A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872 by Daniel J. Burge (review).

A Whig, Taylor acted on his skepticism of manifest destiny by negotiating the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which prohibited the United States from annexing any part of Central America. During the U.S. War with Mexico (1846-48), southern Whigs spoke out against the conflict because they believed that it would undermine the "peculiar institution": Mexico had already abolished slavery, and the climate hardly seemed hospitable to plantation agriculture. Although the United States now spanned from the Atlantic to the Pacific, expansionists believed that the republic's manifest destiny had not yet been realized. That same year, Carl Russell Fish at the University of Wisconsin published I The Rise of the Common Man, 1830-1850, i which attributed to manifest destiny the election of James K. Polk, the U.S.-Mexican War, and the sectional controversy that led to the Civil War. [Extracted from the article]