American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  This trading and brokering took place amid a curious vacuum. Despite much editorializing, the country was not deeply aroused. Northern feeling against slavery had not developed strongly, nor did the slaveholders yet feel mortally threatened. Congress was less a scene of grand confrontation between the two sides than an arena for guerrilla warfare, as small factions clung to protected positions on the ideological battlefield. The compromise was not so much a solemn compact between North and South, as Glover Moore said, as “merely an agreement between a small majority of the Southern members of Congress and a small minority of the Northern ones.” Aside from a sweeping attack by Rufus King on the whole moral and philosophical case for slavery, debate was mainly legalistic. Any transcending moral issues fed into the fragmented machinery of Congress were divested of their ethical content by endless constitutional logic-chopping, then quietly enervated in the backstairs trading and brokering that produced the compromise.

  The debate aroused no great confrontation between the two parties, because there were no longer two parties, only a bloated conglomeration of Republicans and a dying band of Federalists. The debates aroused no dramatic encounter between President and opposition party leader, for the latter did not exist and the former wanted things as they were. Monroe was essentially passive throughout the long course of the debates. He feared that the issue might get out of hand and intrude into his re-election campaign in 1820, but he won a second term with only a single elector in opposition, and some wondered whether he might have expended more of his political capital on such a major issue.

  To Jefferson the debates came “like a fire bell in the night.” But the fire bell seemed to awaken few outside the politicians and the press, in part because the politicians mainly wanted it that way. Perhaps the fire bell aroused the Virginia conscience, but Jefferson used a more apt figure when he said, in noting the lack of considered measures for dealing with slavery, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

  ADAMS’ DIPLOMACY AND MONROE’S DICTUM

  Stretching two thousand miles to the west of the United States at the end of the War of 1812-15, and five or six thousand miles to the south, lay the vast possessions of Spain and Portugal. Rooted in the culture and heritage of Britain and northern Europe, most Americans had a poor and contorted understanding of the empire that flanked them from California along the Pacific shores of Mexico through the Caribbean, to the long shoulder of Brazil jutting far out into the Atlantic. Of heroic stories of Columbus and Cortes and Pizarro, North Americans learned in their infancy. Sailors and traders brought back tales of exotic and erotic adventures in great ports such as Havana, San Juan, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, of frightful tempests and endless storms off Cape Horn, of pleasant trading places like Acapulco and San Francisco. But little was known, outside the ranks of diplomats and a few scholars, of the Latin cultures that had begun to flourish in Central and South America during the sixteenth century while North America was peopled by native Indians and a few white settlers.

  North Americans knew little of the glories of a Spanish America that was enjoying a kind of Indian summer in the early nineteenth century—of the creative patronage of the arts, of the brilliant circles of learning, of the astronomical observatory in Bogotá, of the already ancient university in Santo Domingo, of the school of mines in Mexico City. Most yanquis comprehended only dimly a polity of Spanish state rule from the Crown in Madrid through a great pyramid of viceroyalties, such as New Granada, Peru, New Spain (Mexico), down through presidencies, captain-generalcies, and audiencias. And even less did they understand or appreciate the Church that, now stern and now benign, spread its spiritual arms over Spanish and Indian alike and often, to a far greater extent than northern missionaries, made an effort not merely to convert the Indians but to understand and accommodate their language, customs, and needs. Nor did most Latin Americans know or care much about the small republic to the north, with its Protestant culture and often bumptious diplomacy.

  The two cultures confronted each other along a hazy boundary from the northern reaches of the Floridas to Louisiana and then across the southwestern desert. The Administration ended the war with a good deal of ill feeling toward the Spanish. He had been looking at some official Spanish documents, President Madison told the chief clerk of the State Department, and they backed up all the earlier accounts “of the extreme jealousy & hatred of us prevailing in the Spanish Court, and prove that after the fall of Napoleon, there was a project entertained, for taking advantage of our war with England, and the expected succour of the latter to Spain, to settle all territorial matters with the U.S. according to Spanish wishes.” For years the Floridas had lain like a pistol aimed at the Mississippi, the central artery of American commerce, with East Florida the butt and West Florida the barrel, Samuel Flagg Bemis noted; now, with sections sliced off earlier by the United States, the pistol looked more truncated. But it was still dangerous, and must be muzzled.

  Who would do the muzzling, and how? The military action was undertaken by Andrew Jackson, but the guiding hands were those of James Monroe, and especially of John Quincy Adams, in a brilliant display of American Realpolitik.

  While Monroe was still Secretary of State, and Adams Minister to Britain, Adams in London had confronted the British Foreign Minister, Lord Castlereagh, with Washington’s suspicions that Spain had secretly ceded Florida to Britain.

  “As to that,” Castlereagh said, “I can set you at ease at once. There is not and never has been the slightest foundation for it whatsoever. It never has been even mentioned.”

  “I am sure the American government will receive with much pleasure the assurance given me by your Lordship that no such cession has been made,” Adams said.

  “None whatever,” Castlereagh continued. “It has never been mentioned, and, if it had, it would have been decisively declined by us. Military positions may have been taken by us during the war, of places which you had taken from Spain, but we never intended to keep them. Do you also observe the same moderation. If we should find you hereafter pursuing a system of encroachment upon your neighbors, what we might do defensively is another consideration.”

  “I do not precisely understand what your Lordship intends by this advice of moderation,” Adams said smoothly. “The United States have no design of encroachment upon their neighbors, or of exercising any injustice toward Spain.”

  Castlereagh’s warning did not deter Monroe and Adams from taking a strong line toward Spain on Florida when they became President and Secretary of State in 1817. The United States held certain advantages. The Louisiana treaty had left quite vague the boundary west of the Mississippi. Spain’s military grip on Florida had weakened as she siphoned off troops to fight insurgents in South America. Florida had become a haven for privateers and runaway slaves; even more, Seminole Indians, harboring resentments against the Americans, had thrust across the border to “pillage, burn, and murder.” For its part, Madrid was less interested in keeping the disorderly settlements and treacherous swamps of Florida than in securing its holdings to the west. The Spanish minister in Washington, Don Luiz de Onís y Gonzales, was instructed to defer any cessions of the Floridas until Washington compromised on Texas. Onís was happy to drag his heels, but events would not permit this, for Americans in lower Georgia were clamoring for a punitive expedition into Florida against both the Seminoles and the Spanish.

  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.