"As the Good Poet Said”: Berkeley’s Verses and the Creation of a Usable Past in the Early Republic

“Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” Penned in 1726 by the Irish-Anglican Bishop George Berkeley, these words colonized an enormous swath of America’s cultural landscape over nearly two centuries. Originally formulated as an Old World vision of New World millennial empire, the poem underwent a series of re-intepretations and misreadings in the American context to ultimately emerge as a potent claim to American exceptionalism, a justification for an expansive conception of American empire, and a rallying cry for manifest destiny.

In the early years of the new republic, the imaginative framework of Berkeley’s famous stanza became an essential venue for nationalistic explorations. A new nation like America, arising out of thin historical fabric, had a burning need for myths. “Westward the Course of Empire” formed the basis of one of those myths. This paper examines the use of Berkeley’s poem in Revolutionary War commemorations as part of early attempts by Americans to historicize the new nation. Using Berkeley’s Versesas a relic of America’s past and further framing it as the pronouncement of a prophet, orators sought to posit a certainty with their listeners that, despite its radical beginnings and chaotic progress, the United States of America was meant to be. The historicizing, legitimating, and not least of all, political, usefulness of Berkeley’s poem would come to a head in John Quincy Adam’s 1802 oration at Plymouth in which he paired Berkeley’s prophetic announcement with the Mayflower Compact to create a thick and complex web of history for a young nation that had too little.