The True Geography of Our Country by Joel Kovarsky

Author:Joel Kovarsky [Kovarsky, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN: 9780813935591
Google: RHzAAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2014-07-01T02:45:22+00:00

BIBLICAL ROOTS

There is substantive evidence of the biblical roots of Manifest Destiny, including the ideal of a promised land and a chosen people.18 Biblical allusions were commonplace in western European, and hence colonial American, political discourse between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. An early assertion of a special destiny, a secularized “Holy Commonwealth” for North Americans can be found in the writings of the early Puritan settlers.19

Thomas Jefferson invokes the idea of a “chosen” people and place on several occasions. Writing to James Monroe in 1785, he exclaimed, “My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy. . . . I will venture to say no man now living will ever see an instance of an American removing to settle in Europe and continuing there.”20 In his first inaugural address in March of 1801, Jefferson observed that his fellow citizens were “kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high minded to endure the degradations of the others, possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.”21 And in April of 1809, Jefferson told incoming president James Madison that “we should then have only to include the north [Canada] in our confederacy, which would be of course in the first war, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self-government.”22

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