How America Grew, and Grew, and Grew

In “Civil Disobedience” (1849), Henry David Thoreau wrote: “This government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West . . .” Admirable as Thoreau’s small-government principles may be, this is nonsense.

For the West to be settled, as opposed to simply being inhabited by nomadic resource exploiters, a territory needed soldiers to protect the settlers, surveyors to define their land holdings, officials to register them, and governments to make and enforce laws. Before all these, though, settling Western lands required diplomats to define their borders, and the work of these men is the main focus of Seizing Destiny: How America Grew From Sea to Shining Sea, by Richard Kluger (672 pages, $35), just published by Knopf.

Looking at a map today, America’s destiny does indeed seem manifest. Of course the nation expanded inexorably across the “empty” Western lands—who was going to stop it? Yet when the Revolution ended, the new United States was a cluster of fissiparous colonies clinging to the Eastern seaboard, with little economic or military strength and few settlers beyond the Appalachians. Opposing it for control of North America were three established Old World powers, Britain, France, and Spain. At the start of the nineteenth century, who would have picked the infant United States to dominate the continent?

Yet by the time the century was halfway through, the United States extended from coast to coast, and by the end of the century it held in its somewhat reluctant grasp possessions stretching halfway around the world. Seizing Destiny shows how America’s ever-rising demographic tide, along with generous doses of shrewdness, luck, and a peculiarly American mingling of entitlement and divine mission, made the United States a regional titan and a world power.

In a narrative extending from Jamestown to Panama, the author makes the obligatory condemnations of Americans’ fondness for slavery, warfare, and exploitation of indigenous populations, and he provides occasional snapshots of how pioneers lived on the nation’s ever-shifting frontier. But the book’s two main subjects, treated in extensive and loving detail, are deal-making and real estate. Donald Trump would love this book, especially if he could get someone to read it for him.

In examining how America’s borders were drawn and redrawn through the years, Kluger includes topics that will be illuminating for many readers. For example, he traces North America’s eventual control by English speakers back to the differing approaches of the three major colonial powers. Spain saw the New World as a resource to be exploited; it conquered as much territory as it could, established mines and plantations, and brutally subjugated the native population. France took a more minimalist approach, spreading out chiefly along waterways, concentrating on trade, and seeking to befriend the Indians. Both these nations ran their colonies from abroad under tight regulations that discouraged large-scale settlement and individual initiative.

The British, by contrast, saw North America as a catch basin for criminals, religious dissenters, the poor, spare sons from aristocratic families, and others among the homeland’s numerous expendable citizens. These colonists went to America to build a new life for themselves and their descendants, and the British government allowed them considerable freedom to run their own affairs. In the short term, this policy encouraged the growth of Britain’s American colonies; in the long term, it led them to rebel.

During the Revolution, Kluger points out, tensions between the colonies-turned-states over conflicting Western land grants were a much greater impediment to unity than most general histories of the Revolution reveal. He also reminds us that the post-Yorktown negotiations to end the Revolutionary War were not just a duet between Britain and the United States but an elaborate and vastly complicated quadrille involving France and Spain as well.

Each nation among the four used the influence and weapons at its disposal to protect its possessions and weaken those of the others. The only thing the three European powers agreed on was that the United States had to be contained. The new nation, however, had time and geography on its side, and its skillful diplomats managed to play France against Britain and negotiate a settlement giving themselves huge portions of the continent. This set the stage for its eventual expansion all the way to the Pacific coast—and beyond.

Once past the Revolution, Kluger devotes nearly 70 pages to the byzantine maneuverings behind the Louisiana Purchase. Against all odds, he manages to make them intelligible. One point he brings out is the importance of Haiti’s 1790s rebellion in determining the course of American expansion. When France’s egalitarian rebels stopped trying to reimpose slavery in their biggest Caribbean colony, French ambitions of dominating trade in the Gulf of Mexico were seriously deflated. This made it much easier to sell New Orleans (and France’s vast possessions in the continent’s interior) when Thomas Jefferson offered some much-needed cash. The result: three new slave states. Thus a successful slave revolt in Haiti was responsible for the spread and perpetuation of slavery in the United States.

With its emphasis on the tough-sell topics of diplomacy and international politics, Seizing Destiny has something of the feel of an academic study, though it is better written than most entries in that category (and the top-down narrative, driven by the acts and statements of powerful white men, is out of sympathy with current academic fashion). To be sure, a few of the chapters that are mainly concerned with treaties, agreements, legalities, surveys, laws, and negotiations can be like eating a whole box of dry crackers. And in some of the more viscous sections, readers will find sentences like, “By 1777 the landless states had begun to question the validity of Virginia’s charter claims by contending that while all the colonies had general jurisdiction over the territory within their boundaries, actual title to all land ungranted by the crown had been inherited by the Congress of the sovereign United States—not by the states that succeeded the colonial governments—and it was Congress that had the power to hold, sell off, and administer all lands still in the crown’s possession at the time the war began.”

In general, though, Kluger’s writing exhibits the clarity that won him a Pulitzer Prize for Ashes to Ashes, his 1997 book about the cigarette industry. And while the book’s length will weed out the dilettantes among its readers, it could easily have been longer. Halfway through, the author is still in 1803; afterwards he picks up the pace, particularly on topics like the Panama Canal and the Spanish-American War that have been treated extensively elsewhere.

What Seizing Destiny amounts to is a history of America from the first settlements to the early twentieth century, told from the standpoint of the continuing accretion of territory. While it helps to have a prior interest in (or at least a tolerance for) diplomacy and statecraft, Kluger’s unconventional focus, for those with the persistence to stick with it through 600 pages of text, will teach readers see many familiar events in new ways.