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"Years of Preparation, 1860-1889"
by
Walter Lafeber
...[By] the time William Seward became Lincoln's Secretary of State in 1861, a new empire had started to take form. Two important features distinguished it from the old. First, with the completion of the continental conquest Americans moved with increasing authority into such extracontinental areas as Hawaii, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Second, the form of expansion changed. Instead of searching for farming, mineral or grazing lands, Americans sought foreign markets for agricultural staples or industrial goods...
As [figures] indicate, the United States was not isolated from the rest of the world in the years' 1850-1873. When examined in economic and ideological terms, the familiar story of American isolation becomes a myth. It is true, however, that from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until the 1890's the vast Atlantic sheltered America from many European problems. Many problems, but not all, for even before the 1890's the United States became involved in such episodes as the international slave trade, Latin American revolutions, numerous incidents in Asia with the major powers of the world, and even colonial questions in Africa and Madagascar.
External factors, such as England's command of the seas and the balance of power in Europe, might have given the United States the luxury of almost total isolation; but internal developments, as interpreted by American policy makers, led the United States to become increasingly involved in world affairs. The economic revolution, new scientific and ideological concepts, and the policy makers' views of these changes had begun to accelerate this involvement before the Civil War.
This development is sometimes overlooked, since economic and ideological expansion are often considered apart from political entanglements. American history, of course, belies such a separation, for the United States annexed a continental empire by undermining economically and ideologically, British, French, Spanish, Mexican, and Indian control and then taking final possession with money, bullets, or both. Similarly, one rule may be suggested which particularly helps in understanding the course of American foreign policy in the nineteenth century: the United States could not obtain either continental or overseas economic benefits without paying a political and often a military price. Economic expansion and political involvement became so interlined that by 1900 a reinvigorated Monroe Doctrine, participation in an increasing number of international conferences, and a magnificent battleship fleet necessarily made explicit America's world-wide political commitments....
THE ROOTS OF THE NEW EMPIRE
Long before the 1860's Americans had been involved in the affairs of Canada, Latin America, Hawaii, and Asia. In its first moments of independence, the United States had struck quickly and unsuccessfully in an effort to bring into the new nation the territory north and east of the Great Lakes. The Americans failed no less miserably in their second try during the War of 1812. But two strikes were not out and time and again in the first half of the nineteenth century Americans had more subtle measures for adding Canada to the Union. The carrot of trade replaced the stick
of war when in 18** the United States and Canada entered into a reciprocity treaty which many Americans hoped would tie the northern nation to them with unbreakable economic bonds. When the treaty tended instead to strengthen Canadian autonomy, a disgusted American Senate allowed the agreement to terminate in 1866.
The United States did not attempt to annex Latin America as it did Canada, but there was no lack of interest in the southern continent. Jefferson had declared that North America could be the nest from which the entire Western Hemisphere would be peopled. Henry Clay later admonished the United States to put itself at the head to the entire hemisphere through a "Good Neighborhood" policy. Increasing interest in Latin America markets as replacements for those lost with the closing of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe provided adequate material reasons. In a negative sense, the Monroe Doctrine, as formulated by President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, had tried to exclude European powers from affairs in this hemisphere. Viewed positively, the Doctrine staked out the hemisphere as an area for future American economic opportunities and de facto political control. In the mid-1890's and American Secretary of State would announce the positive aspects of the Doctrine in blunt terms. The annexation of Texas in 1845, which had
formerly been a part of Mexico, the war with Mexico in 1846-1848, which resulted in the enlargement of United States by one-fifth, and the numerous filibustering expeditions into Central America in the 1850's only partially indicated American interest in lands south of the border.
Also to the south lay Cuba, an island which Jefferson had considered annexing as early as 1808 and which John Quincy Adams delayed taking only because he believed that the "laws of political gravitation" demanded that Cuba, like "an ape, severed by the tempest from its native tree," would "gravitate only towards the North American Union." By the 1850's Cuba and refused to fall in spite of increased American interest, so three distinguished United States envoyes to Europe decided to shake the tree. Failing to persuade Spain to sell the island, they issued the Ostend Manifesto, which proclaimed the right of the United States to take the island if Spain would not sell it. Washington, however, quickly disavowed the Manifesto. Such expansionist projects failed in the 1850's, not because they were unpopular, but because too many of them were advocated by men who spoke with the drawl of southern slave holders. Even such northern expansionists as Seward refused to cooperate in attempts to extend the slavocracy.
American attention had also turned to the Pacific. Trading and whaling vessels from Massachusetts had early stamped the Hawaiian Islands as outposts of United States trade. New England missionaries established colonies during the 1820's. Soon American interest grew from within as well as from without. In the 1840's the United States began sending notices to England and France (the mailing list would later include Germany and Japan) that it would not tolerate European control of the islands. By the decade before the Civil War, the American Secretary of State, William L. Marcy, tried to negotiate a treaty of annexation with Hawaii, was outsmarted by the anti-annexationist block in Honolulu, and retreated with the warning that future annexation by the United States was "inevitable." More than forty years later William McKinley would say, while successfully annexing the islands, that his action was "the inevitable consequence" of "three quarters of a century" of American expansion into the Pacific.
By the time of the Civil War, the Monroe Doctrine had been implicitly extended as far as Hawaii, but important American interest were developing still farther west. (Textbooks call the Orient the Far East, but his hinds the understand of American expansion, for the United Statues has more often considered his area as the Far West.) The "Empress of China" and sailed out of New York City in 1784 to make the first important contact. The United States signed its first commercial treaty with China in 1844. Ten years later Commodore Matthew C. Perry opened Japan. By the
time Seward assumed his duties as Secretary of States, the United States had been caught in the web of Asian power politics. The State Department had to maintain trade privileges and safeguard traders and missionaries either by cooperating with the European powers or by developing a go-it-alone policy. Americans deviated only the means, not the fact of involvement...
These two facts-that by 1860 the industrial economy was already moving ahead rapidly and that the Civil War marked the transference of power from planters to industrialists and financiers-do much to explain the dynamics of the new empire. The roots of this empire date back at least to the 1843-1860 period, which climaxed in the taking off of the economy, for during this era eastern industrial interest, working through such men as Daniel Webster and William Marcy, began to
show interest in the vast China market and in such areas as California and Hawaii to serve as stepping stones to that market. William Seward, rising to a lofty position in American politics during the 1850's, developed an expansive philosophy within the context of this industrialism which he attempted to realize during the next decade. Policy makers in the post 1870's completed what these men had begun, but the later empire builders succeeded because the Civil War had given them the political power to carry out their plans. The control of policy making by the
industrialist and financiers was a prerequisite to the creation of a new commercial empire in such noncontiguous areas as China and South America....
When coupled with the maturing of the economy, especially in the industrial segment, America's western history provides valuable insights into the formulation of foreign policy after Seward. This is so for several reasons. Fist, the American West supposedly held the great open frontier of opportunities for both individual farmers seeking land and for eastern and Midwestern industrialist searching for markets and raw materials. When in the 1880's many Americans feared that this frontier was closing, they reacted in the classic manner of searching farther west for new
frontiers, though primarily of a commercial, not landed, nature. This swept them into the Pacific and Asiatic area and hence into on of the maelstroms of world power politics. Second, when the belief spread that the internal frontier had quit expanding and had begun to stagnate, the newly restore Union aced an intensified internal threat. This came from bankrupt farmers, unemployed laborers and miners, and bitter social critics including some of the foremost novelists of the day.
Foreign policy formulators and many businessmen viewed expanding diplomatic interest as one way to ameliorate the cause of this discontent....
POSTSCRIPT:
THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER:
WAS 1898 THE DECISIVE YEAR?
This issue pinpoints the conflict between the process of continual historical development on one hand, and the power of a cataclysmic event on the other, in attempting to understand historical change. The myriad incidents of 1898 capture attention; less dramatic episodes like missionary activity, the purchase of Alaska, or the occupation of the Midway Islands recede into the background. That is, until students question the acquisition of the Philippines and the Hawaiian
Islands in the same year-American interest in the Orient and Pacific did not pop up overnight; in the case of Cuba there had been a century of anticipation.
American expansion did not follow the pattern set by the European powers. There seemed to be temporal limits to America's control of some of its dependencies-the Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba, Alaska. Alaska and Hawaii were promoted to statehood after ninety-two and sixty-one years respectively. Cuba and the Philippines were dealt with more quickly. Cuba gained independence in 1934 and the Philippines were relinquished in 1945. The westward movement across the Mississippi to the Pacific also differentiates the nature of American expansion from that of the
European powers. There is a great sense of continuity between continental growth and trans-oceanic development which was impossible for the Europeans.
Perhaps this issue may be best understood if the events of 1898 are regarded as the undeniable signs of America as a world power, and not as its earliest manifestation. If different stages of world power are recognized with their characteristics of political, military, cultural, economic, and ideological control, some new insights will emerge.
The comparative approach to this issue can be found in Ernest R. May's American
Imperialism (Athenaeum, 1968), and Robin W. Wink's "Imperialism" in C. Vann Woodwards (ed.), The Comparative Approach to American History (Basic Books, 1968). Julius W. Pratt's Expansionists of 1898 (John Hopkins University Press, 1936) remains a standard work on the subject of the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of the Philippines and Hawaii as does Walter Millis The Martial Spirit: A Study of Our War with Spain (Little, Brown, 1931).