With Europe out of the way and ownership rights of land removed from Native Americans, there’s nothing to stop anyone from spreading further west.
It’s 1825 now, and in an editorial for the New York Morning News, John L. O’Sullivan (himself the editor of the Democratic Review), drops the words “manifest destiny” for the first time, saying “…that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the great experiment of liberty and federated self government given to us… The God of nature and of nations has marked it for our own; and with his blessing we will firmly maintain the incontestable rights He has given, and fearlessly perform the High duties he has imposed…”
(You might remember hearing something like this before.)
This excites present-elect Andrew Jackson to no end, who proceeds to get right to work “extending the area of freedom.” He’s been supporting the idea of “Indian removal” for a decade; the second he takes office, he gets going with his greatest legacy, the Trail of Tears. Between the years of 1830-1850, approximately 60,000 indigenous people are “moved” out of the southeast United States in order to clear space for more settler-colonialists, who want to grow cotton and tobacco.
Let’s not sugarcoat it. This is forced removal and ethnic cleansing in the nebulous name of “freedom” (also, this is the South, so this freedom only applies to certain people).
Jackson will be remembered by some as “the People’s president” for his work. And the Southern settler-colonialists get about ten more years of growing cotton and enslaving people before everything blows up in their faces.