Seizing Destiny: The Relentless Expansion of American Territory

by: Richard Kluger

Published by: Vintage Book

Reviewed by Paul Markowitz

What began as scattered settlements that hugged the Atlantic coast in the early 1600s, would be by the end of the Revolutionary War, an incipient nation that already stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Within the next 20 years the United States, with the addition of the Louisiana Purchase, would double in size, so that its western boundary would now be the Rocky Mountains. Between the years 1845 and 1850, a mere 70 years after its founding, the new nation would be a transcontinental empire that stretched from coast to coast. In these few short years in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the U.S. would add the Mexican Cession and the Oregon Territory, more land than was added with the Louisiana Purchase. This was all in addition to the formal absorption of Texas into the republic in 1845, even though its independence from Mexico had occurred a decade earlier.

This inexorable growth of the United States had taken on, by the middle of the 1800s, an almost divine approbation with the commonly referred to designation of “manifest destiny.” What brought on this mission was the spontaneous melding of a “ill-disciplined, hard-charging” populace and a land of “immeasurable expanse and superlative fertility.” This deadly combination could be slowed but not stopped.

Richard Kluger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has fastidiously gathered the military, political and diplomatic history that explains the why and how of each acquisition. His richly detailed and highly compelling writing style makes for a clear and cogent analysis.

Kluger covers not only the major acquisitions–the original colonies, the Northwest Territory, the Louisiana Purchase, Texas, the Oregon Territory, and the Mexican Cession, but he also includes the strategic additions of the Gadsden Purchase, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Panama Canal among others.

For anyone who has the slightest interest in how the United States came to acquire and inhabit this immense expanse of territory we now know as the United States, this compelling narrative is sure to enlighten and enthrall all those who opt to read it.

Armchair Interviews says: This is for people who love to know the full story of this country.

Author’s Web site: http://www.RichardKluger.com