GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS INAUGURATED THE first president of the United States under the new Constitution in April 1789. Three months later the Bastille fell. The American Revolution was the first of what would become an age of revolutions, which would test and ultimately expand our commitment to liberty.
The French Revolution destroyed Europe’s most sophisticated absolute monarchy in Europe’s most populous country. The shock to France’s neighbors and the stimulus to France’s energies generated a world war that would last for twenty-five years. Beginning in 1791, a slave revolution and war of independence turned France’s richest Caribbean colony, Saint-Domingue, into the black republic of Haiti.
How to respond to the French Revolution perplexed American politics for years. Was the new France, as our ambassador in Paris during its earliest days, Thomas Jefferson, thought, a sister republic deserving our best wishes? Or was it, as his successor Gouverneur Morris believed, a belligerent despotism that meant us no good? America went to war with France’s great rival, Britain, in 1812, an objectively pro-French act, though we took it for our own reasons. The question of the French Revolution’s nature was never truly answered, only mooted with the final defeat of Napoleon, its last avatar, at Waterloo in 1815.
The United States had given Haiti’s rebels some tactical help in the late 1790s in order to frustrate French attempts to retake it. At the request of the American consul there, Alexander Hamilton even sketched a constitution for the new country—a military dictatorship with wishful checks and balances built in. (His suggestions were not followed, the Haitians opting for dictatorships pure and simple.) But black Haiti was a phenomenon that the American slave republic preferred to shun and ignore for decades.
As the 1820s began, the world saw a new wave of revolution. In 1820 Spanish liberals forced their king to accept a constitutional government; in 1821 Greeks rose up against their Ottoman overlords. In this hemisphere, the Spanish empire, which stretched from California to Buenos Aires, had been contending with native-born rebels for a decade.
Americans felt a natural sympathy for these struggles. Spain’s liberals wanted a constitution; America had one. Greeks were Christians; so were almost all Americans. Between the United States’ and Spain’s colonies lay no unbridgeable racial barrier: their societies were mestizo, but their would-be leaders belonged to the local white upper classes. The colonial revolutions also tempted American appetites: the Spanish empire represented a world of potential trade that Spain had kept to itself for three centuries.
The most eloquent American supporter of the new revolutionary moment was the most eloquent man in America, Speaker of the House Henry Clay. A Virginian transplanted to Kentucky, he looked like an ordinary farmer. But when he opened his mouth, he could sigh like a lute or ring like a trumpet. He was a drinker, a gambler, a flirt, and a politician to the marrow of his bones. He had been chosen Speaker in 1811, at age thirty-three, on his very first day in the House—a meteoric rise appropriate to his ambition and his glittering personality.
He expressed his sentiments on the new era in an oration on the House floor in March 1818. Formally, he was making a motion to appropriate funds to send an ambassador to what is now Argentina, but he used the occasion to survey all the revolutions in Spain’s New World domain. “Within this vast region, we behold the most sublime and interesting objects of creation; the loftiest mountains, the most majestic rivers in the world; the richest mines of the precious metals.… We behold there a spectacle still more interesting and sublime—the glorious spectacle of eighteen millions of people, struggling to burst their chains and to be free.” Clay’s feelings toward the struggling eighteen millions were fraternal. They were like “an elder brother,” long “abused and maltreated… rising, by the power and energy of his fine native genius, to the manly rank which nature, and nature’s God, intended for him.”1 Their rights, and ours, were the same. As we had asserted ours, so they were claiming theirs. All men of the Western Hemisphere were created equal.
A cooler view was taken by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Former president Adams’s eldest son was destined—some might say condemned—to public service. During an episode of adolescent funk such as even the hardest-working young men experience, John Quincy’s father had warned him that if he did not rise “to the head… of your country,” it would be due entirely to his own “laziness” and “slovenliness.”2 The lesson stuck. Unlazy, unslovenly John Quincy became a diplomat at age twenty-seven, a US senator at age thirty-six, a diplomat again, and then secretary of state, in 1817, at age fifty.
In March 1821 he had a private talk with Clay, which he recorded in his copious and exacting diary. The two men had known each other since 1815, when they served on the American commission that negotiated the treaty ending the War of 1812. They had worked reasonably well together then, though their temperaments could not have been more different—nor could their views about Spain’s escaping colonies now. “So far as they were contending for independence,” Adams told the Speaker, “I wished well to their cause; but I had seen… no prospect that they would establish free or liberal institutions.” Clay looked to nature, Adams to history: “They have not the first elements of good or free government. Arbitrary power, military and ecclesiastical, was stamped upon their education, upon their habits and upon all their institutions. Civil dissension was infused into all their seminal principles.” Spain’s children had no Jamestown in their upbringing. As far as Adams was concerned, they were fated to be despotic or turbulent, likely both. He went on: “Nor was there any appearance of a disposition in them to take any political lesson from us.” Jefferson had written about the laws of nature and nature’s God, but Spanish Americans did not read him. If we and they belonged to the same hemispheric family, they were the prodigal sons.
Adams and Clay did agree on one thing: the revolutionaries were bound to win. “That the final issue of their present struggle would be their entire independence from Spain,” said Adams, “I had never doubted.”3
The reaction of European governments to the revolutionary wave was almost entirely hostile. After Napoleon’s defeat, his victorious enemies were determined that there should be no repetition of continental carnage. Peace required order, which seemed to require political stability. A Quadruple Alliance of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia was formed to ensure that result. The powers agreed to hold congresses every two years to coordinate their policies. A second alliance, inspired by Czar Alexander of Russia, embraced all these powers except Britain. Adams had known Alexander when he was minister to Russia a decade earlier; the czar struck him as polite and pro-American (American merchants did a thriving Baltic trade). When they met on the streets of St. Petersburg—both men were regular walkers—they would chat about the cold or Adams’s young son. Intellectually, however, Alexander was a reactionary mystic who saw himself as doing the Lord’s work; his tripartite group called itself the Holy Alliance.
France wished to become a peer and partner of its vanquishers. Since its monarchical government, restored after Bonaparte’s fall, was as hostile to revolution as they were, perhaps it could use repression as a way of getting back into their good graces.
In April 1823 France invaded Spain in order to rescue its king from the constitutionalists. The invasion was the special project of the French foreign minister, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand. Chateaubriand was a poet even more than a politician, a minor nobleman whose life had been upended by the French Revolution. His memoirs are ornamented by vignettes, always appalled, of the revolution’s leaders, even as they occasionally acknowledge their impressive qualities (nature molded the head of one, he wrote, “either for imperium or for the gallows”4). Chateaubriand also left a purely admiring portrait of George Washington, whom he met during a period of exile. Washington seemed to him to be everything that the zealots of his own country were not: “Silence envelopes Washington’s deeds. He moved cautiously; one could say that he felt charged with the liberty of future generations, and feared compromising it.”5 Chateaubriand wished above all to spare Spain his own and France’s sufferings at the hands of noisy wreckers.
He wished something more: to turn the new nations of Spanish America into monarchies, ruled by princes of the House of Bourbon, Spain’s royal dynasty.6 He had already sent an army across the Pyrenees; now he wanted to send rulers across the Atlantic. Spain’s former colonies could pass directly from an arbitrary dependence to an arbitrary independence. The Holy Alliance would be pleased to see revolution defeated the world over and think the better of France for doing it.
This scheme was disfavored by the European power that did not belong to the Holy Alliance, Britain. Britain’s motives were economic—it was as entranced as America by the prospect of trading with the former Spanish empire and did not want the sequestered status quo restored under a new royalist guise. As the greatest naval power on earth, it had the means to stop any armada of Bourbon princes. But before things came to such a pass, perhaps Britain could warn France and the Holy Alliance off.
In September 1823, Britain’s foreign minister, George Canning, made an offer to the American ambassador to London. (Canning, who had been a part-time journalist earlier in life, had a notoriously tart tongue. Adams, who had met him when he himself had been ambassador to London, noted it in his diary: “He had a little too much wit for a minister of state.”7) Canning now asked if the United States would be willing to go “hand-in-hand” with Britain in a joint statement concerning Spanish America. The two countries would declare that its independence seemed assured and that neither Britain nor America coveted any part of it but that they could not see any of it “transferred to any other Power with indifference” (this was the veiled warning against the scheme of the Bourbon princes).8
The American ambassador wrote home for instructions in the middle of September. Steamboats already existed, but not reliable oceanic ones; communication was slow. President James Monroe received his account of Britain’s offer a month later.
Monroe had long memories of Anglo-American relations, all of them grim. As a young lieutenant, he had been shot in the shoulder at the Battle of Trenton in 1776, and as a middle-aged member of James Madison’s cabinet, he had tried to repel a British raid on Washington during the War of 1812. But new times might require new measures. Monroe sought the advice of the two men he most respected in the world, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
At the tail end of Monroe’s term, these three would be called the Virginia Dynasty. The term was apt. They had followed each other in the White House for two terms apiece. Jefferson, conveniently, was eight years older than Madison, who was seven years older than Monroe. The Constitution forbade hereditary succession; they were a succession of soul mates, friends, and almost-neighbors: virtual siblings.
“Shall we entangle ourselves,” Monroe began, “in European politics?”9 Fraught words: Jefferson had warned, in his first inaugural address, against “entangling alliances.”10 But Monroe thought the time for entanglement had come. “Has not the epoch arrived when Great Britain must take her stand, either on the side of the monarchs of Europe, or of the United States?… My own impression is that we ought to meet the proposal of the British government.”
His former president friends each gave him the answer he wanted, Jefferson most ringingly. “By acceding to [Britain’s] proposition, we… bring her mighty weight into the scale of free government, and emancipate a continent at one stroke.… With her on our side, we need not fear the world.”11
Encouraged with these approvals, Monroe put the question to his cabinet in November 1823. The cabinet then was a small body, initially composed of only three secretaries—state, treasury, and war—boosted to four in the late 1790s with the addition of the secretary of the navy. The attorney general, the administration’s lawyer, was a sort of junior member (there was as yet no such thing as a Department of Justice).
William Crawford, Monroe’s treasury secretary, was a Georgia politician, handsome and imposing, who had made an almost-successful bid to succeed James Madison as president; when it fell short, he contented himself with waiting until the end of the Virginia Dynasty. In the fall of 1823, he was out sick. Attorney General William Wirt would also miss some discussions. Secretary of the Navy Samuel Southard was new on the job, having been appointed that September, and would say little.
The burden of deciding America’s reaction to Britain’s offer thus fell on the president, Secretary of State Adams, and Secretary of War John Calhoun. Calhoun, a South Carolinian educated in Connecticut (Yale, Litchfield Law School), was as precocious as Adams or Clay—elected to Congress at age twenty-eight, tapped for Monroe’s cabinet at age thirty-five. Adams and Calhoun became friendly—they were both smart, ambitious, and inclined to gloom. Adams recorded in his diary a conversation they had about Washington’s meager burial ground for congressmen. “There are plain, modest and tasteless marble monuments,” Adams wrote, “which the lapse of a few short years will demolish. We were remarking how exclusively by the nature and genius of our institutions we confine all our thoughts and care to the present time. We have neither forefathers nor posterity.”12 Calhoun meant to leave a lasting mark.
The cabinet’s first discussion of Spanish America was in a meeting at the White House on November 7. (The marauding British had burned the White House to the ground during the War of 1812, but Monroe had rebuilt it.) Monroe did not tell his cabinet what Jefferson and Madison had advised him, though he made his own preference for an Anglo-American statement clear.
Calhoun agreed with the president. Our ambassador in London, he said, should be given “discretionary power… to join in a declaration against the interference of the Holy Allies.”13
Adams objected. He did not want to see Europeans interfering in our hemisphere, but he did not want to join Britain in saying so. “It would be more candid,” he said, “as well as more dignified” to state our own objections directly to France and Russia instead of “com[ing] in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”14 Adams had his own memories of Anglo-American hostility—he had seen the smoke and heard the cannon of the Battle of Bunker Hill from his father’s house in Braintree in 1775—and he stayed truer to them. Despite, or perhaps because of, his many years abroad, he was the prickliest nationalist in the room.
The president made no decision at that meeting, though he continued to worry about the possibility of French and Holy Alliance interference; in his diary, Adams accused Monroe of “panic” and Calhoun of feeding it.15 When the cabinet met again on November 15, the secretary of war suggested that the Holy Alliance could restore all of Spanish America to Spain with only ten thousand men. Adams countered that this would no more happen than that Chimborazo (the tallest mountain in Ecuador) would sink into the sea. In his diary he called Calhoun “moon-struck.”16
There was a major change in the diplomatic scene the following day, when a letter from our ambassador in London arrived in Washington, reporting that Britain was no longer interested in cooperating with us. Canning had conveyed a warning directly to the French: they and the Holy Alliance must leave Spanish America alone. Chateaubriand had a vision, but Canning had a navy. Britain’s foreign minister had checked the ambitions of France’s and no longer needed a joint Anglo-American declaration.
Our ambassador did not then know what Canning had said to the French, only that he was no longer interested in speaking to us. But the questions he had raised remained, even after his offer had vanished. What did America think about the world’s new revolutions? What did it think about what Europe thought about them?
At the next cabinet meeting, on November 21, Monroe made a surprising announcement: he would address these questions in his annual message to Congress, to be delivered at the beginning of December. (We now call the annual message the State of the Union address, and it is given as a speech to a joint session, but in the nineteenth century, it was released in written form.) Diplomats communicate privately, often in strictest secrecy; diplomats abroad spend much of their time trying to discover what other diplomats have said. By including foreign policy in his annual message, Monroe would make his diplomacy public.
He would make it public to tell the world, but more importantly, to tell the American people. Foreign affairs, no less than taxes, budgets, morals, and all the other domestic issues that had been the stuff of day-to-day politics since the Jamestown General Assembly, were ultimately the responsibility of voters—of ordinary Americans. Diplomats discussed and spied; policy makers deliberated and schemed in private. But the electorate had the final say and so had to be told and persuaded.
He read to the cabinet a sketch of his ideas. His passages on Spanish America followed their thinking, minus Calhoun’s alarm: independence seemed certain; we would not meddle in whatever mutual arrangements Spain and its former colonies chose to make, but we would not look kindly on other European powers making new arrangements of their own. It was obvious, and therefore unnecessary to state, that we were saying this independently, not in concert with Britain.
Then Monroe added this coda: he condemned France’s invasion of Spain “in terms of most pointed reprobation,” recognized Greek independence, and asked Congress to appropriate funds to send an ambassador there.
Here was a new wrinkle: the cabinet had been arguing about European interference in Spanish America; now the president would be offering critical opinions of European affairs.
Adams protested. “For more than thirty years, Europe had been in convulsions [while] we had looked on safe in our distance beyond an intervening ocean.” But “this message… would have the air of open defiance to all Europe.”17 He became as alarmed as Calhoun: Spain, France, and even Russia might break off diplomatic relations in response. He asked the president to reconsider.
The cabinet broke up without coming to any conclusion, but Adams went back to Monroe the next day to lobby him, suggesting that he make “an earnest remonstrance against the interference by force of the European powers with South America, but to disclaim all interference on our part with Europe; to make an American cause, and adhere inflexibly to that.”18
To make an American cause: here was the point. What was an American cause? The United States had declared its independence, and its principles, to a candid world and the opinion of humanity in 1776. But what did our independence and our principles require us to say during world wars? During world wars in which we were not (yet) involved? In a world marked by far-distant, but not entirely unconnected, small wars and revolutions?
In recent decades, the phrase the Atlantic World has infected the scholarly mind. It is one of those grand, lighter-than-air concepts, like the Frontier Thesis, which explain a lot, though less than those who use them imagine. The Atlantic World posits four continents—Europe, Africa, North and South America—in continuous interconnection. It is simpler to say that men had ships and that ships were the internet of the age.19 Ships carried men; men carried newspapers. Shots fired in Greece, Madrid, or Buenos Aires were eventually “heard” in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London—and Washington. They might not, of course, concern us, but even distant shots sometimes did.
In his appeal to Monroe, Adams raised a second important point: How would Congress react, particularly the House, Clay’s domain? “What would be Mr. Clay’s course in this case I could not foresee,” Adams said, but Monroe “well knew” that when Clay had first hailed Spanish American independence on the House floor in 1818, “his main object was popularity for himself.”20
Making an American cause was everyone’s ideal, but making political points was everyone’s business. Monroe was in the homestretch of his last presidential term. Clay was running to succeed him. So was Adams. So was Calhoun. So was the absent Crawford (he was thought to be the frontrunner, but his indisposition, all the world soon learned, was the result of a stroke, a revelation that would shatter his prospects).
The foreign policy positions advanced by these men were designed to give them advantages as presidential candidates. Calhoun expected Holy Alliance invasions of the Western Hemisphere because combating, or preparing against them, would highlight him and the War Department. Adams insisted we not be a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war to refute any suspicions that his many years of service abroad, and even his wife, Louisa Catherine—who was half English, born, raised, and married in London—had de-Americanized him. Clay hailed the glorious spectacle of revolution in Spanish America so that he could bathe in its reflected glory here.
The diplomatic historian Ernest May wrote a book analyzing the domestic politics behind the foreign policies of the Monroe administration’s main actors. Yet, for all its merits, it has the air of a book explaining that the sun rises in the east. In democratic republics almost all officeholders will be politicians; that is the alternative to hereditary succession, and politics will inform their every move. Politics—with a small p, jockeying for advantage, jabbing one’s rivals—never needs to be discovered; it is omnipresent and unkillable.
At the same time, politics can be, and sometimes is, about more than itself. The most effective politicians take positions that express their natures and their beliefs. Calhoun had gravitated to the War Department because he was both combative and efficient: a belligerent administrator. Adams’s father had been on the committee to write the Declaration of Independence, and his son had followed his father in everything; John Quincy was all-American by inheritance, upbringing, and conviction. Clay found the spectacle of Spanish American revolution glorious because he believed in liberty. “He loved his country partly because it was his own country,” Abraham Lincoln would say of him years later, “but mostly because it was a free country.”21 All politicians calculate the odds; the best ones put themselves wholeheartedly behind their bets.
Monroe’s annual message was issued on December 2. It began with a warning that foreign policy—“the condition of the civilized world”—would occupy more of the annual message than it usually did. “The people being with us exclusively the sovereign, it is indispensable that full information be laid before them on all important subjects, to enable them to exercise that high power with complete effect. If kept in the dark, they must be incompetent to it.” This was pure Monroe: whenever responsibility rests with the people, they must understand so that they can decide wisely.
Most of the message in fact surveyed domestic affairs—post roads, forts, budgets (“on the first of January there was a balance in the Treasury of $4,237,427.55”)—or the most routine matters of foreign relations (tying up loose ends of the treaty that ended the War of 1812).
The revolutions that had roiled the world and the cabinet first appeared, as in a bank shot, in a paragraph discussing not Europe or Spanish America but the Pacific Northwest. Russia, Britain, and the United States had been harvesting furs along the North American coast—what is now Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon—and the three countries were considering an amicable division of their spheres of activity. In these discussions, the message added, the United States had asserted, “as a principle in which [its] rights and interests [were] involved, that the American continents… are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” This was pure Adams: stay out of our half of the world.
Further along, the message touched the world’s revolutions directly, citing “the heroic struggle of the Greeks” and the “great effort” Spain’s constitutionalists had made to improve Spain’s condition. What did we think of these struggles and efforts?
“The citizens of the United States cherish sentiments the most friendly in favor of the liberty and happiness of their fellow men on that side of the Atlantic.” But there was no “pointed reprobation” of France’s invasion of Spain, no proposal to immediately recognize the Greeks. “In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do.” European revolutionaries could expect our sympathies, not our help.
The message then pivoted to American revolutionaries, who could expect something more.
“With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected.… The political system of the allied powers”—the Holy Alliance—“is essentially different… from that of America.… We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” No new colonies, no Bourbon princes.
The message repeated the point. “With… existing colonies… we have not interfered and shall not interfere.” Northern North America was British and Russian; the Caribbean was a salad of British, French, Spanish, and Dutch islands. None of these were any of our business, “but with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it… we could not view any [European] interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny” as anything but “an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”
The message repeated the point one more time for good measure: “It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of [North or South America] without endangering our peace and happiness.”
This was Monroe’s message, delivered in public, to Europe’s monarchs: We sympathize with those you oppress, though we will not interfere with your oppression. But we will treat any new efforts you make to oppress in this half of the world as interference with us.
This was a declaration of geopolitical division.
Equally important, it was also a declaration of philosophical separation. Since all the nations of Europe then were monarchies, and all the nations of the Americas were republics, Monroe had said: no more kings. He was passing judgment on Europe’s political systems as well as its imperial pretensions. His message extended Article II of the Constitution to the hemisphere.
Russia, the holiest of the allies, instructed its minister in Washington that Monroe’s message deserved “the most profound contempt.”22 Britain was somewhat happier with it, and Canning even tried to take credit for it, telling Parliament in 1826 that he had “called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.”23
It was an expression of the president’s opinion only, speaking, he hoped, for his countrymen but calling for no legislation or appropriations. Five years later, when John Quincy Adams had become president himself and Henry Clay his secretary of state, Clay wrote one of his diplomats, a bit shamefacedly, that if ever there were European aggression in this hemisphere, “the declaration of the late president” would be upheld or not by “Congress alone.” It would not be mentioned again until James Polk’s first annual message in December 1845, in which he iterated “the principle avowed by Mr. Monroe… that no future European colony or dominion shall, with our consent, be planted or established on any part of the North American continent.”24 (A whole continent had fallen out of Polk’s summary.) Adams, who was then a feisty seventy-eight-year-old, said that he “approved entirely” of Polk’s remarks.25
The Monroe Doctrine did describe the future development of the Western Hemisphere, more or less. Three homegrown monarchs had already assumed thrones—Emperor Jacques and King Henri in Haiti and Emperor Augustin in Mexico. In the 1860s Haiti would belatedly produce one more emperor, Faustin. But Jacques was murdered, Henri committed suicide, and Augustin was deposed and exiled, then shot after attempting to return. Only Faustin, exiled, would die in bed. There would be dictators and perpetually reelected presidents aplenty—arbitrary power, as John Quincy Adams had said, was indeed stamped upon the habits of too many in the New World. But an old form of bondage, like colonialism itself, had passed away. President Monroe’s message announced, and ratified, its exit.
The Monroe Doctrine can seem like a patchwork of rhetoric and action. We say fine things about liberty everywhere (we “cherish sentiments the most friendly” to it). But we will only support it when Europeans meddle in our hemisphere. In fact it fuses aspiration and prudence. Our friendly sentiments in favor of liberty are real, and we will resist those who would undermine it where we can and where their schemes would most menace us.
Henry Clay might have been bolder, John Quincy Adams more reticent. President Monroe made America, as far as we were able, the advocate of liberty in the world.