From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (29 page)

The United States also managed to achieve the treaty with Turkey that had eluded it for thirty years. Destruction of the Turkish navy by a combined European fleet at Navarino in 1827 convinced the sultan that closer relations with the United States would be useful. In return for a "separate and secret" U.S. promise to assist in rebuilding its navy, Turkey agreed to establish diplomatic and consular relations, trade on a most-favored-nation basis and admit American ships to the Black Sea. Although the Senate rejected the secret article, Americans without official sanction helped design ships and train sailors for the Turkish navy. The commercial treaty did not live up to expectations, only the exchange of rum and cotton goods in Smyrna for opium, fruit, and nuts turning out to be significant, but it established, along with the missionaries in Beirut, a basis for U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
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Jackson eagerly sought out trade with Asia. In January 1832, he appointed New England merchant and veteran sailor Edmund Roberts as a special agent to negotiate treaties with Muscat, Siam (Thailand), and Cochin China (southern Vietnam). To keep his mission secret, Roberts was given "ostensible employment" as clerk to the commander of the sloop
Peacock
. This first encounter between the United States and Vietnam was not a happy one. The ship landed near present-day Qui Nhon in January 1833. The discussions that followed constituted a classic cross-cultural exercise in futility. Low-level Vietnamese officials raised what Roberts called "impertinent queries," namely, whether the visitors had brought the obligatory presents
for the king. Himself an imperious figure and like most Americans of the time strongly nationalistic, Roberts staunchly refused to use the "servile forms of address" the Vietnamese demanded in dealing with the emperor. They would accept nothing less, insisting that since the U.S. president was elected he was obviously inferior to a king. Roberts took a strong dislike to his hosts, describing them as untrustworthy and "without exception the most filthy people in the world." Most important, he refused to submit to "any species of degradation"—notably the elaborate ritual known as the ko-tow—to "gain commercial advantage." After a month of unproductive discussions, the
Peacock
sailed away.

Roberts's frustrations with Vietnam persisted. The
Peacock
went on to insular Southeast Asia, where he negotiated treaties with the rulers of Siam and Muscat, the former a model of commercial liberality. Jackson was so pleased that he asked his envoy to go back to Cochin China and then proceed to Japan, pragmatically imploring him, this time, to conform to local custom "however absurd." Wined and dined by rulers across the world, the venturesome Roberts had survived shipwrecks, pirates, and disease. This time his luck ran out. He contracted cholera en route. His ship landed at Da Nang in May 1836, but after a week of futile discussions, this time hampered by his illness, he sailed to Macao, where he died before completing his mission. The emperor Ming-Mang summed up the experience with a poem:

We did not oppose their coming,
We did not pursue them on their departure,
We behaved according to the manners of a civilized nation
What good would it do for us to complain of foreign barbarians.
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Building on Adams and Clay's foundation, Jackson negotiated ten commercial treaties in all. Exports nearly doubled during his two terms. Much of the increase was with Europe, still the major U.S. market, but the new treaties established a foundation for future commercial interests in the Middle East and East Asia.

Far more than his predecessors, Jackson thought in global terms, and he was committed to extending American influence into remote areas. He endorsed a plan for exploring the South Pole, agreeing, with its promoter, that it was important to show the flag "to every portion of the
globe, to give to civilized and savage man a just impression of the power we possess."
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He upgraded the navy and used it to defend the nation's commercial interests and uphold its honor. For years, Americans had fished and sealed in the gray and icy South Atlantic and dried sealskins on the shores of the barren Falkland/Malvinas Islands. In the early 1820s, the new republic of Buenos Aires laid claim to the islands, established a tiny settlement of gauchos and ex-convicts, and restricted foreigners from fishing and sealing. When U.S. sailors in 1831 violated the orders, local authorities seized three American ships. Recently arrived in the area, the powerful USS
Lexington
proceeded to the Falkland/Malvinas under general instructions to protect U.S. commercial interests. Exceeding more specific orders issued by a diplomat in Buenos Aires without standing or instructions, and flying the French flag for purposes of deception, Capt. Silas Duncan neutralized Argentine defenses, declared the islands without government, placed the settlers under arrest, and took several hostages. Far from disavowing Duncan's actions, Jackson endorsed them. The new U.S. minister in Buenos Aires defended the captain to the point of demanding his passport to return home.
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A more serious incident occurred in 1831 along the "pepper coast" of present-day Indonesia. Malayan pirates attacked an American merchantman (ironically named
The Friendship
) in the West Sumatran port of Quallah Battoo, killing several sailors, taking $12,000 in specie and $8,000 in opium, and adding insult to injury by taunting the captain and his crew: "Who is greater now, Malay or American?" Outraged by this affront and persuaded that the "piratical perpetrators" were in "such a state of society that the usual course of proceedings between civilized nations could not be perused," Jackson dispatched the fifty-gun USS
Potomac
to the East Indies, instructed Capt. John Downes to demand indemnity and restitution of the stolen property, and authorized him to use force if no satisfaction was obtained. Arriving at the scene in early 1832, the impulsive captain decided to shoot first and talk later. He landed marines on Quallah Battoo, plundered the port, and burned the town, killing as many as two hundred Malays, women and children included. Annoyed that Downes had exceeded his orders, Jackson assigned him to finish his
career as an inspector of lighthouses. But he publicly defended the captain, condemning the Malays as a "band of lawless pirates" and admitting that his purpose was to "inflict a chastisement as would deter them from like aggressions."
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Jackson's gunboat diplomacy reveals much about U.S. foreign policy in the 1830s. It makes clear the nation's contempt for "lesser" peoples, its determination to command respect as a great power, and its conviction that military force could be used to alter the behavior of others. Jackson's political foes denounced him for being trigger-happy and bloodthirsty, and for usurping a war-making power rightly belonging to Congress. His defenders, in turn, dismissed as "unmanly" the notion that the president could not chastise "pirates" without an act of Congress. Americans in general applauded his actions as a "necessary lesson to be taught ignorant savages who would violate the rights of a young republic with a world destiny to fulfill."
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The United States was justified in defending its interests, but in each case naval officers exceeded their orders and, in Sumatra in particular, inflicted destruction far out of proportion to the losses suffered. Moreover, the lessons administered seem to have been lost on their intended students. Numerous incidents along the pepper coast made clear that Downes's reprisals had not deterred "like aggression." In an ironic twist, Duncan's escapade left the Falkland/Malvinas vacant. When Britain filled the vacuum by seizing the islands in early 1833, Argentina asked for U.S. support under the Monroe Doctrine. It was one thing, of course, to take on Argentina, quite another Great Britain, and the United States did nothing. Jackson's action—and subsequent inaction—confirmed Latin American and especially Argentine suspicions of the United States. His gunboat diplomacy put the United States very much in the mainstream of Western imperialism rather than outside of it, as Americans have boasted, belying the nation's claims of its exceptionalism.

Like Monroe and Adams, Jackson moved vigorously to eliminate obstacles to U.S. expansion on the North American continent. This involved, on the one hand, removal of the Indians to unoccupied land west of the Mississippi, and on the other, efforts to acquire Texas from Mexico through purchase or negotiation. Jackson's inaugural pledge to ask nothing "not clearly right" and "permit nothing that is wrong," did not apply in these cases.

Defeat in the War of 1812 had crippled Indian resistance to white expansion, and in its aftermath the United States moved to solve the Indian "problem." It was a solution devised by whites for Native Americans. Indians "neither are, in fact, nor ought to be considered as independent nations," Calhoun observed in 1818. "Our views of their interest, and not their own, ought to govern them."
⁹⁰
That view came to center on removal. Monroe endorsed the policy as early as 1817. The cotton boom in the South and discovery of gold in Georgia prompted land-hungry settlers in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to agitate for removing the southeastern Indians west of the Mississippi. Ironically, the main targets of removal, the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, had taken the greatest strides toward assimilation, but by this time that concept had fallen into disrepute. Some Americans viewed the degeneracy that "civilization" had brought to Indians as evidence that assimilation had failed. Most fell back on the blatantly racist and entirely expedient position that Indians were an inferior people beyond redemption. Even Clay, whose views were relatively humane, affirmed that the Indians "were not an improvable breed, and their disappearance from the human family will be no great loss to the world."
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In this atmosphere, drastic change in Indian policy was inevitable. Jackson was elected by states eager for removal. He had concluded that the Indians could not remain—it was impossible for separate peoples to coexist within a nation. Thus, even though the United States had signed numerous treaties with the various tribes, he rejected outright their claim to sovereignty. He rationalized removal as a way of saving Indian civilization—the only alternative to annihilation—although he must have foreseen that in time the same pressures might drive them from the lands to which they were being removed.
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One of the great tragedies of U.S. history thus unfolded during the Jackson years. Violating earlier treaty obligations, Congress passed in 1830 by a very thin margin a bill for removal. In theory, it was voluntary. Jackson insisted that he would not forcibly remove those Indians who submitted to state law, but state officials ignored his qualification and applied the law to Indians in a discriminatory and oppressive manner. Removal was accomplished by force, bribery, fraud, and the grossest exploitation. Jackson himself warned recalcitrant chiefs, if they rejected removal, not
to call upon their "great father hereafter to relieve you of your troubles." When his old adversaries, the Creeks and Cherokees, resisted and sued the United States, he made clear he must leave those "poor deluded" tribes "to their fate and annihilation."
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Jackson's claims that his policy toward his "red children" was "just and humane" ring hollow. Removal may indeed have been inevitable, but he might have done more to protect the rights of those who chose to remain and make the process of removal more humane. The government acquired 100 million acres of Indian land for $70 million plus 30 million acres in the West. Amidst horrific suffering, more than forty-six thousand Indians were forced from their ancestral lands into the wilderness across the Mississippi. The human losses were incalculable. Members of the tribes were divided against themselves. Efforts to remove the Seminoles sparked a war that lasted seven years and cost millions of dollars and thousands of lives. The cold winter of 1831–32, a cholera epidemic, and Congress's refusal to appropriate adequate funds added to the misery of those removed. The Cherokees resisted longest. They were herded into prison camps and eventually removed by force, resulting under Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, in the infamous "Trail of Tears." Jackson's removal policy spelled the doom of the American Indian. "What is history but the obituary of nations," one pro-removal congressman sighed.
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With no more scruples but much less success, the administration also attempted to push back the frontiers of Mexico. Like other southerners, Jackson viewed the exclusion of Texas from the treaty with Spain as a huge mistake. He feared leaving a foreign power in control of the lower branches of the Mississippi. He rationalized that national security and good relations with Mexico required a natural boundary. The "god of the universe had intended this great valley to belong to one nation," he exclaimed. "I shall keep my eye on this object, and the first propitious moment make the attempt to
regain
the Territory as far south and west as the great Desert."
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Jackson was not terribly troubled about the means employed. In August 1829, he empowered Poinsett to offer as much as $5 million for a boundary at the Rio Grande. The minister had already been discredited by his interference in Mexican politics. When Mexico demanded his recall, Jackson made a bad situation worse by replacing him with an old pal, Colonel Anthony Butler of Mississippi. A wheeler-dealer and notorious
rascal, Butler also speculated in Texas lands. Jackson probably encouraged his aggressiveness and unscrupulousness by advising him that "I scarcely ever knew a Spaniard who was not the slave of avarice, and . . . this weakness may be worth a great deal to us in this case."
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Upon arriving at his post, Butler made obvious his contempt for the Mexicans and his determination to get Texas by fair means or foul. Alternately pushy and indolent, happily ignorant of and insensitive to his hosts, Butler completely misread his opposite number in negotiations, the clever and sophisticated secretary of foreign affairs, Lucas Alaman, who had no intention of selling Texas. Certain of success, Butler promised his chief that he would get what he wanted or "forfeit my head." He tried first to purchase the coveted territory. That failing, he urged Jackson to occupy strategic parts of Texas and then open negotiations. When Jackson rejected that proposal, he suggested in an uncoded communication the bribery of that "vile hypocrite and most unprincipled man," the Mexican leader Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. This was too much even for Jackson. "A. Butler. What a scamp!" the president snarled as he ordered his minister recalled. Without Texas, still in possession of his head, and not content with the damage already done, Butler tarried for two years, among other things, challenging the Mexican secretary of war to a duel and threatening to cane and whip him in public. He is also alleged to have molested Mexican women. When ordered to leave the country, he had the effrontery—as well as the good sense—to request an armed guard to escort him to the border.
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