Best Answer: pretend that you are walking down the street and you see a real big pit bull laying in the sidewalk, do you walk over to it and wake it up or do you ...
Now, with territory up to the Mississippi River claimed and settled and the Louisiana Purchase explored, Americans headed west in droves. Newspaper editor John O'Sullivan coined the term  manifest destiny  in 1845 to describe the essence of this mindset. A symbol of Manifest Destiny, the figure Columbia moves across the land in advance of settlers, replacing darkness with light and ignorance with civilization. The religious fervor spawned by the Second Great Awakening created another incentive for the drive west.
The phrase manifest destiny is most often associated with the territorial expansion of the United States from 1812 to 1860. This era, from the end of the War of 1812 to the beginning of the American Civil War, has been called the age of manifest destiny.