We were of opinion that the country in contest was of great value, both on account of its natural fertility and of its position.
John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, 1783
The United States was born into a continent of European empires, and its first opportunities for territorial expansion came at their expense. One by one, U.S. leaders relieved Britain of Transappalachia, France of Louisiana, and Spain of Florida, increasing U.S. land area by roughly 700 percent (about 1.5 million square miles) and transforming thirteen colonies nestled between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains into a continental power. 1 Does profitability theory or domestic impact theory better explain these early acquisitions?
These three cases are arguably the least puzzling ones in this book, best-case scenarios in which U.S. territorial expansion was overdetermined. Each territory offered valuable material benefits: Transappalachia and Louisiana housed impressive natural resources; Louisiana and Florida provided crucial security for U.S. exports. The military costs of acquiring them were relatively minimal: Transappalachia entailed some diplomatic risk but no military action beyond the sunk costs of the Revolution, France willingly sold Louisiana, and Spanish authority in Florida crumbled under pressure. Since these cases rank among the most profitable opportunities the United States faced, profitability theory predicts widespread support for their pursuit among U.S. leaders.
Domestic impact theory also predicts expansionism in these cases, though it diverges from profitability theory in predicting varying levels of domestic political opposition. The pursuit of Transappalachia occurred before the Constitution was ratified, when the United States was not a unified nation-state but an alliance among “free and independent states.”2 Since territorial expansion did not imply annexation in that case, the region’s tremendous natural resources could be exploited at no domestic cost. Hence domestic impact theory expects U.S. leaders to broadly support acquiring Transappalachia. In contrast, the pursuits of Louisiana and Florida occurred under the Constitution, when the federal balance of power governed U.S. domestic politics. Those annexations were widely expected to tip that balance toward the South, so domestic impact theory predicts a sectional divide between southern advocates looking to reinforce their domestic support and northern opposition afraid of weakening domestic influence. The Virginia Dynasty’s firm grip on the presidency and Congress in both cases implies that the southern preference for expansion should have prevailed, but only over northern objections.
Leaders from both sections had little reason to fear worsening from these acquisitions because of their sparse populations. In 1800 the entirety of the future continental United States was inhabited by 600,000 Native Americans dispersed across hundreds of tribes, and their numbers declined to fewer than 280,000 by 1870.3 In contrast, the number of Anglo-American settlers in the Mississippi Valley alone reached 377,000 by 1800 and 900,000 thirty years later.4 Despite decades of Spanish rule, neither Louisiana nor Florida contained many Spaniards beyond civil and military officials. As the historian Karl Schmitt writes, “Americans, British, and blacks (as slaves) predominated among the some 6,000 polyglot Floridians, and the 20,000 inhabitants of Louisiana were almost equally divided between African slaves and French settlers.”5 Many U.S. leaders agreed with former Massachusetts Congressman Fisher Ames that this “ Gallo-Hispano-Indian omnium gatherum of savages and adventurers” was as worthy of citizenship as “otters in the wilderness,” yet their sparse numbers rendered them vulnerable to marginalization via postexpansion policies.6 Domestic impact theory therefore agrees with profitability theory that the United States should have pursued each of these golden opportunities, though in the later cases over sectional opposition.
“We do hereby strictly forbid, on pain of our displeasure, all our loving subjects from making any purchases or settlements whatever” west of the Appalachian Mountains.7 With this royal proclamation, issued on October 7, 1763, King George III attempted to reserve the area between the mountains and the Mississippi River for Native Americans. Disregarding royal preference and Native presence alike, the U.S. leaders who declared independence in 1776 demanded that their new nation include that vast region, called Transappalachia. This demand had no legal or demographic basis. Several of the rebellious colonies’ charters granted them territory stretching to the Mississippi and beyond, but the legitimacy of those grants derived from the same British Crown that had set their western boundaries at the Appalachians. Colonial settlers had barely even touched the Ohio River, the Mississippi’s main eastward tributary. Still, there was widespread support for expansion into the continent, support which featured prominently both in the Continental Congress’s overtures for a Spanish alliance as early as December 1776 and in its instructions to the peace negotiators John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay through the war’s end.8 Why did U.S. leaders pursue territorial expansion even before securing their national independence?
Transappalachia’s natural resources were a strong lure. As the U.S. negotiators reported to Secretary of Foreign Affairs Robert Livingston in July 1783, “We were of opinion that the country in contest was of great value, both on account of its natural fertility and of its position.”9 Its fertile lands bred visions of rich agriculture easily shipped down the Mississippi to international markets. In October 1780 Franklin wrote to Jay, “Poor as we are, yet as I know we shall be rich, I would rather agree with them to buy at a great price the whole of their right on the Mississippi than sell a drop of its waters. A neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street door.”10 Paired with access to North Atlantic fisheries, Transappalachia guaranteed prosperity for the young United States. In November 1782 Adams recorded in his journal, “Franklin said . . . that the fisheries and the Mississippi could not be given up; that nothing was clearer to him than that the fisheries were essential to the Northern states, and the Mississippi to the Southern, and, indeed, both to all.”11
If they failed to acquire Transappalachia during the Revolution, U.S. leaders expected that demographic trends would soon make it a cause of war. Fewer than twenty-five thousand colonial settlers lived there in 1782, but their numbers had already exploded from only a few hundred when the Revolution began.12 Watching this westward movement, U.S. leaders knew that settlers would flood into Transappalachia whether it remained British, passed to Spain, became an independent Native reservation, or any combination of those real possibilities. Expanding into the region later would probably mean another war with whoever controlled it, imposing costs which could be avoided by acquiring it now. As Adams reflected, “From first to last I ever insisted . . . that the fisheries and the Mississippi, if America was not satisfied in those points, would be the sure and certain sources of a future war . . . that the population near the Mississippi would be so rapid, and the necessities of the people for its navigation so pressing, that nothing could restrain them from going down.”13
Expansion into Transappalachia carried no domestic costs because it did not entail annexation, and in this regard, the case differs from most cases in this book. The United States was not a unified nation-state during the Revolution: the Continental Congress, its first central decision-making institution, functioned as “a diplomatic assembly of sovereign states,” a council of ambassadors from the rebellious colonies rather than a national government.14 As one scholar writes, “It had no authority to pass laws, no powers for enforcing the measures it did take, no means of raising money except printing, begging or borrowing. . . . The Continental Congress, in short, was simply an advisory council which depended for its effectiveness on the good will of thirteen scattered colonies with conflicting interests.”15 In November 1777 the Articles of Confederation formalized this international cooperation by establishing a “firm league of friendship,” including a defensive alliance, mutually respected citizenship, and a Congress of representatives to coordinate external relations and resolve interstate disputes. The Articles brought no deeper political integration, however, reserving for each state “its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right” not “expressly delegated” to Congress.16 Each state’s domestic politics remained independent from the others, leaving their leaders with nothing to fear from expanding their confederation.
The military costs of demanding Transappalachia are difficult to isolate from the broader struggle for independence. The claim clearly antagonized Spain and France, whose aid the United States badly needed during the Revolutionary War, and forgoing Transappalachia might have eased the path to independence by generating more foreign aid sooner. Spain did not hide its ambition to seize the region as spoils of war, offering U.S. leaders a formal alliance if they stopped demanding the western lands, “not having had possession of them before the present war, or not having any foundation for a claim in the right of the sovereignty of Great Britain, whose dominion they have abjured.”17 French leaders also recognized King George III’s 1763 proclamation line along the Appalachians as the legitimate border, advising their U.S. counterparts to focus on territories where their population actually resided rather than “run after the shadow and a chimerical object.”18
Disagreement over Transappalachia did not prevent France and Spain from aiding the U.S. cause, however. Military supplies smuggled through Spanish New Orleans gave a crucial boost to the Continental Army as early as 1776, and these were supplemented by sizable loans in 1777, the U.S.–French alliance in 1778, and the Spanish declaration of war on Britain in 1779.19 Both France and Spain resented their recent defeats by Britain in the Seven Years’ War, and they relished the chance to regain standing in Europe by splintering the British Empire. Knowing this, U.S. leaders played diplomatic hardball to secure independence and expansion simultaneously.
After their victory at Yorktown, Britain’s foes strove unsuccessfully to unify their conflicting interests into a final list of demands. In August and September 1782 Jay met repeatedly with the Spanish ambassador to France, Count d’Aranda, rebuffing no fewer than five Spanish boundary proposals calling for a divided Transappalachia.20 Franklin wrote on August 12, “My conjecture of that court’s design to coop us up within the Allegheny Mountains is now manifested. I hope Congress will insist on the Mississippi as the boundary, and the free navigation of the river, from which they could entirely exclude us.”21 The situation grew urgent when Jay discovered that the French foreign minister had secretly dispatched his undersecretary to London in mid-September. Assuming that his mission was to negotiate a separate pro-Spanish settlement, the Americans opened their own bilateral negotiations with Britain to emphasize that if “limiting our western extent . . . east of the Mississippi . . . was insisted upon it was needless to talk of peace, for that we never would yield that point.”22 With British leaders ready to concede independence, the U.S. negotiators went so far as to encourage them to reconquer West Florida from Spain, hoping that “would operate as an additional inducement to their joining with us in agreeing that the navigation of the [Mississippi] river should forever remain open.”23
Transappalachia’s fate ultimately lay in British hands, and it was a stroke of geopolitical fortune that the final peace negotiations coincided with the “Shelburnian moment.” Lord Shelburne was British prime minister between July 1782 and February 1783, and during the fall of 1782 he resolved to end the war before Parliament reconvened, even if it meant ceding Transappalachia.24 The result was a territorial windfall that more than tripled the size of the United States from its birth. As the historian Walter Nugent writes, “Other British politicians, had they been running the government, might have cut some sort of deal with the Americans. But only Shelburne, almost certainly, would have given them so much.”25 Thanks to its diplomats’ steadfast insistence and a fortuitous moment of British appeasement, the United States gained Transappalachia alongside independence, a remarkable achievement considering its allies’ opposition. Reporting the peace terms from Paris, the negotiators declared, “We knew this court and Spain to be against our claims to the western country, and having no reason to think that lines more favorable could ever have been obtained, we finally agreed to those described in this article; indeed they appear to leave us little to complain of and not much to desire.”26
The Revolution was unusual among the historical periods examined in this book in that U.S. territorial expansion did not involve annexation. With independence achieved, the Confederation Congress suffered from a “creeping paralysis” as states frequently ignored its requests. In 1782–83 it received less than $1.5 million of its requested $10 million budget, and it failed to defend U.S. sailors from Algerian enslavement in 1785 or effectively manage Shays’ Rebellion in 1786.27 Frustrations boiled at this “anarchy and confusion,” a “federalistic saturnalia” during which “Maryland and Delaware fought an undeclared ‘oyster war’ over fishing rights to the Potomac River; nine states had navies of their own; state militias were separate and distinct armies; seven of the states even printed their own currency; New York placed a tariff on wood from Connecticut and on butter from New Jersey; Boston boycotted grain from Rhode Island.”28 U.S. leaders responded by drafting the Constitution in 1787, binding the states under a unified federal government and giving their leaders a say in each other’s affairs.29 Many chafed against this redistribution of domestic influence, and sectionalism quickly took root as northerners like William Gordon of Massachusetts worried that “the seat of government will be to the southward, and the Northern states be insignificant provinces,” while southerners like Virginia’s Henry Lee feared living under “the rule of a fixed insolent Northern majority.”30 Moving forward under the Constitution, territorial expansion would imply annexation—incorporating new territories into the Union as states on equal footing with the others. As a result, these sectional concerns began generating formidable domestic costs.
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 roughly doubled the size of the United States, adding 828,000 square miles to the young republic.31 This far exceeded U.S. ambitions, which at the time focused on New Orleans and Florida. It also marked the first major episode of territorial expansion under the Constitution, and hence the first case in which U.S. leaders confronted annexation’s domestic costs. Why did U.S. leaders target the Gulf Coast, why did they end up purchasing Louisiana, and how did the prospect of annexation affect their approach to territorial expansion?
After the Revolution U.S. leaders coveted one territorial objective above all: controlling the Mississippi River. Transappalachia’s swelling settler population depended on the Mississippi to export its agricultural produce, and the river’s commerce was loaded onto oceangoing vessels at the Spanish port of New Orleans.32 As President Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802, “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market.”33 The dependence of so much trade on one port represented a critical vulnerability that U.S. leaders hoped to eliminate by annexing it. Secondary avenues for Transappalachia’s exports like the Pearl, Mobile, and Apalachicola Rivers opened into the Gulf of Mexico in Spanish Florida, bringing that territory into U.S. crosshairs as well.
U.S.–Spanish relations were rocky after the Revolution. Spanish officials frequently harassed U.S. shipments on the Mississippi, and in October 1802 Spain suspended the U.S. right to deposit merchandise in New Orleans.34 The resulting crisis saw Secretary of State James Madison threaten military action if the port remained closed, declaring that for “our Western citizens . . . the Mississippi is to them everything.”35 Transappalachia’s market access was so important that it generated bipartisan calls for a war of conquest. Alexander Hamilton held that “the best interests of our nation require that we shall annex to the United States all the territory east of the Mississippi, New Orleans included,” and he mused that for Jefferson “the great embarrassment must be how to carry on war without taxes.”36 In February 1803 the Federalist senator James Ross of Pennsylvania proposed authorizing the president to call forth fifty thousand troops to seize New Orleans, which he dubbed “the lock and key of the whole western country.”37 The Senate quickly passed a modified resolution sponsored by Democratic-Republican John Breckin-ridge of Kentucky, raising the number of troops to eighty thousand.38
The costs of both action and inaction suddenly increased when Jefferson learned that Spain had agreed to transfer Louisiana to France, a development that, he exclaimed, “completely reverses all the political relations of the U.S.”39 Spanish harassment had been a nuisance, but as Congress’s willingness to authorize military force shows, U.S. leaders did not fear the military costs of war with Spain. A new French empire in Louisiana would introduce a far more formidable neighbor capable of squeezing U.S. exports and inciting hostility among Native American tribes. Although he was “not sanguine in obtaining a cession of New Orleans for money,” Jefferson approached France with opportunistic diplomacy, offering to purchase the city along with East and West Florida if those had been ceded (they had not) and “putting off the day of contention for it, till we are stronger in ourselves, & stronger in our allies.”40 Fearing that the French acquisition of Louisiana was “the embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both sides of the Atlantic,” he told U.S. Minister in Paris Robert Livingston to offer up to $10 million.41 Although Congress had authorized only $2 million, Livingston used its prior military authorization to underscore the gravity of the situation, threatening that the United States might seize New Orleans if Napoleon refused to sell.42
This dread of an imposing French rival in North America proved premature. Napoleon’s expeditionary force, sent to fortify Louisiana after subduing a slave rebellion in Haiti, was decimated by yellow fever in the summer of 1802 and failed to accomplish even its initial mission.43 In response, Napoleon shelved his plans for the Western Hemisphere pending “the unfinished business of smiting Britain,” which he assumed would seize Louisiana if he still held it when war resumed in 1803.44 As he told his treasury director, François Barbé-Marbois, “The conquest of Louisiana would be easy, if they only took the trouble to make a descent there. I have not a moment to lose in putting it out of their reach. . . . I think of ceding it to the United States. . . . They only ask of me one town in Louisiana, but I already consider the colony as entirely lost.”45 Selling Louisiana to the United States would convert Napoleon’s lost colony into crucial war funding, give “England a maritime rival, that will sooner or later humble her pride,” and foment “rivalries among the members of the Union,” which might eventually collapse under its own weight and enable a later French return to North America.46 Thus motivated, Napoleon answered Livingston’s inquiries about New Orleans by offering to sell all of Louisiana.
The territory stretched from the Gulf of Mexico north to modern Canada and from the Mississippi River west to the Rocky Mountains. It was assumed to contain immense natural resources despite being on literally nobody’s map in 1803—Lewis and Clark were sent to chart it the following year.47 The Kentucky traveler Hugh Brackenridge observed in 1814, “From the fatal ravages of the small pox, the present Indian nations of Louisiana, particularly on the Missouri, have not the tenth of the numbers which they had near thirty years ago. . . . [T]hese people are scattered over so wide a country as scarcely to be noticed in it. One may travel for days without meeting a living soul.”48 Only its eastern edge was speckled with fledgling cities, including New Orleans with a population of around eight thousand. By one estimate perhaps one hundred thousand Native Americans spanned the entire territory along with fewer than fifty thousand white settlers, black slaves, free blacks, French, Spanish, and others.49 Louisiana’s small Anglo-American population was growing rapidly as the rising tide of Transappalachian settlement spilled across the Mississippi, however, leading John Jay to speculate that Spain would never have been able to “hold the territory against this human flood.”50
Nevertheless, the eyes of the new republic initially remained fixed on the Gulf Coast. When the French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord asked Livingston on April 11, 1803, “whether we wished to have the whole of Louisiana,” Livingston protested that the United States desired only New Orleans, prompting Talleyrand to reply “that if they gave New Orleans the rest would be of little value” and to ask “what we would give for the whole.”51 Livingston protested again the following night, this time to Barbé-Marbois, “that we would be perfectly satisfied with New Orleans and the Floridas, and had no disposition to extend across the river,” but Barbé-Marbois convinced him that Napoleon was determined to sell all of Louisiana.52 Despite lacking immediate interest beyond the Gulf Coast, U.S. leaders recognized that the French offer brought control of the Mississippi within reach, while also adding Louisiana’s presumably huge resources. Negotiations proceeded quickly. On April 30 Barbé-Marbois, Livingston, and James Monroe—newly arrived in Paris to aid the negotiations—signed a treaty purchasing Louisiana for 68 million francs ($15 million), 18 million of which went toward U.S. claims for ships and cargoes lost during the Quasi-War of 1798–1800.53
Louisiana’s material benefits and amicable acquisition notwithstanding, the purchase ignited impassioned opposition from northern Federalists who worried about domestic costs rooted in partisanship and sectionalism. Despite Hamilton’s insistence that “the acquisition has been solely owing to a fortuitous concurrence of unforeseen and unexpected circumstances, and not to any wise or vigorous measures on the part of the American government,” the Louisiana Purchase would be a signature achievement for the Democratic-Republican Jefferson.54 New states would be carved from it once enough settlers moved westward, and many expected those states to join the southern bloc. Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts bemoaned the Constitution’s three-fifths clause, noting that “the Northern states have nothing to countervail the power and influence arising from the negro representation.”55 Connecticut Congressman Roger Griswold feared that “the vast and unmanageable extent which the accession of Louisiana will give to the United States; the consequent dispersion of our population, and the destruction of that balance which it is so important to maintain between the Eastern and Western states, threatens, at no very distant day, the subversion of our Union.”56 The northern Federalists’ desperation grew so great that by 1804 several of them plotted to secede from the Union rather than endure southern domination. Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire wrote, “Adopt this western world into the Union, and you destroy at once the weight and importance of the Eastern states, and compel them to establish a separate and independent empire.”57
Many leaders also complained that the purchase exceeded the president’s constitutional powers by granting citizenship to Louisiana’s Spanish, French, Creoles, and free black residents, sparse though they were. As the historian Peter Kastor has argued, “It was demographic expansion, rather than geographic expansion, that was the subject of so much concern.”58 Griswold objected that “the incorporation of a foreign nation into the Union . . . destroys the perfect union contemplated between the original parties, by interposing an alien and a stranger to share the powers of government with them.”59 Fisher Ames grumbled, “The powers that be concern themselves little about the Constitution,” while Senator John Quincy Adams thought Louisiana had been purchased “at an immense price, not of money, but of principle.”60 Exceeding his constitutional powers also offended Jefferson’s limited-government philosophy, and he fretted to Breckinridge in August 1803 that “the Constitution has made no provision for our holding foreign territory, still less for incorporating foreign nations into our Union. The executive in seizing the fugitive occurrence . . . have done an act beyond the Constitution.”61 Jefferson even went so far as to draft a constitutional amendment to square this worrisome circle, abandoning the amendment only upon realizing it could not be ratified before the treaty’s own October 30 ratification deadline.
In the end Jefferson’s institutional dominance ensured that neither sectional opposition nor constitutional scruples about alien populations could derail the Louisiana Purchase. His Democratic-Republican Party had routed the Federalists in the 1800 elections and tightened its grip on Congress throughout his presidency. The Senate approved the purchase with only five votes against, and the House followed suit with the required funds, though a potentially troublesome vote requesting documentation of France’s title to Louisiana was only narrowly defeated, 59–57.62 From his firm position atop U.S. domestic politics, Jefferson achieved the coup de maître of his presidency: the local French garrison surrendered New Orleans to the United States on December 20, 1803, one month after it had received the city from Spain.
The Louisiana Purchase was the second territorial windfall for the United States. Unlike with Transappalachia, however, U.S. leaders had not pursued the majority of the territory, and many of them did not want it. Securing U.S. control of the Mississippi represented “a great stride to real and substantial independence,” but the vast expanse that came with it posed new challenges to leaders’ domestic politics and visions.63 As a result, Congress admitted the state of Louisiana nine years later, but most of the purchased territory remained without congressional representation for decades as uncertainties over alien populations drove a “process of constructing the legal, political, administrative, racial, and military structures of racial supremacy.”64
Strained by the Revolutionary War and Napoleonic Wars, respectively, Britain and France proved willing accomplices to U.S. territorial expansion in Transappalachia and Louisiana. In contrast, Spain resisted U.S. efforts to annex East and West Florida for nearly two decades. Why did U.S. leaders continue pressing until Spain finally capitulated?
The Floridas housed a meager population and fewer natural resources than the two previous acquisitions, and their climate was relatively inhospitable to settlers.65 Barely more than three thousand non-Natives lived in East Florida in 1814 with perhaps another ten thousand in West Florida, and their combined Native population dropped below six thousand after the Creek War.66 In contrast, the population of neighboring Georgia surpassed a quarter million by the 1810 census.67 Rather than resources or population, two geopolitical benefits drove U.S. interest in the Floridas. First, with New Orleans in hand, securing other avenues for Transappalachia’s trade became a top priority, and the Floridas spanned the entire Gulf Coast east of Louisiana, including the mouths of the Pearl, Mobile, and Apalachicola Rivers.68 Second, the Mississippi trade remained vulnerable in wartime. As Senator John Pope of Kentucky observed in December 1810, “An enemy in possession of West Florida can with great facility cut off New Orleans from the upper country.”69 That fear was soon realized when Britain assaulted New Orleans in the closing days of the War of 1812. Annexing the Floridas would reduce this vulnerability by denying enemies a proximate landing area.
The crumbling Spanish empire undercut annexation’s military costs. As Nugent writes, “The United States benefited greatly from Spain’s weakness—in fact, prostration—during the Napoleonic Wars, and did not hesitate to kick the other fellow when he was down.”70 U.S. leaders had been willing to conquer New Orleans from Spain in early 1803, and their contempt for Spanish power only grew over the ensuing years. Unlike the crisis over New Orleans, however, there was little urgency to annex the Floridas, and Spanish authority there was so brittle that leaders preferred to erode it by using less expensive methods than a war that was winnable but still costly.
The first of those methods entailed “unilateralism and fact denial.”71 Sec retary of State Madison recognized shortly after the Louisiana Purchase that “the Floridas are not included in the treaty,” and he instructed Monroe that “the acquisition of the Floridas is still to be pursued.”72 Capitalizing on a self-contradictory clause in the purchase treaty, however, Livingston convinced first Monroe and then Madison and Jefferson to insist that West Florida actually had been included in the Louisiana Purchase.73 Though groundless, the expanded claim was immediately popular in the United States, and in February 1804 Congress passed the Mobile Act annexing Florida west of the Perdido River.74 Spanish protests and French efforts to clear up the “misunderstanding” fell on deaf ears as Jefferson and Madison followed Livingston’s advice to “act as if no doubt could be entertained of our title.”75 That April they instructed Monroe to negotiate, “1st, an acknowledgement by Spain that Louisiana, as ceded to the United States, extends to the river Perdido; 2nd, a cession of all her remaining territory eastward of that river, including East Florida.”76 Recognizing Napoleon’s influence over Spanish foreign policy, Monroe sought his support, essentially trying to convince the French government “that it had indeed, though without its knowledge, received West Florida in addition to Louisiana from Spain by the Treaty of St. Ildefonso in 1800, and that it had sold West Florida, though equally without its knowledge, to the United States along with Louisiana.”77 France refused to play along, and Spain rebuffed Monroe’s offer to drop U.S. claims against Spain and adjust the western border in exchange for the Floridas.78 A second U.S. effort in 1806 “to secure West Florida which is essential to their interests and to obtain East Florida which is important to them” was similarly rejected.79
In the face of Spain’s intransigence, Jefferson again considered conquering the Floridas. Anticipating a profitable conquest as long as Napoleon stayed out of the conflict, he plotted to deter France from intervening by gaining a powerful ally of his own. He wrote to Madison in August 1805, “We should lose no time in securing something more than a mutual friendship with England.”80 On October 21 the British navy cast a stone in Jefferson’s favor when it destroyed the Spanish fleet as well as the French one at the Battle of Trafalgar, crippling Spain’s ability to project power into the Western Hemisphere.81 Contrary to Jefferson’s wishes, though, Britain followed this victory by intensifying its maritime restrictions on U.S. trade in the context of the Napoleonic Wars.82 Jefferson reacted with his infamous embargo, hoping to compel a quick rapprochement that might yet open the door to alliance and conquest. As he told his secretary of war in August 1808, “Should England make up with us, while Bonaparte continues at war with Spain, a moment may occur when we may without danger of commitment with either France or England seize to our own limits of Louisiana as of right, and the residue of the Floridas as reprisal for spoliations.”83 Alas, Jefferson’s embargo proved to be in vain, as did his hope that Napoleon might barter Spanish colonies for U.S. support against Britain.84
Madison abandoned visions of conquest after assuming the presidency in 1809, preferring to exploit Spanish weakness by using less expensive forms of coercion, including unilateral claims, local insurgencies, and plausibly deniable military interventions. In the summer of 1810 Madison sent Colonel William Wykoff to incite popular uprisings in West Florida.85 He simultaneously ordered David Holmes, the governor of Mississippi Territory, to prepare his militia to occupy the area “in the event of either foreign power interference with West Florida, or of internal convulsions.”86 After a series of local conventions demanded self-government, rebels seized the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge on September 23 and requested annexation to the United States, prompting Holmes to write, “The views of our government have been in great measure realized.”87 Madison agreed, proclaiming on October 27, “Whereas the territory . . . has, at all times, as is well known, been considered and claimed by them, as being within the colony of Louisiana . . . and whereas a crisis has at length arrived subversive of the order of things under the Spanish authorities . . . [n]ow be it known, that I, James Madison, President of the United States of America . . . have deemed it right and requisite that possession should be taken of the said territory, in the name and behalf of the United States.”88 With a stroke of his pen Madison reasserted West Florida’s inclusion in the Louisiana Purchase, justified the insurgency against Spanish rule in Baton Rouge, and unilaterally annexed Spanish territory.
With Baton Rouge now under U.S. control, events spread east during the winter of 1810–11 as private filibusters schemed to take the Spanish fort at Mobile.89 Madison sent General George Mathews and Judge Harry Toulmin to urge Mobile’s residents to overthrow Spanish rule, declaring that “in the event of a separation from the parent country, their incorporation into our Union would coincide with the sentiments and policy of the United States.”90 Fearing unrest, the Spanish governor of West Florida temporarily offered to transfer his territory to the United States, and Congress in secret session authorized Madison to occupy the Floridas “in case an arrangement has been, or shall be, made with the local authority of the said territory . . . or in the event of an attempt to occupy the said territory, or any part thereof, by any foreign government.”91
Madison sent Mathews and Colonel John McKee to accept the Floridas from any willing “local authority,” but the governor withdrew his offer after receiving aid from Cuba and Mexico.92 Mathews requested authorization to sponsor a revolution in East Florida, and, hearing no response from Washington, in March 1812 he gathered seventy Georgians and nine Floridians who branded themselves “Patriots” and seized the border town of Fernandina and Amelia Island.93 To avoid provoking war Madison formally dis-avowed Mathews and sent Governor David Mitchell of Georgia to withdraw the invaders, but he told Mitchell to “delay” and not “to compel the patriots to surrender the country or any part of it to the Spanish authorities,” leaving open the possibility of seizing East Florida amidst the approaching War of 1812.94
The domestic costs of annexing the Floridas were limited by their sparse population, but the expectation that they would be carved into southern states drove many northern leaders to fear that the acquisition would weaken their domestic political positions. As in the case of Louisiana, though, their opposition had little effect given the Virginia Dynasty’s firm grip on the federal government. When the Senate reconvened after Madison’s 1810 proclamation annexing West Florida, for example, northern Federalists launched into heated debate over the limits of presidential authority and the demerits of the U.S. claim, but they were overwhelmed by the administration’s supporters. Even Pickering’s revelation of the French letter denying that West Florida was part of Louisiana, which Jefferson and Madison had kept secret, provoked only a resolution censuring Pickering’s public disclosure of a classified document.95
Only during the War of 1812, when elevated military costs combined with domestic ones, did sectional opposition break partisan lines to briefly derail the U.S. acquisition of Florida. Despite the fact that the Floridas were Spanish territory, not British, southern leaders hoped to seize them during the war. The day after declaring war on Britain, Congressman George Troup of Georgia proposed authorizing Madison “to occupy East and West Florida, without delay.”96 Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin wrote that Madison’s preoccupation with the Floridas was a “Southern one, and will, if it should involve us in a war with Spain, disgust every man north of Washington,” and northern Democratic-Republicans joined Federalists to defeat the bill in the Senate, 16–14.97 Madison again sought authorization for “an immediate occupancy” of the Floridas the following March, when a new congressional session included two sympathetic senators from Louisiana (admitted the previous year), but again a sectional vote blocked Madison’s plans.98
A rump bill passed this time, authorizing him to occupy the remainder of West Florida, and the undermanned Spanish fort at Mobile surrendered without a fight in April 1813.99 Despite lacking congressional authorization, Madison ordered General Thomas Pinckney to ready a force “for offensive operations, preparation to the entire possession of the province of East Florida” in response to Spain’s mobilization of Seminoles and former slaves against the “Patriots,” but the invasion never occurred as U.S. forces struggled against Britain.100 Madison tried to get British leaders to accept U.S. claims to the Floridas during peace negotiations, but they had little reason to do so, especially given the underwhelming U.S. military performance.101
The war’s end brought a fresh round of U.S.–Spanish negotiations, and in light of Spain’s rapidly deteriorating position in the Western Hemisphere Madison knew its leaders would eventually accept any deal allowing them to save face.102 He offered a firm western boundary between the United States and Spanish Mexico, giving “to the Spanish all the territory that we have, or claim, west of the Sabine [River in Texas], in consideration of East Florida being granted to us,” but Spanish hopes to retain Florida lingered through the end of his administration.103 When Monroe assumed the presidency in March 1817, he and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams looked to pressure Spain into making a deal via a twofold strategy: “first, isolating Spain from the other European powers (especially Great Britain), and second, applying steadily increasing military pressure on the poorly defended Spanish North American possessions.”104 In essence, they sought to maneuver the United States into the position of having won a war without having to fight one.
The first goal, denying foreign aid to Spain, undercut Spanish hopes of salvaging its colonial empire, which had recently been fractured by rebel victories in Buenos Aires, New Granada, Venezuela, and Chile.105 It also coincided with a widespread European desire for peace after the carnage of the Napoleonic Wars. Britain’s naval power gave it a decisive voice within the Concert of Europe on overseas issues like the Spanish colonial rebellions, and British leaders preferred pressing Spain for trade concessions rather than helping recover its empire. Under their influence, the Concert refused to invite King Ferdinand VII of Spain to its 1818 conference at Aix-la-Chapelle, where its members effectively dashed Spanish hopes by refusing to furnish any military aid toward recovering its lost colonies.106
With European politics playing into their hands, Monroe and Adams focused on their second goal, showing Spain that the Floridas were already lost. When filibusters and pirates seized Amelia Island in the summer of 1817, Adams convinced Monroe to launch a military intervention to expel “the marauding parties,” illustrating with one swift stroke that Spain was incapable of controlling East Florida, that the resulting anarchy threatened the United States, and that U.S. forces might conquer it if Spain remained unwilling to negotiate a cession.107 Monroe announced the island’s occupation that December along with his decision to retain “possession of it for the present,” which Adams translated directly into diplomatic leverage by warning the Spanish minister to the United States Luis de Onís y González-Vara that “if we should not come to an early conclusion of the Florida negotiation, Spain would not have the possession of Florida to give us.”108 In January 1818 Monroe openly labeled Spanish Florida a failed state, declaring, “To a country over which she fails to maintain her authority, and which she permits to be converted to the annoyance of her neighbors, her jurisdiction for the time necessarily ceases to exist.”109
Monroe doubled down on destabilizing the Floridas by ordering General Andrew Jackson to pursue marauding Seminoles into Spanish territory, ambiguously instructing him that “movement . . . against the Seminoles . . . will bring you on a theatre where you may possibly have other services to perform. Great interests are at issue. . . . This is not a time for repose.”110 After driving the Seminoles into the swamp, Jackson turned on the local Spanish forts. He seized St. Marks that April and Pensacola in May, after which he ordered an assault on the Spanish capital, St. Augustine, and proclaimed a new government for East Florida.111 This “obvious act of war” risked undermining the negotiations, however, forcing Monroe to recall Jackson.112 Nev ertheless, once Onís accepted that Jackson had acted on his own initiative, Adams defended his actions and accused Spanish commanders of aiding the Seminoles.113 Monroe used his second annual message in December 1818 to declare Spanish authority in the Floridas “completely extinct,” and he justified Jackson’s invasion by “right of self-defense.”114 From this position of strength, Adams played his diplomatic trump card by threatening to recognize the independence of Spain’s Latin American colonies.115 When asked if a Florida treaty might persuade the United States to withhold recognition, he made no guarantees but replied that “if Spain had taken the pains to adjust her differences with us, there would probably be much less ardor in this country against Spain, and consequently less in favor of the South Americans.”116
In January 1819 Onís received authorization from Madrid to cede the Floridas on the best terms possible, and he requested of Adams only that the new western border be “natural and clearly defined, and leave no room for dispute to the inhabitants on either side.”117 Negotiations proceeded quickly, and on February 22 Adams and Onís signed the Transcontinental Treaty. Spain formally gave the Floridas to the United States; a firm transcontinental boundary was established following the Sabine River, Red River, Arkansas River, and the 42nd parallel to the Pacific Ocean; and the United States agreed to pay up to $5 million in private claims against the Spanish government.118 The Senate unanimously ratified the treaty, then re-ratified it in February 1821 after Spain’s ratification was delayed.119 In March 1822, having no further need of a bargaining chip, Monroe asked Congress to recognize the new Latin American republics.120
Transappalachia, Louisiana, and Florida were all valuable territories ripe for the taking. In each case European leaders had more pressing concerns than U.S. expansion—escaping the Revolutionary War for Britain; fighting the Napoleonic Wars for France; salvaging its colonial empire for Spain—and in each case U.S. leaders exploited the resulting opportunities. The pursuit of Transappalachia was not compromised by domestic costs because it occurred before the Constitution was ratified, but the other acquisitions did impose varying domestic consequences on U.S. leaders. As domestic impact theory predicts, those who anticipated domestic costs from Louisiana and Florida (northerners and Federalists) opposed annexation, while those who expected domestic benefits (southerners and Democratic-Republicans) supported it. The United States pursued annexation in both cases because a preponderance of U.S. leaders fell into the latter group, including presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe along with healthy congressional majorities.
Is profitability theory sufficient to explain these cases, or does domestic impact theory make a worthwhile contribution? Profitability theory successfully predicts macro-level U.S. behavior in all three of these cases: given the high material benefits and low military costs, all three cases were profitable, and in all three cases the United States pursued territorial expansion. Nonetheless, all three cases also support domestic impact theory’s more fine-grained predictions regarding variations in support and opposition among U.S. leaders. Those variations did not prevent U.S. expansionism because sparse target populations minimized fears of worsening and because policy was dictated by the domestic political bloc that stood to gain from annexation. Those conditions would not always be present in the future, however.
After negotiating the Transcontinental Treaty, Onís reflected, “The Americans believe themselves superior to all the nations of Europe, and see their destiny to extend their dominion . . . to all of the New World.”121 Many of his contemporaries shared that view, yet U.S. territorial expansion would not be as boundless as they expected. Annexation’s domestic consequences, first evidenced in northern opposition to the Louisiana Purchase and the Florida cession, would increasingly shape U.S. foreign policy.