The concept of Manifest Destiny played a heavy role in the American psyche during the expansion westward. All throughout the prior decades, Americans had forced Native Americans from their ancestral homelands and forced them further west. The murders of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans were all it cost the United States in order to move the nation from merely the east coast all the way to the central plains, and I would argue that many Americans thought that what it cost the Native Americans was most definitely worth the expansion. John Gast's painting shows very clearly what Americans thought they brought with them into the Great Plains and westward. White people and their civilization bring light, technology, and end of barbarism in which the Native Americans had been suffering through for centuries before the arrival of the white man. This ideology of white supremacy and American exceptionalism would not just be limited to Indian-American relations though. The racism that pervaded the policy of the mid-1800's would continue to hold up policies concerning any interaction with the colored people of the North American continent.
"The Battle of Cerro Gordo" Lithographed and published by Nathaniel Currier, courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
White Perspectives on and Mexicans
In this painting, it is clear that the American troops are usurping Mexican territory. The American soldiers vastly outnumber the Mexicans in this battle scene, but the fallen troops on the battlefield are mostly in green, the color symbolizing the Mexico. The fact that the artist would want to depict the battle on an unbalanced playing field is interesting. The Americans are gaining the upper ground as they charge up this mountain- the higher ground that the Mexicans once occupied. This symbol for gaining superiority is paramount in framing the white perspective on Mexicans in the United States. In John Calhoun's speech to Congress on the topic of the all-Mexico movement, he reveals that he believes the Mexicans are unfit to self govern and most definitely unfit to govern the likes of men such as himself if they were to be given equal citizenship in America and therefore the right to vote. White supremacy and American exceptionalism played huge yet subtle roles in determining what actions the US would take in terms of absorbing members of an alien nation into its own ranks. This is where the multitude of white perspectives come into play.
There were many white people that believed as Susan Shelby Magoffin wrote, "(Mexican) women slap about with their arms and necks bare, perhaps their bosoms exposed (and they are none of the prettiest or whitest)." She asserts that the Mexicans are a primitive people that are as in need of civilizing as the Native Americans were. Strangely enough though, an entirely different perspective is expressed by white men towards Mexican women. White men believed that they could reproduce with Mexican women and thus purge their children of all qualities that deemed them an improper race. It was patronizing while not being outright hateful toward this race of women. White men's respect for Mexican men, though, was rather different and well illustrated by the perpetual squatters that encroached on Mexican landowners' property. The white man believed that with land came women and that conquering a race's land also entailed conquering their women. This ideology added a whole new layer of complexity to what it meant to take over an area that was already inhabited by another nation's population. If the white perspective on Mexicans was that they were a primal nation that needed to be conquered, the American perspective on racism and slavery in the US only became more clear. Why should colored people who have no nation, no education, no standing army, no freedom, and no sovereignty be given rights? The degradation of the Mexican peoples' dignity would only further justify the institution of slavery because they existed in a social bracket below Mexicans.
White Perspectives on African Americans
The White perspectives on African Americans and slavery are almost entire opposites with one part of the country entirely embracing the practice of slavery and white supremacy while the other half of the nation was home to the abolitionist movement. Benjamin Lundy, renowned abolitionist, writes about the conditions for African Americans in Mexican Texas in 1833 and recounts how equal Mexicans view African Americans. Lundy writes that very much like in the North, Mexicans pay him the same respect as to the other laboring people. There exists almost no racial complex between this black man in Nacogdoches and other people of his status. Lundy tells of the encounter in a matter of fact manner that neither questions nor is outraged by the manner in which this black man is treated. Lundy accepts the equality that he finds in Mexican Texas, but imagine if this encounter had been retold by racists that embodied the sentiments of the South at this time. Surely, John Calhoun or James Polk himself would be mortified at the very thought of considering this man an equal. There were abolitionists that existed among the white population that starkly contrasted to the slave holders who brought with them slaves into the new territory, and it was this division that made the white perspective on slavery and African Americans not only opposing, but also potentially violent.