John L. O'Sullivan

John Louis O'Sullivan, born on November 15, 1813, was the son of Irishman John Thomas O'Sullivan, an American diplomat and sea captain, and Mary Rowly, a genteel Englishwoman. According to legend, he was born at sea on a British warship off the coast of Gibraltar.[2] O'Sullivan's father was a naturalized US citizen and had served as US Consul to the Barbary States.[3][4]

O'Sullivan enrolled at Columbia College in New York at the age of 14. He graduated in 1831. In 1834, he received a Masters of Arts and became a lawyer.[2]

In 1837, he founded and edited The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, based in Washington. It espoused the more radical forms of Jacksonian Democracy and the cause of a democratic, American literature. It published some of the most prominent American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, and Walt Whitman. O'Sullivan was an aggressive reformer in the New York State Legislature, where he led the unsuccessful movement to abolish capital punishment. By 1846, investors were dissatisfied with his poor management, and he lost control of his magazine.[5]

O'Sullivan opposed the coming of the American Civil War, hoping that a peaceful solution, or a peaceful separation of North and South, could be resolved. In Europe when the war began, O'Sullivan became an active supporter of the Confederate States of America; he may have been on the Confederate payroll at some point. O'Sullivan wrote a number of pamphlets promoting the Confederate cause, arguing that the presidency had become too powerful and that states' rights needed to be protected against encroachment by the central government. Although he had earlier supported the "free soil" movement, he now defended the institution of slavery, writing that blacks and whites could not live together in harmony. His activities greatly disappointed some of his old friends, including Hawthorne. Towards the end of the Civil War, O'Sullivan appealed to his southern "comrades in arms" to burn Richmond, stating "let every man set fire to his own house".[6]

• Young America Movement

• Sampson, Robert D. "O'Sullivan, John Louis" American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Oct 12 2015
• Sampson, Robert D. John L. O'Sullivan and His Times. (Kent State University Press, 2003) online
• Scholnick, Robert J, "Extermination and Democracy: O'Sullivan, the Democratic Review, and Empire, 1837—1840." American Periodicals (2005) 15#2: 123–141.online
• Widmer, Edward L. Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. (excerpt)
• Letters and Literary Memorials of Samuel J. Tilden – Volume 1 – Edited by John Bigelow

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The Great Nation of Futurity

• "The Democratic Principle" Archived February 17, 2006, at the Wayback Machine, mission statement from the first issue (1837) of the Democratic Review, called by Robert D. Sampson "a classic statement of romantic Jacksonian Democracy"
• "The Great Nation of Futurity": November 1839 editorial in which O'Sullivan touched upon many themes of manifest destiny.
• "Annexation" Archived November 25, 2005, at the Wayback Machine: The July–August 1845 editorial in which the phrase "Manifest Destiny" first appeared
• John L. O'Sullivan at Find a Grave