward [...]."

This general law "is too evident to leave us in doubt of the manifest design of Providence in regard to the occupation of this continent. [Texas] was disintegrated from Mexico in the natural course of events, by a process perfectly legitimate on its own part, blameless on ours; and in which all the censures due to wrong, perfidy and folly, rest on Mexico alone. And possessed as it was by a population which was in truth but a colonial attachment from our own, and which was still bound by myriad ties of the very heart-strings to its old relations, domestic and political, their incorporation into the Union was not only inevitable, but the most natural, right and proper thing in the world [...]."

"The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on [California's] borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting-houses. A population will soon be in actual occupation of California, over which it will become independent. All this without agency of our government, without responsibility of our people -- in the natural flow of events, the spontaneous working of principles, and the adaption of the tendencies and wants of the human race to the elemental circumstances in the midst of which they find themselves placed."

"Unless the projected rail-road across the continent to the Pacific be carried into effect, perhaps [California] may not [join the US]; though even in that case, the day is not distant when the Empires of the Atlantic and the Pacific would again flow together into one, as soon as their inland border should approach each other. But that great work, colossal as appears the plan on the first suggestion, cannot remain long unbuilt."

2. The Frontier and the Turner Thesis

Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). [Emphases mine].

"American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.
    Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people -- to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life."

"American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier."

"[T]he frontier is the outer edge of the wave, the meeting point between savagery and civilization."

"The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist [...] at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs [...]. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American."

"As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics."

"The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system."

"In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality or characteristics."

3. Criticisms of the Turner Thesis

Turner saw the West as the key to American democracy, particularly the notion of the FRONTIER:

The Frontier is the SOURCE of democracy.
The West is a SAFETY VALVE for Eastern urban discontent -- the prospect of cheap land and a new life diffused class conflict.
The Frontier promoted the American virtues of SELF-RELIANCE and INDIVIDUALISM.

BUT the Turner Thesis has been challenged on the following grounds:

a. The inability to agree on religious beliefs was a bigger influence on American Republicanism than the frontier.

b. Urban workers did not have the skill or capital to move West.

The safety valve theory worked more indirectly: Western lands were attractive to Eastern farmers who could move West rather than leave agriculture for jobs in the city. The West, then, helped prop up Eastern wages.
There was a RESOURCES safety valve -- i.e., the huge natural resources in the West -- land, lumber, oil, gold -- exploitation of these helped the East and the West.
There was a PSYCHOSOCIAL safety valve -- Eastern workers BELIEVED in the opportunities in the West even if they did not exist.

c. Frontier life was very far removed from the community spirit represented by the so-called national virtues. New elites emerged in frontier areas: because there was no inherited power base, democracy became vulnerable to new groups. Between 1815 and 1860, Eastern ruling groups found it increasingly hard to control the new territories because:

Transport was slow until the railways emerged in the 1820s.
By 1840, over 3000 miles of track.
Between 1840-60, 28,000 miles laid.
The Federal government granted over 150 million acres of land to rail companies to encourage building in sparsely populated areas and over $64 million in loans

Therefore,  CORPORATE CAPITALISM developed alongside the expansion into the wilderness. This is, of course, at odds with the myth of the pioneer and the notion of individual freedom and enterprise.

The 1862 HOMESTEAD ACT entitled any head of a family over 21 to 160 acres of free land once they had lived there for 5 years and could pay the registration fee of approximately $30.

BUT:

Links

The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner
Maps of American Territorial Expansion