Before Manifest Destiny: The Contested Expansion of the Early United States

BOOK REVIEW: Before Manifest Destiny: The Contested Expansion of the Early United States by Nicholas DiPucchio (University of Virginia Press, 2025) $35.00 paperback

It is rather easy to take for granted the continental scale of the modern United States as a near inevitability, imagining a steady march of intrepid American pioneers into a foreboding wilderness over several decades that resulted in one of the best cartographically situated nations in the world with access to abundant natural resources and the protection of two oceans. In Before Manifest Destiny: The Contested Expansion of the Early United States, author Nicholas DiPucchio dispels these notions and weaves a fascinating story of the difficulties of early expansion and the various ways a young country tried and failed to secure its borders and more territory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A mindset that saw the expansion of territory as key to the survival and success of the United States predates the national formation in 1776 as early American rebels looked into the wider British Atlantic world for a potential ally in the island of Bermuda, a story skillfully related in Chapter One. Focused on the efforts to include the island in revolutionary activities, DiPucchio uses this as the starting point for a broader discussion of the desire for security against future British incursions, a theme picked up again in Chapter Three centered around the efforts to subdue Pan-Indigenous unity and British influence in the Great Lakes region in the early nineteenth century. Wedged between is Chapter Two, which examines ungoverned white settler expansion in the short-lived state of Franklin, an attempted secession from North Carolina in the 1790s. Chapters Four and Five deal with elements of racial hierarchies in the American obsession first with Cuba and later, wider Spanish America as the nation extended its borders into the Pacific Northwest.

DiPucchio chronologically tackles these eras of American expansionist thought with one major, overarching goal in mind; dispelling the myth that manifest destiny was predestined or inevitable. The story of the United States becoming a continental power is one contingent on a large number of variables and was full of false starts, failed campaigns, and missed opportunities. The book relies heavily on primary sources, most notably the correspondence of leading figures related to each of the expansionist tales covered from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. This evidentiary base allows DiPucchio to demonstrate that expansion was never guaranteed, but was instead shaped by fragile politics, persistent anxieties, and contested ideas.

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At its core, Before Manifest Destiny is concerned with carefully examining various efforts at American expansion without falling into the trap set by John Louis O’Sullivan in 1845 of seeing the eventual continental scope of the nation as a foregone conclusion. DiPucchio emphasizes three recurring themes that shaped expansionist thought from the Revolution through the early republic: the constant sense of insecurity that drove early territorial ambitions, the role of race in justifying conquest and exclusion, and the deep contingency of each attempted advance, some succeeding and others coming to nothing. These themes unify what might otherwise appear to be a scattered set of episodes, and they reveal how leaders of the early United States conceived of expansion not as destiny, but as a necessary, contested, and often precarious strategy for national survival.

At under 200 pages excluding notes, DiPucchio balances narrative clarity with analytical depth and situates early expansion within its full context. Economic motives, settler agency, and race relations all receive careful attention, demonstrating how varied forces, not a preordained or “manifest destiny” shaped the nation’s earliest uneven efforts to grow. Policymakers in the United States were clear in their intentions from the very beginning about what they saw as the necessity of national enlargement, but the efforts of many populations in these contested regions thwarted those ambitions. It is here that the sense of contingency becomes most apparent. DiPucchio shows how the final Manifest Destiny, expansion westward across the North American continent, came to be by first addressing the failures of efforts to the east in Bermuda, north in Canada, and south in the Caribbean. With the other directions unavailable for a wide range of reasons, the indigenous peoples inhabiting the interior of the continent became the path of least resistance for the United States to achieve its territorial ambitions.

Before Manifest Destiny is an important contribution to the study of early U.S. history, presenting the policy decisions and broader territorial ambitions of a fledgling republic in a neat and accessible work. Other respected scholars such as Matthew Karp in This Vast Southern Empire and Claudio Saunt in Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, have examined in great depth specific aspects of the same world, but the strength of DiPucchio’s work lies in its accessibility as a primer to the world of scholarship centered around early American expansion. Equally valuable for undergraduates or general readers, Before Manifest Destiny should be enjoyed by all who are looking for a well-written and thoroughly sourced work that reframes the nation’s early territorial projects as a tale not of destiny fulfilled, but of ambition constrained and continually reshaped.

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