American Experiment (45 page)

So Monroe could reign; could he rule? Madison had bequeathed him some issues that did not admit of easy conciliation. One was the bank, which actually began operations only a few weeks before Monroe took office and generated controversy by its mere existence. Another was federally subsidized internal improvements, especially roads.

Westerners in particular had been clamoring for better connections with the market centers of the eastern seaboard. The typical inland road of the time was still a rough and meandering strip of rutted earth that often might turn into a bog that could swallow carriage wheels, or into a streambed that could break them. In his last annual message to Congress, Madison had favored a federally financed network of roads and canals, but he believed that a constitutional amendment was necessary before the federal government could undertake such a project. Calhoun, arguing that internal improvements were sanctioned by the general welfare clause of the Constitution, had helped push a bill through a closely divided House and Senate, only to see Madison veto it the day before he left the White House.
Early in Monroe’s presidency George Tucker of Virginia presented a report by the House Committee on Internal Improvements affirming the power of Congress to construct roads and canals. Monroe anxiously consulted with ex-President Madison.

This time it was Henry Clay of Kentucky who took on a foot-dragging Virginia President. Rarely had “Harry of the West” so brilliantly commanded the floor of the House. Treating his foes with exquisite courtesy, mixing heavy constitutional arguments with stiletto thrusts, he touched on Monroe’s regal tour, with his loyal subjects rising to salute the “entrance of the sovereign,” and he sarcastically exploited Monroe’s inconsistencies and the inadequacies of his constitutional arguments. The President, he said, had given the House only “an historical account of the operations of his own mind.” Friends of the Administration rose to rebut him, but he brushed them off like so many flies. His constitutional arguments were hardly new; they were the Hamiltonian case for federal power. But Hamilton, the proponent of executive power, would hardly have accepted Clay’s attack on Monroe’s supporters for ascribing “imperial powers” to their chief.

Clay bluntly attacked Monroe’s idea of rising above party. “We are told,” the Speaker said acidly, “that in these halcyon days there is no such thing as party spirit; that the factions by which the country has been divided, are reduced to their primitive elements, and that this whole society is united by brotherly love and friendship.…Sir, I do not believe in this harmony, this extinction of party spirit, which is spoken of; I do not believe that men have ceased to be men, or that they have abandoned those principles on which they have always acted hitherto.”

The President hardly needed Clay to remind him of the difficulties of partyless government. It was soon clear that if men did not divide into two parties, they would divide into countless factions within parties. To govern without party support, moreover, meant that the President lacked allies when he needed them. And he needed them most when the going was rough—most notably after the Panic of 1819.

The causes of that panic were manifold—worldwide readjustments after the Napoleonic wars, overexpansion of credit, low prices of imports from Europe—but the debtors of Kentucky and South Carolina and other western and southern states did not look for remote sources of their troubles when their loans were called in or their mortgages were foreclosed. Nor did the tradespeople and laborers who lost their jobs. The culprit was tangible and visible—the United States Bank. Though the bank’s desperate efforts to save itself were a sign more of weakness than of strength, this
was a time for hyperbole. “All the flourishing cities of the West are mortgaged to this money power,” said Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri later. “They may be devoured by it at any moment. They are in the jaws of the monster!” Someone else said: “The Bank was saved, and the people were ruined.”

An even harsher challenge to the “era of good feelings” came shortly—a flare-up over slavery. This issue, it was true, had not yet achieved formidable proportions, and even now it did not rise as an issue in itself, but was suddenly projected into Washington politics when the Missouri Territorial Assembly petitioned Congress for statehood. At this time the twenty-two states in the Union were equally divided between slave states and free. This was no coincidence, since the respective political weight of North and South had been carefully balanced by the alternate admission of free and slave states. Despite the three-fifths rule, the free states had 105 votes in the House, the slave states 81. But the Southerners counted on the equal vote in the Senate to sustain the political balance.

Maintaining that balance was the central thrust of the political efforts of 1820 that later came to be known as the Missouri Compromise. The legislative path to compromise was long and tortuous, as northern legislators tried to limit slavery in Missouri and to the west, and were beaten back by southern lawmakers. Representative James Tallmadge of New York sought to amend the Missouri statehood legislation by prohibiting the further introduction of slaves into the state and requiring that all children born of slaves in Missouri be freed at the age of twenty-five. The House passed this amendment; the Senate killed it. When the organization of Arkansas Territory came before Congress, John W. Taylor of Saratoga County, another New York congressman who shared Tallmadge’s moral objection to the extension of slavery, moved to prohibit its further expansion. This was defeated, and Congress admitted Arkansas with no curb on slavery. After Maine had freed itself of Massachusetts and petitioned for admission, Maine was used as a counter to Missouri. When the Senate coupled the admission of Maine and Missouri, Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois proposed an amendment providing that Missouri be admitted as a slave state but that, in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase, slavery be barred north of latitude 36º30?. This amendment the Senate passed, but the House balked. After considerable attitudinizing, confronting, foot dragging, and dickering, Maine was admitted as a free state, Missouri as a slave state, and the northern boundary of slavery was fixed at 36º30?.

This was the “Missouri Compromise,” but the compromising was not over. Missourians soon met in convention in St. Louis and adopted a
constitution empowering the legislature to exclude free Negroes and mulattoes from the state. Feeling betrayed, the compromisers for the North, with the powerful help of Henry Clay, arranged the “Second Missouri Compromise,” stipulating that Missouri would not finally be admitted until the legislature promised that nothing in her constitution could be interpreted as sanctioning the abridgment of the privileges and immunities of United States citizens. On that basis Missouri was admitted. Later, the state repudiated this undertaking.

This trading and brokering took place amid a curious vacuum. Despite much editorializing, the country was not deeply aroused. Northern feeling against slavery had not developed strongly, nor did the slaveholders yet feel mortally threatened. Congress was less a scene of grand confrontation between the two sides than an arena for guerrilla warfare, as small factions clung to protected positions on the ideological battlefield. The compromise was not so much a solemn compact between North and South, as Glover Moore said, as “merely an agreement between a small majority of the Southern members of Congress and a small minority of the Northern ones.” Aside from a sweeping attack by Rufus King on the whole moral and philosophical case for slavery, debate was mainly legalistic. Any transcending moral issues fed into the fragmented machinery of Congress were divested of their ethical content by endless constitutional logic-chopping, then quietly enervated in the backstairs trading and brokering that produced the compromise.

The debate aroused no great confrontation between the two parties, because there were no longer two parties, only a bloated conglomeration of Republicans and a dying band of Federalists. The debates aroused no dramatic encounter between President and opposition party leader, for the latter did not exist and the former wanted things as they were. Monroe was essentially passive throughout the long course of the debates. He feared that the issue might get out of hand and intrude into his re-election campaign in 1820, but he won a second term with only a single elector in opposition, and some wondered whether he might have expended more of his political capital on such a major issue.

To Jefferson the debates came “like a fire bell in the night.” But the fire bell seemed to awaken few outside the politicians and the press, in part because the politicians mainly wanted it that way. Perhaps the fire bell aroused the Virginia conscience, but Jefferson used a more apt figure when he said, in noting the lack of considered measures for dealing with slavery, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

Stretching two thousand miles to the west of the United States at the end of the War of 1812-15, and five or six thousand miles to the south, lay the vast possessions of Spain and Portugal. Rooted in the culture and heritage of Britain and northern Europe, most Americans had a poor and contorted understanding of the empire that flanked them from California along the Pacific shores of Mexico through the Caribbean, to the long shoulder of Brazil jutting far out into the Atlantic. Of heroic stories of Columbus and Cortes and Pizarro, North Americans learned in their infancy. Sailors and traders brought back tales of exotic and erotic adventures in great ports such as Havana, San Juan, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, of frightful tempests and endless storms off Cape Horn, of pleasant trading places like Acapulco and San Francisco. But little was known, outside the ranks of diplomats and a few scholars, of the Latin cultures that had begun to flourish in Central and South America during the sixteenth century while North America was peopled by native Indians and a few white settlers.

North Americans knew little of the glories of a Spanish America that was enjoying a kind of Indian summer in the early nineteenth century—of the creative patronage of the arts, of the brilliant circles of learning, of the astronomical observatory in Bogotá, of the already ancient university in Santo Domingo, of the school of mines in Mexico City. Most
yanquis
comprehended only dimly a polity of Spanish state rule from the Crown in Madrid through a great pyramid of viceroyalties, such as New Granada, Peru, New Spain (Mexico), down through presidencies, captain-generalcies, and
audiencias.
And even less did they understand or appreciate the Church that, now stern and now benign, spread its spiritual arms over Spanish and Indian alike and often, to a far greater extent than northern missionaries, made an effort not merely to convert the Indians but to understand and accommodate their language, customs, and needs. Nor did most Latin Americans know or care much about the small republic to the north, with its Protestant culture and often bumptious diplomacy.

The two cultures confronted each other along a hazy boundary from the northern reaches of the Floridas to Louisiana and then across the southwestern desert. The Administration ended the war with a good deal of ill feeling toward the Spanish. He had been looking at some official Spanish documents, President Madison told the chief clerk of the State Department, and they backed up all the earlier accounts “of the extreme jealousy & hatred of us prevailing in the Spanish Court, and prove that after the fall of Napoleon, there was a project entertained, for taking advantage of our war with England, and the expected succour of the latter to Spain, to settle
all territorial matters with the U.S. according to Spanish wishes.” For years the Floridas had lain like a pistol aimed at the Mississippi, the central artery of American commerce, with East Florida the butt and West Florida the barrel, Samuel Flagg Bemis noted; now, with sections sliced off earlier by the United States, the pistol looked more truncated. But it was still dangerous, and must be muzzled.

Who would do the muzzling, and how? The military action was undertaken by Andrew Jackson, but the guiding hands were those of James Monroe, and especially of John Quincy Adams, in a brilliant display of American
Realpolitik.

While Monroe was still Secretary of State, and Adams Minister to Britain, Adams in London had confronted the British Foreign Minister, Lord Castlereagh, with Washington’s suspicions that Spain had secretly ceded Florida to Britain.

“As to that,” Castlereagh said, “I can set you at ease at once. There is not and never has been the slightest foundation for it whatsoever. It never has been even mentioned.”

“I am sure the American government will receive with much pleasure the assurance given me by your Lordship that no such cession has been made,” Adams said.

“None whatever,” Castlereagh continued. “It has never been mentioned, and, if it had, it would have been decisively declined by us. Military positions may have been taken by us during the war, of places which you had taken from Spain, but we never intended to keep them.
Do you also observe the same moderation.
If we should find you hereafter pursuing a system of encroachment upon your neighbors, what we might do defensively is another consideration.”

“I do not precisely understand what your Lordship intends by this advice of moderation,” Adams said smoothly. “The United States have no design of encroachment upon their neighbors, or of exercising any injustice toward Spain.”

Castlereagh’s warning did not deter Monroe and Adams from taking a strong line toward Spain on Florida when they became President and Secretary of State in 1817. The United States held certain advantages. The Louisiana treaty had left quite vague the boundary west of the Mississippi. Spain’s military grip on Florida had weakened as she siphoned off troops to fight insurgents in South America. Florida had become a haven for privateers and runaway slaves; even more, Seminole Indians, harboring resentments against the Americans, had thrust across the border to “pillage, burn, and murder.” For its part, Madrid was less interested in keeping the disorderly settlements and treacherous swamps of Florida than in
securing its holdings to the west. The Spanish minister in Washington, Don Luiz de Onís y Gonzales, was instructed to defer any cessions of the Floridas until Washington compromised on Texas. Onís was happy to drag his heels, but events would not permit this, for Americans in lower Georgia were clamoring for a punitive expedition into Florida against both the Seminoles and the Spanish.