What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

by Daniel Walker Howe

Nevertheless, American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity. The Whig Party conceived of American development more in terms of qualitative economic improvement than quantitative expansion of territory. As Henry Clay wrote to a fellow Kentuckian, “It is much more important that we unite, harmonize, and improve what we have than attempt to acquire more.” The historian Christopher Clark has distinguished between the two partisan goals by saying the Democrats pursued America’s “extensive” development and the Whigs its “intensive” development.13 Whigs believed in America’s postmillennial role too, but interpreted it differently. They saw America’s moral mission as one of democratic example rather than one of conquest. William Ellery Channing expressed a Whig view of America’s empire in a famous open letter to Clay opposing the annexation of Texas: “The United States ought to provide its less fortunate sister republics with support, [and] assume the role of a sublime moral empire, with a mission to diffuse freedom by manifesting its fruits, not to plunder, crush, and destroy.”