American Experiment (46 page)

Who could do the job better than Andrew Jackson, long a frontier nationalist and harrier of Indians and Spaniards, and already in place as commander of the Southern Division? All that was needed was an incident, and this had been conveniently provided when, in November 1817, American troops burned a Seminole border village and the Indians in retaliation ambushed an American hospital ship and killed forty-five soldiers, women, and children. Jackson urged on Monroe that the “whole of East Florida be seized and held as indemnity for the outrages of Spain upon the property of our Citizens.” The government need not be implicated, the general added. “Let it be signified to me through any channel…that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.” Jackson received no direct reply to this letter; all he did receive was murky instructions from Washington that left him just where he liked to be: on his own.

Early in March 1818, Jackson crossed the border with about two thousand men. Acting with his usual dash and elan, in a few weeks’ time he chased Indians, seized Pensacola and other key Spanish posts in Florida, confiscated the royal archives, court-martialed and executed two British subjects suspected of aiding the enemy, deposed the Spanish governor, and declared in force the revenue laws of the United States. After howls of indignation in London and Madrid, he expressed regret only for failing to hang the Spanish governor.

Patriotic Englishmen reacted with predictable wrath to the “murder” of their fellow countrymen. The press, exhibiting Jackson in their street placards, denounced him as a tyrant, ruffian, and murderer, United States minister Richard Rush reported from London. There was even talk of war. Patriotic Americans responded to Jackson’s incursion with predictable delight. Public dinners offered toasts to the man who had vanquished Spanish, Indians, and British all in one stroke, and gained real estate to boot.
Niles’ Weekly Register
reported that the general’s popularity in the West was unbounded—at his call 50,000 warriors “would rise, armed, and ready for any enemy.” Tammany Hall resolved that the “manly” general was justified by the “law of nations” and approved of his teaching “foreign emissaries that the United States was not to be outraged by spies, traitors,
and lawless adventurers.” New York awarded the hero the freedom of the city—in a golden box. In Washington, Onís demanded an explanation, while Congress, after wrangling over Jackson’s actions in a month-long debate, during which the galleries were crowded almost to suffocation and cuspidors overturned in the rush for seats, decisively defeated resolutions condemning the hero’s conduct.

The crucial move lay with President Monroe and his Cabinet. All seemed to agree that the general had exceeded his orders. Secretary of War Calhoun, stung by what he saw as Jackson’s defiance of his own orders not to challenge the Spaniards, wanted him court-martialed. Secretary of the Treasury Crawford joined in the condemnation. Both men had their eyes on the next election—and on Henry Clay, who was making capital against both Jackson and the Administration. The President as usual looked for a consensus, and he might have had one, except for his Secretary of State.

John Quincy Adams did not like Andrew Jackson; the Tennesseean was not his kind of man. Nor did he approve of the general’s excesses in Florida. But Adams saw an opportunity that transcended personalities, an opportunity to exercise American statecraft, to advance his dream of a transcontinental nation, and to promote his rising hopes of a second Adams presidency. Instead of allowing the Jackson incursion to be elevated to a moral issue forcing the United States on the defensive, he treated it as a fait accompli that put Washington in a stronger position in dealing with Madrid over the whole transcontinental border. “On the receipt of Genl. Jackson’s report of his proceedings there,” Monroe wrote ex-President Madison a few weeks after, “we had three great objects in view, first to secure the constitution from any breach, second to deprive Spain and the allies of any just cause of war, and third to turn it to the best account of the country.” The third responsibility was peculiarly Adams’. In his instructions to the United States minister in Madrid, Adams took the offensive. He charged Spain with having failed to restrain her Indians and in fact with encouraging them; he defended the execution of the two Britons; he demanded the punishment of the guilty Spanish officers and—audacity of audacities—he laid claim to an indemnity for the cost to the Americans of pursuing the Indians.

Having established a strong bargaining position, Adams proceeded to negotiate with Onís in Washington. They had long been discussing the western boundary; now they sought a total settlement. As a sweetener, Spain’s posts seized by Jackson were returned to her, though her demand that Jackson be punished was rejected. Week after week, Adams and Onís shuffled maps and haggled over territory, as large tracts of land hung on
day-to-day agreements over tentative boundaries based often on vague information about the location of mountain ranges or the configuration of rivers.

Onís was no equal to Adams as a negotiator, in part because of inferior ability, in part because his king, the repellent Ferdinand VII, had a reputation for exiling his envoys to distant monasteries for exercising too much latitude in bargaining. In the end, after Monroe delivered a near-ultimatum to the foot-dragging Onís, the Adams-Onís treaty was signed in February 1819. Spain renounced all her claims to West Florida and ceded East Florida to the United States; the United States repudiated its claims to Texas; the western boundary was defined as running from the mouth of the Sabine River, then northwest along the Red and Arkansas rivers and the 42nd parallel, from which it proceeded due west to the Pacific. In essence, the Spanish claims to the Pacific Northwest were surrendered to the United States in exchange for the equally immense territory in the Southwest.

On February 22, 1819, Adams and Onís affixed their signatures to the treaty. “It was, perhaps, the most important day of my life,” Adams wrote in his diary. He had secured Florida. But he forbade exultation—it was the “work of an intelligent and all-embracing Cause.” Two days later, the Senate unanimously advised and consented to the treaty. Spain’s pistol to the south had been removed. Few asked whether its cannon had been entrenched two thousand miles to the west.

Even while Adams was negotiating with Spain, the old mobiles of international politics were beginning to shudder before the gusts of powerful forces that were bringing new groups to power in Latin America. By some common alchemy of the human spirit, people across the long reach of the Latin world were seeking to transform their lives by rebelling against autocratic rulers and ancient laws. The Holy Alliance, formed in part to put down the revolutionary spirit, suddenly confronted rebellions in Naples, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Long-fermenting unrest in Latin America swelled into liberation movements led by the spirited young Venezuelan Simón Bolívar, by the Mexican priest and patriot Miguel Hidalgo, by the Argentinian general José de San Martín, and many others. Two years before Adams signed the treaty with the old regime in Madrid, San Martín crossed the Andes to defeat the Spanish at the Battle of Chacabuco and thus helped bring about the liberation of Chile. Two years after that treaty, Bolívar won the last major battle of the war in Venezuela, and Mexico
gained its independence; a year after that, the Brazilian Empire was declared independent under Pedro I.

Americans watched admiringly as patriots came to power who used the Declaration of Independence as sacred writ and George Washington as a model. Americans watched apprehensively as the Holy Allies agreed to mandate Austria to put down the republican revolution in Naples and in the Piedmont, as the allies approved French military intervention in Spain to suppress the new constitutional government there: The European leaders invited Britain to share these sacred responsibilities, but by now Castlereagh was frustrated by his involvement in the alliance. The servant of a dynasty that owed its throne to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he could hardly embrace with passion an anti-revolutionary entente. Moreover, influential English opinion was turning away from the embrace of reactionary, absolutist regimes toward flirtation, at least, with political liberalism and a freer commerce. Beset by these and other pressures, Castlereagh went mad, cut his throat with a penknife, and thus made possible the succession to the Foreign Ministry of his fierce rival, George Canning, who also feared the reactionary power of the Holy Allies and sought to build a balance of power against them.

Why should not the “two chief commercial and maritime states of both worlds,” as Canning described Britain and the United States, be part of that counterbalance? Thus the swaying mobiles of the Western world could be brought back to an equilibrium. Canning broached the idea to Minister Rush, who passed it on to Washington. President Monroe treated the question as one of the gravest of his career. Would this be a departure from the doctrine of non-involvement in European affairs—a doctrine sanctified by Washington and engraved in his Farewell Address? Typically ambivalent in his own reaction, eager for a collective judgment, Monroe turned first to the bearers of the Virginia tradition. Both Jefferson and Madison counseled cooperation with Britain in what Madison called the “great struggle of the Epoch between liberty and despotism.” Reassured, Monroe called a meeting of his Cabinet. By the time it convened, the Russian minister had advised that the Tsar would not receive agents from any of the rebellious governments in America and congratulated Washington on its neutral attitude toward those governments. Were the Holy Allies planning some effort to restore his former colonies to Ferdinand?

At first, the Cabinet seemed to favor a joint declaration with Canning against interference in the Americas by the Holy Alliance, even if it should commit the United States never to take Cuba—long coveted by none other than Jefferson—or Texas. Britain had the power to seize both Cuba and
Texas, Calhoun observed, and thus would be pledged equally with the United States against such action. Adams demurred. He wanted no action that would bind the Administration’s hands if Texas or Cuba wished to join the Union, or in case of emergency. He was averse, the President replied, to any course that would appear subordinate to that of Britain. Adams wanted to take advantage of the Russian note.

“It affords a very suitable and convenient opportunity,” he told the Cabinet, as he remembered the discussion, “for us to take our stand against the Holy Alliance and at the same time to decline the overture of Great Britain. It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles directly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.” All seemed to agree. As the meeting broke up, Adams cornered the President. The answers to the British, the Russians, and the French “must all be parts of a
combined system of policy and adapted to each other
. “

In meetings that followed, the Cabinet hammered out a policy, with Monroe and Adams taking the lead. The policy was the dual one of disclaiming any interference in the political affairs of Europe and declaring an “expectation that the European powers would equally abstain from seeking to spread their ideas in the American hemisphere,” or to take any part of it by force. The United States had already said “Hands Off” to further colonization of the New World; now it would say the same to further conquest or intervention.

It was an enormous step forward from non-colonization to non-intervention, but Adams was ready to accept the restraints required by this position. When Monroe proposed a message to Congress that would state these policies but would go on to reprove France for invading Spain and acknowledge the rebelling Greeks as an independent nation, Adams objected. This suggested entanglement in European affairs—why defy the powers? He finally brought the President around, but it was Monroe who decided to enunciate the doctrine in a message to Congress rather than in diplomatic communications to other capitals. Even so, he did not dramatize his message but rather embedded it in widely separated places in his message of December 2, 1823:

The “occasion has been judged proper for asserting…that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain,
are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.…

“We owe it…to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that
we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as
dangerous to our peace and safety.
With the
existing
colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and
shall not interfere.…

“Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is,
not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.
…”

Monroe’s doctrine hardly fell as a bombshell on Capitol Hill, but there was widespread satisfaction with it inside Congress and among the press and public outside. British and European conservatives generally were outraged. “Blustering”—”arrogant”—”monstrous”—were some of the words used. It merited only “the most profound contempt,” according to the tsarist government. Chancellor Metternich dismissed it as “indecent.” Liberal Europe was pleased. The aged Lafayette congratulated Monroe on his “manly message” and his bold stand against the “Hellish Alliance.” Across the South Atlantic, Latin Americans, including the great Bolívar himself, generally applauded Monroe. But they were not sure just what he meant, or just how the United States would carry it out. Would European imperialism simply be replaced by North American?

Or would both be replaced by an ascendant capitalism? After the dislocations of the Napoleonic wars and the postwar readjustments, the 1820s were bringing an enormous expansion of trade and manufacture in both the United States and Britain. Fundamental to Canning’s desire for Anglo-American political cooperation was his awareness of the need of British manufacturing interests for access to the growing American market. Free trade pressure in Britain was bursting the bonds of the old mercantilist system. Why quarrel with a huge source of customers? It was this need for commercial reciprocity with Washington that explains London’s refusal to respond aggressively to Monroe’s dictum. The United States in turn needed good trade relations with Britain because of the markets it controlled—and the great navy London could deploy along the trade routes of the world. And Washington’s interest in the new nations of Latin America was a commercial as well as a political and moral one.