The Cowboy Messiah: Stage Setting
“Manifest Destiny”: Journalist and newspaper editor John O’Sullivan coined the phrase in 1845. It captures a conviction that glosses a century of colonial expansion. A verbal anchor for the heartfelt, pervasive belief that the government and citizens of the United States have been divinely ordained to stampede across the North American continent–no matter the cost to principles or to life–and to claim it as their own.