Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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most immigration, did not want to move to a semi-tropical climate, and were unfamiliar with dealing with people of African origin. Most Americans were in free states, and despite the three-fifths rule, the congressional delegations of the free states were substantially larger than those of the South. When amendments were proposed prohibiting slavery in the Missouri Territory, which was a large part of the Louisiana Purchase, there was very spirited reaction from southerners, and a series of heated debates and close votes, as the strains on a country half free and half slave, with a constitutional arrangement for favoring slave states in congressional delegations and presidential and vice presidential electoral votes, began, as was widely foreseen, to tear at national unity. After acrimonious and confused debate for nearly four months, a compromise proposed by Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois was adopted. Maine and Missouri were admitted as states, Maine as a free state and Missouri without restriction on slavery, and the balance of the Louisiana Territory west of Missouri and north of the line 36°30 (the continuation of the Arkansas-Missouri border) would not be a slave-holding area.
This settled the issue down for a time, but it was perennial, and would become more intractable. The North now realized that slavery would not die on its own, though most considered it unchristian and an affront to the founding values of the country. The South realized that it would always be questioned and that it would always be on the moral defensive. “From [the Missouri Compromise] on few Americans had any illusions left about the awful reality of slavery in America.”5 Jefferson famously now called it “A fire bell in the night . . . the knell of the Union.” He feared that all that he and “the generation of 1776” had accomplished to secure “self-government and happiness to their country” could be squandered “by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.”6 Yet he dismissed the Missouri question as “not a moral question, but one merely of power.”
Monroe had so defused partisanship, the caucus of his party in the House of Representatives that was to choose the Democratic-Republican nominees for president and vice president could not assemble a quorum on the preannounced date. The Federalist Party was inactive, so no one was officially put forward by any party. President Monroe and Vice President Tompkins allowed their names to stand and there was no formal opposition. Monroe won 231 electoral votes to three abstentions and one vote cast for Adams (the secretary of state) by an elector who thought no one but Washington should have the honor of being elected unanimously. Tompkins collected 218 votes, with the others scattered, although he simultaneously ran as governor of New York, making it clear that if elected, he would serve in that office, leaving the secretary of state to succeed to the presidency should Monroe not complete his term. In the event, Tompkins lost the governor’s race narrowly to De Witt Clinton, who went on to build the Erie Canal, connecting New York City to the Great Lakes, one of the world’s most noteworthy feats of engineering at the time. It was 363 miles long, 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep, and had 83 locks to take vessels up 675 feet. It would have been only half as long if it had utilized Lake Ontario, but war with Britain was still thought quite possible, and Lake Ontario was more peopled on the northern side (Toronto) and was directly accessible from the St. Lawrence, so the Erie Canal runs parallel to the lake, about 10 miles south of it, from Lake Oneida to Lake Erie at Buffalo.
9. THE MONROE DOCTRINE
Starting in 1810, all of the Latin American countries began to agitate for independence from Spain and Portugal. Open revolts flickered and raged all over the Americas south of the United States. The colonial powers were evicted more effortlessly in some places than others, but they had nothing like the resources to try to maintain themselves that the British had had at their disposal 40 years before. The so-called Holy Alliance (France, Russia, Austria, Prussia; Britain withdrew from this ultra-conservative arrangement), a strange and almost mystical reactionary league to freeze Europe and much of the world as they were when the Congress of Vienna concluded, determined at Verona in November 1822 that members would all assist a restoration of absolute monarchy in Spain. France invaded Spain to this end, less than a decade after Wellington and the Spanish guerrillas had forced Napoleon’s army out of Spain. Canning, who had replaced the (suicidally) deceased Castlereagh as foreign minister, suspected the French of aspiring to a Latin American empire, and when he did not receive adequate French assurances to disabuse himself of this concern, he proposed to Rush, the American minister in London, that Great Britain and the United States make a joint pact to keep other European powers out of Latin America. Monroe had already recognized the nascent Latin American republics and exchanged embassies with them (in May 1822). Rush told Canning that he did not have the authority to commit the U.S., but that he suspected the concept could have traction if Britain would join the United States in recognizing the new Latin American republics.
Monroe and, when he consulted them, Jefferson and Madison were enthusiastic about close cooperation with Great Britain, quite a turn for the old revolutionaries. Once America became active in the world, its leaders quickly found that the only foreign power it had much in common with was Britain—the language, the comparative liberality, and the stable political institutions. Adams demurred from his elders and predecessors (all four had been secretary of state and Adams, too, would be president.) Secretary of State Adams was not so convinced that the British were really renouncing colonial ambitions in Latin America; he had been jousting with the British over Cuba, and feared a nefarious attempt to establish a quid pro quo. He considered that the British alone would prevent other Europeans from asserting themselves in Latin America, as no one now disputed the absolute supremacy of the Royal Navy, virtually everywhere in the world. Adams was also concerned about the czar’s assertion of rights in the Northwest, where the British had a minimal naval presence and little concern what the Russians did. In the light of these factors, Adams proposed distinctive American warnings to Russia and France, and the United States did not respond to Canning. Adams persuaded Monroe and the rest of the cabinet to issue a policy statement purporting to govern foreign activities in the Americas.
In his annual message to the Congress on December 2, 1823, the president enunciated what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, which was composed by Adams and himself. They made four points: The Americas would not be subject to further colonization by Europeans; there was a distinct political society in the Americas very different to that of Europe; the United States would consider any attempt to extend European influence in the Americas to be dangerous to the national security of the U.S., but existing European colonies and dependencies in the Americas were grandfathered as legitimate; and the United States renounced any interest in influencing events in Europe. There were some doubtful aspects of this formulation. The United States had much more in common with Britain than with the emerging, unstable dictatorships of Latin America, and the Royal Navy assured the integrity of the Americas at least for the first 40 years after Monroe promulgated his doctrine. The United States had no ability whatever to prevent British encroachments in South America, had they wished to make any. And the renunciation of an American role in Europe was not much of an act of restraint, as it had no capacity whatever to play any such role. On April 17, 1824, the U.S. signed with Russia a treaty in which Russia confined itself to activities in the Pacific Northwest of North America above longitude 54°40, and desisted from attempts to rule the Bering Sea exclusively for Russian fishing and whaling.
In general, international reaction to Monroe’s speech was complete indifference, even in Latin America, but it would become an extremely important dispensation for the Americas after 1865, when the power of the United States was very great and unchallengeable in its own hemisphere. In the meantime, this was a brilliant diplomatic stroke by Monroe and Adams, as they managed to align their country’s interest exactly with Britain’s and appear to have more power than they did, while building a solid relationship with their former nemesis. Britain was now entering the greatest century of its influence in the world in its history, and the association of America with it was entirely on the basis of America’s own national interest.
Monroe would follow his fellow Virginians and retire after two terms, having blended Jeffersonism with Hamiltonism, and having recovered some of Franklin’s talent for diplomatic finesse, which seemed to give America a greater weight in the world than it really possessed. And the ill-conceived embargoes had been successful shields for the launch of manufacturing. That was not what was expected to happen by the squires of Monticello and Montpelier (Jefferson’s and Madison’s homes), but it was the beginning of an industrial capacity