From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (30 page)

The Butler mission represents the low point of Jacksonian diplomacy. The president sent perhaps the worst possible person on a mission of great delicacy, encouraged his bad behavior by sharing his own negative assessment of Mexicans, and refused to recall his agent when his conduct demanded it. Butler could not accomplish his mission. His arrogance and crudeness further poisoned Mexican-American relations, already strained by Poinsett's meddling, creating an atmosphere of anger and distrust conducive to war.

In the meantime, a revolution among Americans in Texas created a new set of problems—and opportunities. The United States did not incite the revolution; nor did the Jackson administration do anything to stop it. The president proclaimed U.S. neutrality but did not rigorously enforce
it. When the Texans won independence after the April 1836 Battle of San Jacinto and asked for recognition and annexation, Jackson demurred, fearing that the explosive issue of the expansion of slavery would tear apart his Democratic Party and cost his chosen successor, Van Buren, the election. Even after Van Buren had won, the ailing, outgoing president declined to act decisively, passing the buck to Congress. After an equally hesitant legislature finally enacted a resolution favoring recognition in March 1837, Jackson in one of his last acts recognized the Republic of Texas, leaving annexation for another day.

Despite his dedication to empire and his considerable foreign policy achievements, Jackson failed to complete a central task of continental expansion left undone by Monroe and Adams. In this case, the exigencies of politics won out over his commitment to expansionist goals. The annexation of Texas would form perhaps the defining event in the era of Manifest Destiny, helping to provoke a war with Mexico that in turn would round off U.S. continental expansion and inflame internal divisions that would lead to Civil War.

"The United States will conquer Mexico," philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted at the outbreak of war in May 1846, "but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us."
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Emerson correctly predicted that America's first major foreign war would have disastrous consequences, but he was wrong about what they would be. The assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority he shared with his countrymen caused him to fear that absorption of Mexico's alien people would sully the purity of America's population and the strength of its institutions. In fact, it was the cancer of slavery within U.S. society that, when linked with disposition of the territory taken from Mexico, poisoned the body politic, provoking the irrepressible crisis that eventually sundered the Union.

Indeed, throughout the 1840s and 1850s, slavery and expansion marched hand in hand. Certain of the superiority of their institutions and greatness of their nation, a bumptious people continued to push out against the weak restraints that bound them. Through negotiation and conquest, they more than doubled the nation's territory by 1848. By the time of the Mexican-American War, however, the future of the South's "peculiar institution" had provoked passionate controversy. Even before the war, slavery had become for southerners the driving force behind expansionism and for abolitionists the reason to oppose acquisition of new territory. The conquest of vast new lands in the war with Mexico brought to the fore the pressing question of whether new slave states would be created, the issue that would tear the Union apart. Fears of the further extension of slavery and absorption of alien races, in turn, stymied southern efforts in the 1850s to acquire additional territory in the Caribbean and Central America. In foreign
policy, as in domestic affairs, slavery dominated the politics of the antebellum era.

The mid-nineteenth century marked a transitional stage between the post-Napoleonic international system and the disequilibrium leading to World War I. The European great powers sustained a general peace interrupted only by limited, regional wars. England solidified its position as hegemonic power. The Royal Navy controlled the seas; by 1860, Britain produced 20 percent of the world's manufactures and dominated global finance. The industrial revolution generated drastic economic changes that would produce profound political and social dislocations. Revolutions in France and Central Europe in 1848 shook the established order momentarily and threatened general war. The two nations that prevented war at this point, Britain and Russia, fought with each other in 1854. The Crimean War, in turn, stirred "revisionist" ambitions across Europe and heightened British isolationism, helping to initiate in the 1850s a period of mounting instability. While avoiding a major war, the European powers used the "firepower gap" created by new technology to further encroach on the non-Western world. The opening of China and Japan to Western influence, in particular, had enormous long-range implications for world politics.
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America's global position changed significantly. The United States took steps toward becoming a Pacific power, asserting its interests in Hawaii, participating in the quasi-colonial system the European powers imposed on China, and taking the lead in opening Japan. Its relations with Europe were more important and more complex. Economically, the United States was an integral part of the Atlantic trading community. Politically, it remained a distant and apparently disinterested observer of European internal politics and external maneuvering. Americans took European interest in the Western Hemisphere most seriously. Still nominally committed to containing U.S. expansion, Britain and France dabbled in Texas and California. The British quietly expanded in Central America. In fact, the powers were preoccupied with internal problems and continental rivalries, and European ambitions in the Western Hemisphere were receding. Nevertheless, U.S. politicians used the European threat to generate support for expansion. Increasingly paranoid slaveholders saw
the sinister force of abolitionism behind the appearance of every British gunboat and the machinations of every British diplomat.

The 1840s and 1850s brought headlong growth for the United States. As a result of a continued high birth rate and the massive immigration of Germans and Irish Catholics, the population nearly doubled again, reaching 31.5 million by 1860. Eight new states were admitted, bringing the total to thirty-three. Described with wonderment by foreign visitors as a "people in motion," Americans began spilling out into Texas and Oregon even before the region between the Mississippi River and Rocky Mountains was settled. Technology helped bind this vast territory together. By 1840, the United States had twice as much railroad track as all of Europe. Soon, there was talk of a transcontinental railroad. The invention of the telegraph and the rise of the penny press provided means to disseminate more information faster to a larger reading public, making it possible, in the words of publisher James Gordon Bennett, "to blend into one homogeneous mass . . . the whole population of the Republic." The antebellum era was the age of U.S. maritime greatness. Sleek clipper ships still ruled the seas, but in 1840 steamboat service was initiated to England, cutting the trip to ten days and quickening the pace of diplomacy.
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The economy grew exponentially after the Panic of 1837. Freed from dependence on Britain through development of a home market, America was no longer a colonial economy. In agriculture, cotton was still king, but western farmers with the aid of new technology launched a second agricultural revolution, challenging Russia as the world's leading producer of food. Mining and manufacturing became vital segments of an increasingly diversified economy. The United States was self-sufficient in most areas, but exports could make the difference between prosperity and recession; U.S. exports, mostly cotton, swelled from an average of $70 million during 1815–20 to $249 million in the decade before the Civil War.
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American approaches to the world appeared contradictory. On the one hand, technology was shrinking the globe. The United States was becoming part of the broader world community. Major metropolitan newspapers assigned correspondents to London and Paris. The government dispatched expeditions to explore Antarctica and the Pacific, the interior of Africa and South America, and the exotic Middle East. Curious readers devoured their reports. On their own initiative, merchants and missionaries
in growing numbers went forth to spread the gospel of Americanism. Each group looked beyond its immediate objectives to the larger goal of uplifting other peoples. "One should not forget,"
New York Tribune
London correspondent Karl Marx wrote, "that America is the youngest and most vigorous exponent of Western Civilization."
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Americans observed the outside world with great fascination. They longed "to see distant lands," observed writer James Fenimore Cooper, to view the "peculiarities of nations" and the differences "between strangers and ourselves."
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Some promoted development in other countries. The father of artist James McNeill Whistler oversaw the building of a railroad between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Growing numbers traveled abroad, many to Europe. These tourists carried their patriotism with them and found in the perceived inferiority of other nations confirmation of their own greatness. Those dissatisfied with America should tour the Old World, a Tennessean wrote, and they would "return home with national ideas, national love and national fidelity."
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On the other hand, U.S. policymakers and diplomats, once an experienced and cosmopolitan lot, were increasingly parochial, sometimes amateurish—and often proud of it. The presidential domination of foreign policy institutionalized by Jackson persisted under Polk. Of the chief executives who served in these years, only James Buchanan had diplomatic experience. Reflecting an emerging world role, the secretary of state had a staff of forty-three people by the 1850s; twenty-seven diplomats and eighty-eight consuls were posted abroad. Reforms limited consular appointments to U.S. citizens and restricted their ability to engage in private business.
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The diplomatic corps was composed more and more of politicians and merchants. Some served with distinction; others made Anthony Butler look good.

Americans wore their republicanism on their sleeves and even enshrined it in protocol. Polk displayed "American arrogance" toward diplomats who addressed him in a language other than English and dismissed as "ridiculous" the repeated ceremonial visits of the Russian minister to announce such trivia as the marriage of the tsar's son.
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Secretary of State William
Marcy's "dress circular" of 1853 went well beyond Jackson's republicanism by requiring diplomats to appear in court in plain black evening clothes, the "simple dress of an American citizen." Parisians scornfully dubbed the U.S. minister "the Black Crow." Americans applauded. The person who represented his nation abroad should "look like an American, talk like an American, and be an American example," the
New York Post
proclaimed.
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New World ways some times rubbed off on Old World diplomats. Russian Eduard Stoeckl married an American and during his time in Washington served in a fire company where, in his words, he "run wid de lantern."
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The catchphrase "Manifest Destiny" summed up the expansionist thrust of the pre–Civil War era. Coined in 1845 by the Democratic Party journalist John L. O'Sullivan to justify annexation of Texas, Oregon, and California, the phrase meant, simply defined, that God had willed the expansion of the United States to the Pacific Ocean—or beyond. The concept expressed the exuberant nationalism and brash arrogance of the era. Divine sanction, in the eyes of many Americans, gave them a superior claim to any rival and lent an air of inevitability to their expansion. Manifest Destiny pulled together into a potent ideology notions dating to the origins of the republic with implications extending beyond the continent: that the American people and their institutions were uniquely virtuous, thus imposing on them a God-given mission to remake the world in their own image.
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Many Americans have accepted the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny at face value, seeing their nation's continental expansion as inevitable and altruistic, a result of the irresistible force generated by a virtuous people. Once viewed as a great national movement, an expression of American optimism and idealism, and the driving force behind expansion in the 1840s, Manifest Destiny's meaning and significance have been considerably qualified in recent years.
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For some Americans, no doubt, the rhetoric expressed idealistic sentiments. The acquisition of new lands and the admission of new peoples to the Union extended the blessings of liberty. Territorial expansion provided a haven for those fleeing oppression in other lands. Some Americans even believed that their nation had an obligation to uplift and regenerate "backward" peoples like Mexicans.

More often than not, Manifest Destiny covered and attempted to legitimate selfish motives. Southerners sought new land to perpetuate an economic and social system based on cotton and slavery and new slave states to preserve their power in Congress. People from all sections interested in the export trade coveted the magnificent ports of the Oregon country and California as jumping-off points to capture the rich commerce of East Asia. Restless, land-hungry westerners sought territory for its own sake. Some Americans argued that if the United States did not take Texas and California, the British and French would. At least, they might try to sustain independent republics that could threaten the security of the United States.

Manifest Destiny was also heavily tinged with racism. At the time of the Revolution and for years after, some Americans had sincerely believed that they could teach other peoples to share in the blessings of republicanism. The nation's remarkable success increasingly turned optimism into arrogance, however, and repeated clashes with Indians and Mexicans created a need to justify the exploitation of weaker people. "Scientific" theories of superior and inferior races thus emerged in the nineteenth century to rationalize U.S. expansion. Inferior races did not use the land properly and impeded progress, it was argued. They must give way before superior races, some, like African Americans, doomed to perpetual subservience, others, like Indians, to assimilation or extinction.
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