Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War

Abstract

Destiny and settler colonialism are often linked together by historians. If Manifest Destiny needs re-evaluation, as Burge and others such as Thomas Richards have demonstrated, then perhaps settler colonialism does as well. If Manifest Destiny was ever to be popular and successful, it might be expected that the years immediately following the United States’ defeat of the Confederacy and slavery would be such a time. Instead, Burge shows this was not the case. Republicans successfully annexed Alaska in 1867, but all other efforts toward territorial expansion were thwarted, often by less bellicose Republicans. Nonetheless, as Burge emphasizes, nineteenth-century proponents of Manifest Destiny did not believe it had been achieved even after the United States reached the Pacific Ocean or subdued the Confederacy or Native American nations. They kept pushing for further North American annexations throughout Reconstruction, but most American political leaders, as well as the American people themselves, had little desire to see Manifest Destiny – as defined in the nineteenth century – succeed. One minor critique of A Failed Vision of Empire is relevant to the book’s epilogue, where Burge writes that “policymakers were not successful at implementing their grandiose dreams of empire” (p. 177). While Burge ably demonstrates that nineteenth-century American leaders failed to annex all of North America and Cuba as they desired, this does not mean that their dreams of empire failed. First, the U.S. did successfully create a huge continental empire during the nineteenth century, even if not as grandiose as they might have hoped. And second, the vision of empire itself changed in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Burge acknowledges this shift, from continental to commercial empire, but draws too hard a line of separation between the two. That said, A Failed Vision of Empire is a valuable part of a growing literature seeking to place Manifest Destiny in its proper historical and historiographical position. No longer can historians sensitive to contingency and context blithely refer to an “Era of Manifest Destiny.” Metanarratives make for easy lessons and good stories, but also for bad history.