Site Audio Tour
Site Audio Tour: Stop 6
Manifest Destiny
The early 1860s in the United States were years of war. The young, expanding nation was striving to define itself, but disagreement split the states. President Abraham Lincoln offered new moral and economic platforms, ones that ultimately pitched the country into the Civil War, a war waged to protect or dismantle the economic institution of slavery and to resolve the issue of states' rights.
But there was folly in the federal policy. While the Civil War secured the emancipation of four million slaves in the Southeast, the Lincoln White House gave a long leash to an ambitious General James H. Carleton in the Territory of New Mexico. General Carleton acted on an agenda of militarist policies against Native Americans in the Southwest. He, and many military officers of this time, practiced Manifest Destiny, the doctrine that a dominant culture has the God-given right to spread across the continent, regardless of any preceding culture.
