Notes to Consider… America 250 Presidents Timeline: Manifest Destiny Era Overview

It doesn’t take long being around our English speaking cousins to realize we are very much different peoples. In my experience, the Australians are the closest but even they are “missing” something; that something is American Exceptionalism. So, just where does this “exceptionalism” come from?

The seminal work explaining American Exceptionalism was Dr. Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 work “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Jackson’s Frontier Thesis got to the heart of what made us different from the Brits, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders: rugged individualism.

In America (even before we were a United States), the “authorities” have often been far, far away. Americans were expected, if a problem arose: to handle it themselves. “Lynchings” weren’t directed exclusively by Democrats against blacks. Factually, the vast majority of extra-legal punishments in America occurred when citizens far, far away from the courts took matters into their own hands in order to right a wrong. Such autonomy was unheard of in the other parts of the English speaking world.

One doesn’t have to look to examples as extreme as lynch mobs. The economic adherence to survival of the fittest on the western frontier encouraged risk taking and then living with the consequences of possible failure (or taking advantage of others’ failures). It is here that we should pause to remember the examples from these pages of the late L.G. King and Carmen Abner. Those columnists often wrote on subjects in the first quarter of the twenty-first century that drove home just how close the lessons of the mountain frontiersmen were to our own generation.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this stark contrast. Soon after arriving in Iraq, a fellow agent and I were contacted by a member of the British Army’s Royal Military Police. Early in the war, a group of Brit MPs were in a building surrounded by insurgents. The insurgents ordered the Limeys to lay down their guns and surrender. Before complying, the MPs let a local interpreter escape out a back window and down an alleyway. (The inquiring MP was seeking as a witness the escaped interpreter, thought to then be in our area of responsibility.)

Upon coming out of the building unarmed, the Englishmen were placed on their knees and shot like dogs. Our British counterpart simply could not understand our disgust at his late comrades' spineless actions. And what would have been American MPs' reply for a request to: “Come out with your hands up!”? I couldn’t put such an explicit response in print.

The overall dominant theme between the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and Millard Filmore was “Manifest Destiny”; or God’s will that the United States of America should stretch from “sea to shining sea.” The pushing of that line, often so far from civilization, is the “secret sauce” of American Exceptionalism.
“Come out with your hands up!” “How ‘bout you come in and get us, you…!”

Next Month: Four Current Events articles, then we’ll resume the America 250 Presidents Timeline Project with President Andrew Jackson’s Foreign Policy Big Idea.