What Hath God Wrought (17 page)

After the signing of the treaty, two more years of anticlimactic wrangling preceded the exchange of ratifications. Ferdinand VII had secretly granted most of Florida’s lands to several court favorites just before the signing, and the treaty bound the United States to respect the rights of private property. If the grants were allowed to stand, there would be little land left in Florida for white settlers from the United States. Adams was outraged that he had allowed himself to be outsmarted by this maneuver, and the Americans insisted on having the grants annulled. Meanwhile, several countries in South America made good their struggles for independence and awaited international recognition. The Spanish authorities realized that they could deter the United States from according such recognition by threatening not to ratify the treaty. By 1820, the Monroe administration was making thinly veiled threats to occupy Florida anyway—and Texas as well—if the treaty remained unratified much longer. The bitter pill was sweetened by an assurance from Adams that the United States “probably would not precipitately recognize the independence of the South Americans.”
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Finally, the land grants were revoked and ratifications exchanged in February 1821, two years to the day from the signing of the treaty.

The United States waited sixteen months and then, on June 19, 1822, formally received the first envoy from an independent Gran Colombia (which included Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, and Venezuela). The other new nations to the south were recognized soon thereafter—except for black Haiti, independent from France since 1804, which had to wait until 1862 for recognition by the Lincoln administration. Despite the delay, the United States was the first outside power to recognize the independence of the former Spanish colonies. Henry Clay, whose speeches on behalf of recognition had been welcomed in Latin America, could feel gratified.
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Among the earliest of the Latin American nations to be recognized was Mexico, which as an independent country inherited the boundary that had been negotiated between the United States and Spain such a short time before.

The hemispheric scale of the diplomacy of Monroe and Adams attained explicit statement in the famous Monroe Doctrine. Formulated by Adams and enunciated in Monroe’s State of the Union message of December 1823, the doctrine synthesized the administration’s concerns with Latin America, the Pacific Northwest, and Anglo-American relations. It was to become a fundamental statement of American foreign policy, though it originated in some very specific concerns of the moment.

During the summer of 1823, rumors circulated in diplomatic circles that the Spanish Bourbons might get help to regain their lost empire. The Holy Alliance, an association of the reactionary powers of continental Europe under the nominal leadership of the Russian tsar, might send an expeditionary force to the New World. The possibility could not altogether be dismissed, since the French army had just intervened to restore Ferdinand VII to power in Spain itself. Neither Britain nor the United States welcomed these reports, which seemed inimical to the strategic and commercial interests of both.
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In August 1823, George Canning, who had become British foreign secretary, suggested that the two countries might issue a joint statement disapproving intervention in the conflict between Spain and its former colonies by any third parties. Canning was continuing the policy Castlereagh had begun, of cordial relations with the United States. Monroe took counsel with ex-presidents Madison and Jefferson, both of whom advised him to cooperate with Canning.
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When he raised the matter with his cabinet, however, Monroe found the secretary of state opposed to a joint declaration. Adams believed (correctly) that the chance of intervention by the Holy Alliance was small, and he argued that the United States would look stronger and risk little if it made a pronouncement of its own, rather than appearing to follow in the British wake.
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Besides a strategy for the United States, Adams was also implementing a personal political strategy that he hoped would make him the next president. This required that he run on his record as a successful vindicator of national self-interest as secretary of state. Being a New Englander and a former Federalist, Adams could not afford the slightest imputation of being pro-British.
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Meantime, another threat to American interests had materialized, one also involving the tsar. In the Pacific Northwest, Russia had been extending its claims from Alaska down into the Oregon Country. In 1821, Tsar Alexander I had issued an imperial ukase (edict) warning foreign ships not to come within a hundred miles of the coast of Russian America, as Alaska was then called, north of the 51st parallel of latitude. This unilateral assertion of maritime monopoly showed that the Russians were serious competitors for the fur trade and intending to expand their influence in the Pacific Northwest. Both the United States and Britain determined to resist the edict. However, because of their rivalry with each other, it became necessary for the British and Americans to deal separately with the Russians.
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Within the administration, Adams carried the day, as he had on Florida; the president took his advice over that of Calhoun and the ex-presidents. The secretary had already delivered a warning to the tsar (July 17, 1823) against any further colonization in Oregon; on November 27 he presented the Russian minister with another note, this time warning the tsar against intervention by the Holy Alliance in Latin America. The president made it all public by incorporating much of Adams’s language into his own annual message to Congress on December 2. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the issues had been rendered moot. The tsar had already suspended enforcement of his ukase. And in response to pressure from Canning, the French ambassador to Britain, Jules de Polignac, had secretly assured him in October that the continental powers would not meddle in the New World. After Polignac’s promise had become public, Canning boasted to the House of Commons, “I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.”
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While the Latin American revolutionaries themselves deserved primary credit for the achievement Canning claimed, it was clear enough that Monroe’s pronouncement had come after its precipitating problems had already been resolved. The tsar was not disposed to undertake risky adventures in the Western Hemisphere, either as leader of the Holy Alliance or on behalf of Russia’s own imperial expansion.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, as the president set it forth, contained several components.
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(1) The United States proclaimed that the continents of North and South America “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.” (2) The United States declared it would regard any European political intervention in the Western Hemisphere as “dangerous to our peace and safety.” (3) In a gesture of reciprocal isolationism, the United States resolved that it would not intervene in European wars or “internal concerns.” (4) In Adams’s version of the doctrine, the United States also forbade Spain to transfer any of its New World possessions to any other European power. This “no-transfer principle,” as it has been called, was not included in the president’s speech, but it has been treated by U.S. policymakers as being of equal importance with the other components of the doctrine.
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In terms of international power politics, the Monroe Doctrine represented the moment when the United States felt strong enough to assert a “sphere of influence” that other powers must respect. In terms of national psychology, the Monroe Doctrine marked the moment when Americans no longer faced eastward across the Atlantic and turned to face westward across the continent. The changed orientation was reflected in domestic political alignments. In the 1790s, different attitudes toward the French Revolution had been of basic importance in defining the political allegiances of Americans as either Federalists or Republicans. In the second party conflict that would emerge as Monroe’s consensus disintegrated, different attitudes toward westward expansion, Indian policy, and war against Mexico would be correspondingly fundamental. In the 1850s, a third party system would also emerge out of a problem created by westward expansion: the extension of slavery into the territories.

The immediate Russian threat to Oregon was contained when the Americans and British made separate agreements with the Russians in 1824 and 1825 respectively, defining the southern limit of Alaska as 54° 40’ north latitude, its present boundary.
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(The agreements did not affect the Russian trading post at Fort Ross, California, for that was in Mexican territory.) In other areas of the Western Hemisphere, the United States made no early effort to enforce the noncolonization principle; for example, the British occupation of the Falkland Islands in 1833 evoked no U.S. response. For years the Latin American countries traded more with Britain than with the United States and relied more on the Royal Navy than on the Monroe Doctrine for their strategic security. American relations with Russia soon became the most amicable of any with a major European power. As a result the Monroe Doctrine proved more important in the long run than in the short run. The United States seriously invoked the Monroe Doctrine for the first time only after the Civil War, when it persuaded Napoleon III to withdraw French military support from Maximilian von Hapsburg in Mexico. Thereafter the doctrine loomed increasingly large in the American public imagination.
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The Monroe Doctrine was destined to become a durable force in the shaping of U.S. public opinion and foreign policy. A hundred years later, in 1923, Mary Baker Eddy spoke for millions of Americans when she declared, “I believe strictly in the Monroe Doctrine, in our Constitution, and in the laws of God.” The doctrine’s influence was felt as late as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, although by then the policy of renouncing U.S. intervention in Europe had been abandoned. The doctrine always remained purely a unilateral policy statement, never recognized in international law. The Latin American nations whom it claimed to protect resented its presumption of U.S. hegemony, especially in the years when the “Theodore Roosevelt corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine asserted a right to intervene militarily in Latin America. In the twentieth century, multilateral pan-American agreements gradually took the place of the Monroe Doctrine and led to the founding of the Organization of American States. But no one doubts that the United States still regards the Western Hemisphere as its special sphere of influence, whether or not the Monroe Doctrine is mentioned when defending it.
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IV

The word “nationalism” did not come into usage until the 1830s, but the attitude antedated the name for it. Madison’s bank, Monroe’s aspiration to one-party government, Jackson’s invasion of Florida, and Adams’s assertive diplomacy: All displayed in one form or another the American nationalism characteristic of the period immediately after the War of 1812. These public policies paralleled the celebrations on national festivals like presidential inaugurations or the Fourth of July. But for national unity to acquire a tangible meaning, as opposed to a purely ideological one, required the country to become much more integrated economically. Surprisingly, one of the most important achievements of national economic integration came about not through the efforts of the national government, nor from those of private enterprise, but by the initiative of a single state. This state was New York; its project, the Erie Canal.

The Erie Canal extended from Albany on the Hudson River to Buffalo on Lake Erie. The veto of the Bonus Bill in early 1817 had dashed any hope that Congress might make a contribution toward the undertaking; some were cynical enough to think that Madison’s constitutional scruples against the bill might have been influenced by a reluctance to help New York in its economic rivalry with Virginia. After Madison’s veto, the New York legislature put together a funding package of its own for the canal. Planners took advantage of an opening through the Appalachians discovered centuries earlier by the Iroquois, who had made it a trade route. The canal realized the dream of New York’s Governor DeWitt Clinton, formerly mayor of New York City and an admirer of the Iroquois who called them “the Romans of the western world.” Derided by opponents as “Clinton’s big ditch,” the proposed canal seemed like “madness” to Thomas Jefferson. A coalition of Federalist and Republican business interests supported the undertaking. The New York City workingmen, organized through Tammany Hall, feared it would lead to higher taxes and opposed it. Martin Van Buren, Clinton’s arch-rival in the New York Republican Party, fought against the canal until the last minute; when legislative passage was assured in April 1817, he switched sides. Such sleight-of-hand gave Van Buren his nickname, “The Little Magician.” Once functioning, the canal became overwhelmingly popular in the state.
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