Click to review the online content. Then answer the question(s) below, using complete sentences. Scroll down to view additional questions Online Content: Site 1 Walt Whitman was one of the greatest of American poets - what was his stand on the war and the concept of Manifest Destiny?

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ANSWER IS FROM ANSWER ON ANOTHER QUESTION ASKING THE SAME THING!!!

Walt Whitman supported the Mexican-American War. He justified his support of the war with the concept of manifest destiny. This was the idea that the USA was destined to stretch from coast to coast on the North American continent. Dominated by Anglo-Saxons, the USA had a mission to spread civilization and institutions across the American continent. Whitman believed that it was America's duty to rid Mexico off its misery, inefficiency, her burlesque against freedom and superstition.

Curiously, such racist beliefs were expressed by the American poet Walt Whitman. Of Manifest Destiny, Whitman wrote: “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the new world with a noble race? Be it ours, to achieve that mission!” Clearly, Whitman considered himself, as a white American, better than the Mexicans. Clearly, he believed in America’s right to conquer them. Whitman’s ideas on Manifest Destiny likely surprised his readers because they are different from the ideas in most of his work. However, perhaps this contradiction reflects a more general attitude of the times.