Jane McManus Storms Cazneau

Jane Maria Eliza Cazneau (née McManus, widowed Storm; April 6, 1807 – December 12, 1878) was an American journalist, lobbyist, and publicist who advocated the annexation of all of Mexico during the Mexican-American War.

She was born on April 6, 1807, in Brunswick, Rensselaer County, New York, the daughter of Congressman William McManus and Catharine (Coons) McManus. She attended Troy Female Seminary, one of the earliest colleges for women, but did not graduate. On August 22, 1825, she married Allen B. Storm. Their son, William Mt. Storm (b. August 2, 1826), became an inventor who patented in April 1853 an "Improved Process for Mixing Air and Steam for Actuating Engines.". They separated in 1831, and Allen Storm died 1838 in New York City. Around this time, she is believed to have been both Aaron Burr's lover and partner in land speculation.

In 1832, Jane's father ventured into land speculation, and was one of the founders of the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company, and Jane and her brother Robert traveled to Texas, which was then still part of Mexico, to buy land. The next year, Jane, her father, her brother Robert and a company of German settlers set out to take possession of the land, but the scheme failed when the German settlers refused to go beyond Matagorda. She returned home with her father to Brunswick, NY. Her brother Robert remained in Texas and eventually became a wealthy planter.

Then she turned to journalism, working for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune, and Moses Yale Beach's New York Sun and the Democratic Review, strongly advocating manifest destiny. Storm embraced this with enthusiasm, and was to go on to be a firm believer, northerner though she was, in the expansion of the South, and of slavery, its 'peculiar institution', into Central America and the Caribbean. In Mistress of Manifest Destiny (2001), Linda S. Hudson argued that it was Storm who actually wrote the "Annexation" editorial, and thus coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny". Since many editorials in John L. O'Sullivan's publications were unsigned, Hudson used computer-aided "textual analysis" to support her argument. O'Sullivan biographer Robert D. Sampson disputes Hudson's claim for a variety of reasons.

...
Wikipedia