A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (41 page)

Illegal as Jackson’s exploits were, the fact was that Spain could not patrol its own borders. The Seminole posed a “clear and present danger,” and the campaign was not unlike that launched by General John Pershing in 1916, with the approval of Woodrow Wilson and Congress, to invade Mexico for the purpose of capturing the bandit Pancho Villa. Jackson set the stage for Adams to formalize the victory in a momentous diplomatic agreement. The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 settled the Florida question and also addressed three other matters crucial to America’s westward advance across the continent. First, the United States paid Spain $5 million and gained all of Florida, which was formally conveyed in July 1821. In addition, Adams agreed that Spanish Texas was not part of the Louisiana Purchase as some American expansionists had erroneously claimed. (Negotiators had formalized the hazy 1803 Louisiana Purchase boundary line all the way to the Canadian border.) Finally, Spain relinquished all claims to the Pacific Northwest—leaving the Indians, Russians, and British with the United States as the remaining claimants.

From Santa Fe to the Montana Country

In 1820, Monroe dispatched an army expedition to map and explore the Adams-Onis treaty line. Major Stephen H. Long keelboated up the Missouri and Platte rivers in search of (but never finding) the mouth of the Red River and a pass through the Rocky Mountains. Labeling the central Great Plains a “Great American Desert,” Long helped to perpetuate a fear of crossing, much less settling, what is now the American heartland. He also helped to foster a belief that this remote and bleak land was so worthless that it was suitable only for a permanent Indian frontier—a home for relocated eastern Indian tribes.

Concurrent with Long’s expedition, however, a trade route opened that would ultimately encourage Americanization of the Great Plains. Following the Mexican Revolution of 1820, the Santa Fe Trail opened, bringing American traders to the once forbidden lands of New Mexico. Santa Fe, in the mountains of northernmost Mexico, was closer to St. Louis than it was to Mexico City, a fact that Missouri merchants were quick to act upon. Santa Fe traders brought steamboat cargoes of goods from St. Louis up the Missouri to Independence (founded officially in 1827). There they outfitted huge two-ton Conestoga wagons (hitched to teams of ten to twelve oxen), gathered supplies, and listened to the latest reports from other travelers. They headed out with the green grass of May and, lacking federal troop escorts, traveled together in wagon trains to fend off Kiowa and Comanche Indians. The teamsters carried American cloth, cutlery, and hardware and returned with much coveted Mexican silver, fur, and mules.
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The Santa Fe trade lasted until 1844, the eve of the Mexican-American War, providing teamsters practice that perfected Plains wagoneering techniques, and their constant presence in the West chipped away at the great American desert myth. Moreoever, they established the Missouri River towns that would soon serve the Oregon Trail immigrant wagon trains.

At the same time, Rocky Mountain fur traders—the “Mountain Men”—headed up the Missouri to Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado country. British and American fur companies, such as the Northwest, American, and Hudson’s Bay companies, had operated posts on the Pacific Northwest coast since the 1790s, but in the 1820s, Americans sought the rich beaver trade of the inland mountains. St. Louis, at the mouth of the Missouri, served again as a major entrepôt for early entrepreneurs like Manuel Lisa and William H. Ashley. Ashley’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company sent an exploratory company of adventurers up the Missouri to the mouth of the Yellowstone River in 1822–23, founding Fort William Henry near today’s Montana–North Dakota boundary. This expedition included Big Mike Fink, Jedediah Smith, and other independent trappers who would form the cadre of famous mountain men during the 1820s and 1830s.

But by the 1840s, the individual trappers were gone, victims of corporate buyouts and their own failure to conserve natural resources. They had, for example, overhunted the once plentiful beaver of the northern (and southern) Rockies. Significantly, mountain men explored and mapped the Rockies and their western slopes, paving the way for Oregon Trail migrants and California Forty-niners to follow.

Beyond the Monroe Doctrine

Expansion into the great American desert exposed an empire in disarray—Spain—and revealed a power vacuum that existed throughout North and South America. The weak new Mexican and Latin American republics provided an inviting target for European colonialism. It was entirely possible that a new European power—Russia, Prussia, France, or Britain—would rush in and claim the old Spanish colonies for themselves. America naturally wanted no new European colony standing in its path west.

In 1822, France received tacit permission from other European powers to restore a monarchy in Spain, where republican forces had created a constitutional government. To say the least, these developments were hardly in keeping with American democratic ideals. Monroe certainly could do little, and said even less given the reality of the situation. However, a somewhat different twist to the Europeans’ suppression of republican government occurred in the wake of the French invasion of Spain. Both Monroe and John C. Calhoun, the secretary of war, expressed concerns that France might seek to extend its power to Spain’s former colonies in the New World, using debts owed by the Latin American republics as an excuse to either invade or overthrow South American democracies.

Britain would not tolerate such intrusions, if for no other reason than traditional balance-of-power politics: England could not allow even “friendly” former enemies to establish geostrategic enclaves in the New World. To circumvent European attempts to recolonize parts of the Western Hemisphere, British foreign minister George Canning inquired if the United States would like to pursue a joint course of resistance to any European involvement in Latin America.

Certainly an arrangement of this type was in America’s interests: Britain wanted a free-trade zone for British ships in the Western Hemisphere, as did the United States. But Adams, who planned to run for president in 1824, knew better than to identify himself as an “ally” of England, reviving the old charges of Adams’s Anglophilia. Instead, he urged Monroe to issue an independent declaration of foreign policy.

The resulting Monroe Doctrine, presented as a part of the message to Congress in 1823, formed the basis of American isolationist foreign policy for nearly a century, and it forms the basis for America’s relationship with Latin America to this day. Basically, the doctrine instructed Europe to stay out of political and military affairs in the Western Hemisphere and, in return, the United States would stay out of European political and military affairs. In addition, Monroe promised not to interfere in the existing European colonies in South America. Monroe’s audacity outraged the Europeans. Baron de Tuyll, the Russian minister to the United States, wrote that the doctrine “enunciates views and pretensions so exaggerated, and establishes principles so contrary to the rights of the European powers that it merits only the most profound contempt.”
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Prince Metternich, the chancellor of Austria, snorted that the United States had “cast blame and scorn on the institutions of Europe,” while
L’Etoile
in Paris asked, “By what right then would the two Americas today be under immediate sway [of the United States]?”
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Monroe,
L’Etoile
pointed out, “is not a sovereign.” Not all Europeans reacted negatively: “Today for the first time,” the Paris-based
Constitutionnel
wrote on January 2, 1824, “the new continent says to the old, ‘I am no longer land for occupation; here men are masters of the soil which they occupy, and the equals of the people from whom they came….’ The new continent is right.”
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While no one referred to the statement as the Monroe Doctrine until 1852, it quickly achieved notoriety. In pragmatic terms, however, it depended almost entirely on the Royal Navy.

Although the Monroe Doctrine supported the newly independent Latin American republics in Argentina, Columbia, and Mexico against Europeans, many Americans hoped to do some colonizing of their own. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the Monroe Doctrine paralleled the Adams-Onis Treaty, Long’s expedition, the opening of the Santa Fe Trail, and the Rocky Mountain fur trade. America had its eyes set west—on the weak Mexican republic and its northernmost provinces—Texas, New Mexico, and California. Nevertheless, when James Monroe left office in 1825, he handed to his successor a nation with no foreign wars or entanglements, an economy booming with enterprise, and a political system ostensibly purged of partisan politics, at least for a brief time. What Monroe ignored completely was the lengthening shadow of slavery that continued to stretch its hand across the Republic, and which, under Monroe’s administration, was revived as a contentious sectional issue with the Missouri Compromise.

The Fire Bell in the Night

Opening Missouri to statehood brought on yet another—but up to that point, the most important—of many clashes over slavery that ended in secession and war. Proponents of slavery had started to develop the first “overtly distinct southern constitutional thought” that crafted a logical, but constitutionally flawed, defense of individual states’ rights to protect slavery.
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Once again, it was Jefferson who influenced both the advance of liberty and the expansion of slavery simultaneously, for it was in the southern regions of the Louisiana Purchase territory—Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri—that slavery’s future lay.

Difficulties over the admission of Missouri began in late 1819, when Missouri applied to Congress for statehood. At the time, there were eleven slave states (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) and eleven free states (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois). Population differences produced a disparity in House seats, where, even with the three-fifths ratio working in favor of the South, slave states only counted 81 votes to 105 held by free states. Moreover, free-state population had already started to grow substantially faster than that of the slave states. Missouri’s statehood threatened to shift the balance of power in the Senate in the short term, but in the long term it would likely set a precedent for the entire Louisiana Purchase territory.

Anticipating that eventuality, and that since Louisiana had already become a state in 1812, the South would try to further open Louisiana Purchase lands to slavery, Congressman James Tallmadge of New York introduced an amendment to the statehood legislation that would have prevented further introduction of slaves into Missouri. A firestorm erupted. Senator Rufus King of New York claimed the Constitution empowered Congress to prohibit slavery in Missouri and to make prohibition a prerequisite for admission to the Union. As a quick reference, his could be labeled the congressional authority view, which was quickly countered by Senator William Pinkney of Maryland, who articulated what might be called the compact view, wherein he asserted that the United States was a collection of equal sovereignties and Congress lacked the constitutional authority over those sovereignties.

Indeed, the Constitution said nothing about territories, much less slavery in the territories, and left it to statute law to provide guidance. That was the case with the Northwest Ordinance. But since the Louisiana Purchase was not a part of the United States in 1787, the Northwest Ordinance made no provision for slavery west of the Mississippi, necessitating some new measure. No sooner had the opposing positions been laid out than the territory of Maine petitioned Congress for its admission to the Union as well, allowing for not only sectional balance, but also providing a resolution combining the Maine and Missouri applications. A further compromise prohibited slavery north of the 36-degree, 30-minute line. There were also more insidious clauses that prohibited free black migration in the territory and guaranteed that masters could take their slaves into free states, which reaffirmed the state definitions of citizenship in the latter case and denied certain citizenship protections to free blacks in the former.
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Packaging the entire group of bills together, so that the Senate and House would have to vote on the entirety of the measure, preventing antislave northerners from peeling off distasteful sections, was the brainchild of Henry Clay of Kentucky. More than any other person, Clay directed the passage of the compromise, and staked his claim to the title later given him, the Great Compromiser. Some, perhaps including Clay, thought that with passage of the Missouri Compromise, the question of slavery had been effectively dealt with. Others, however, including Martin Van Buren of New York, concluded just the opposite: it set in motion a dynamic that he was convinced would end only in disunion or war. Van Buren consequently devised a solution to this eventuality. His brilliant, but flawed, plan rested on certain assumptions that we must examine.

Southern prospects for perpetuating slavery depended on maintaining a grip on the levers of power at the federal level. But the South had already lost the House of Representatives. Southerners could count on the votes of enough border states to ensure that no abolition bill could be passed, but little else. Power in the Senate, meanwhile, had started to shift, and with each new state receiving two senators, it would only take a few more states from the northern section of the Louisiana Purchase to tilt the balance forever against the South in the upper chamber. That meant forcing a balance in the admission of all new states. Finally, the South had to hold on to the presidency. This did not seem difficult, for it seemed highly likely that the South could continue to ensure the election of presidents who would support the legality (if not the morality) of slavery. But the courts troubled slave owners, especially when it came to retrieving runaways, which was nearly impossible. The best strategy for controlling the courts was to control the appointment of the judges, through a proslavery president and Senate.