Though he ranked as one of the pre–Civil War era’s most prominent Democrats, the New York editor John L. O’Sullivan long ago became consigned to the status of historical footnote as coiner of the phrase Manifest Destiny. The term first appeared during the summer of 1845 in O’Sullivan’s U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review in an article favoring the U.S. annexation of Texas. Capturing that day’s expansionist zeal, it quickly entered the language and has been with us ever since.
Now, thanks to Robert D. Sampson’s robustly eloquent biography—our first full biography of this seminal figure—we now have an O’Sullivan portrait that fleshes out the man behind the footnote.
O’Sullivan lived a long (1813–1895) eventful life. He was the son of an English woman of aristocratic origins and an Irish-born, naturalized American sea captain whose life included stints as a filibuster (in 1806, with Francisco de Miranda to Venezuela), a reputed smuggler, and a U.S. minister in far-flung posts. After the elder O’Sullivan’s death at sea and after his own studies in France, young John O’Sullivan moved to New York to rejoin his mother and siblings. He excelled at Columbia College, from which he graduated in 1831. After teaching for several years and reading law, he was admitted to the bar in 1835. That same year—by then living in Washington and caught up in Democratic party politics—he and a brother-in-law purchased a faltering semiweekly Georgetown newspaper. Two years later, they folded it and founded the U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review.
Over the years, O’Sullivan found notoriety in many roles—close friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, co-conspirator with Cuba filibuster Narciso López, New York legislator, anti–capital punishment crusader, Young America leader, U.S. minister in Lisbon, and, improbably—during the Civil War, in a move that, for all practical purposes, ended his quixotic public career—Confederate propagandist in England.
But it was through the U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review and its expansionist politics that he left his most indelible mark. Over the journal’s long run (1837–1852), he served variously as co-owner, editor, and contributor. O’Sullivan co-founded the journal as a Democratic counterpart to the Whigs’ North American Review. But though the magazine failed to win much party patronage, it did become a prestigious forum for Democratic literary offerings and ideas—including O’Sullivan’s own laissez-faire, expansionist, and nominally pro-slavery convictions. Contributors included Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry David Thoreau.
Beyond illuminating O’Sullivan’s life, Sampson’s narrative offers compelling intellectual history. Indeed, much as Daniel Walker Howe’s The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1979) probes that party’s intellectual plumbing, so Sampson offers astute insights into the core political and economic doctrines of that day’s Democratic party—particularly those of O’Sullivan’s mentor, the radical William Leggett.
O’Sullivan has turned up as a figure in recent studies of Hawthorne, Cuban filibustering, the Civil War, and the Young America movement. But now, thanks to Sampson’s excellent biography—obviously a labor of love, drawn from an impressive array of primary sources and embellished with fine archival graphics—we now have a work that, drawing O’Sullivan’s life and times into a seamless whole, finally renders him as something more than a Zelig—and far more than a footnote.
By Robert D. Sampson