Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (30 page)

Read Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership Online

Authors: Conrad Black

This settled the issue down for a time, but it was perennial, and would become more intractable. The North now realized that slavery would not die on its own, though most considered it unchristian and an affront to the founding values of the country. The South realized that it would always be questioned and that it would always be on the moral defensive. “From [the Missouri Compromise] on few Americans had any illusions left about the awful reality of slavery in America.”
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Jefferson famously now called it “A fire bell in the night . . . the knell of the Union.” He feared that all that he and “the generation of 1776” had accomplished to secure “self-government and happiness to their country” could be squandered “by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.”
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Yet he dismissed the Missouri question as “not a moral question, but one merely of power.”
Monroe had so defused partisanship, the caucus of his party in the House of Representatives that was to choose the Democratic-Republican nominees for president and vice president could not assemble a quorum on the preannounced date. The Federalist Party was inactive, so no one was officially put forward by any party. President Monroe and Vice President Tompkins allowed their names to stand and there was no formal opposition. Monroe won 231 electoral votes to three abstentions and one vote cast for Adams (the secretary of state) by an elector who thought no one but Washington should have the honor of being elected unanimously. Tompkins collected 218 votes, with the others scattered, although he simultaneously ran as governor of New York, making it clear that if elected, he would serve in that office, leaving the secretary of state to succeed to the presidency should Monroe not complete his term. In the event, Tompkins lost the governor’s race narrowly to De Witt Clinton, who went on to build the Erie Canal, connecting New York City to the Great Lakes, one of the world’s most noteworthy feats of engineering at the time. It was 363 miles long, 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep, and had 83 locks to take vessels up 675 feet. It would have been only half as long if it had utilized Lake Ontario, but war with Britain was still thought quite possible, and Lake Ontario was more peopled on the northern side (Toronto) and was directly accessible from the St. Lawrence, so the Erie Canal runs parallel to the lake, about 10 miles south of it, from Lake Oneida to Lake Erie at Buffalo.
9. THE MONROE DOCTRINE
 
Starting in 1810, all of the Latin American countries began to agitate for independence from Spain and Portugal. Open revolts flickered and raged all over the Americas south of the United States. The colonial powers were evicted more effortlessly in some places than others, but they had nothing like the resources to try to maintain themselves that the British had had at their disposal 40 years before. The so-called Holy Alliance (France, Russia, Austria, Prussia; Britain withdrew from this ultra-conservative arrangement), a strange and almost mystical reactionary league to freeze Europe and much of the world as they were when the Congress of Vienna concluded, determined at Verona in November 1822 that members would all assist a restoration of absolute monarchy in Spain. France invaded Spain to this end, less than a decade after Wellington and the Spanish guerrillas had forced Napoleon’s army out of Spain. Canning, who had replaced the (suicidally) deceased Castlereagh as foreign minister, suspected the French of aspiring to a Latin American empire, and when he did not receive adequate French assurances to disabuse himself of this concern, he proposed to Rush, the American minister in London, that Great Britain and the United States make a joint pact to keep other European powers out of Latin America. Monroe had already recognized the nascent Latin American republics and exchanged embassies with them (in May 1822). Rush told Canning that he did not have the authority to commit the U.S., but that he suspected the concept could have traction if Britain would join the United States in recognizing the new Latin American republics.
Monroe and, when he consulted them, Jefferson and Madison were enthusiastic about close cooperation with Great Britain, quite a turn for the old revolutionaries. Once America became active in the world, its leaders quickly found that the only foreign power it had much in common with was Britain—the language, the comparative liberality, and the stable political institutions. Adams demurred from his elders and predecessors (all four had been secretary of state and Adams, too, would be president.) Secretary of State Adams was not so convinced that the British were really renouncing colonial ambitions in Latin America; he had been jousting with the British over Cuba, and feared a nefarious attempt to establish a quid pro quo. He considered that the British alone would prevent other Europeans from asserting themselves in Latin America, as no one now disputed the absolute supremacy of the Royal Navy, virtually everywhere in the world. Adams was also concerned about the czar’s assertion of rights in the Northwest, where the British had a minimal naval presence and little concern what the Russians did. In the light of these factors, Adams proposed distinctive American warnings to Russia and France, and the United States did not respond to Canning. Adams persuaded Monroe and the rest of the cabinet to issue a policy statement purporting to govern foreign activities in the Americas.
In his annual message to the Congress on December 2, 1823, the president enunciated what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, which was composed by Adams and himself. They made four points: The Americas would not be subject to further colonization by Europeans; there was a distinct political society in the Americas very different to that of Europe; the United States would consider any attempt to extend European influence in the Americas to be dangerous to the national security of the U.S., but existing European colonies and dependencies in the Americas were grandfathered as legitimate; and the United States renounced any interest in influencing events in Europe. There were some doubtful aspects of this formulation. The United States had much more in common with Britain than with the emerging, unstable dictatorships of Latin America, and the Royal Navy assured the integrity of the Americas at least for the first 40 years after Monroe promulgated his doctrine. The United States had no ability whatever to prevent British encroachments in South America, had they wished to make any. And the renunciation of an American role in Europe was not much of an act of restraint, as it had no capacity whatever to play any such role. On April 17, 1824, the U.S. signed with Russia a treaty in which Russia confined itself to activities in the Pacific Northwest of North America above longitude 54°40, and desisted from attempts to rule the Bering Sea exclusively for Russian fishing and whaling.
In general, international reaction to Monroe’s speech was complete indifference, even in Latin America, but it would become an extremely important dispensation for the Americas after 1865, when the power of the United States was very great and unchallengeable in its own hemisphere. In the meantime, this was a brilliant diplomatic stroke by Monroe and Adams, as they managed to align their country’s interest exactly with Britain’s and appear to have more power than they did, while building a solid relationship with their former nemesis. Britain was now entering the greatest century of its influence in the world in its history, and the association of America with it was entirely on the basis of America’s own national interest.
Monroe would follow his fellow Virginians and retire after two terms, having blended Jeffersonism with Hamiltonism, and having recovered some of Franklin’s talent for diplomatic finesse, which seemed to give America a greater weight in the world than it really possessed. And the ill-conceived embargoes had been successful shields for the launch of manufacturing. That was not what was expected to happen by the squires of Monticello and Montpelier (Jefferson’s and Madison’s homes), but it was the beginning of an industrial capacity Hamilton had foreseen and that in the centuries to come would stupefy the world. After five presidencies and 50 years after the American Revolution began, the new republic was fairly launched.
Taken as a whole, in just one lifetime, from the start of the Seven Years’ War to 1824, the Americans had had an astounding rise, from a colony with two million people to one of the world’s six or seven most important countries, with over 11 million people. The problem of being half slave-holding and half free was the only shadow over America’s prospects, but it was a dark and lengthening shadow. Jefferson, the unimpoverishable optimist, in his final years, yet had “twinges of fear of an impending disaster whose sources he never fully understood. He and his colleagues had created” (and nurtured) “a Union devoted to liberty that contained an inner flaw that nearly proved to be its undoing.” Madison, who died 10 years after Jefferson and Adams, in 1836, left the posthumous word that “There was a serpent creeping with his deadly wiles” in the American “paradise.”
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So there was, and the great strategic challenge now was to keep the Union together until the forces of federalism in the North and West would be adequately motivated and powerful to suppress the slave states, if either moral revulsion at slavery or a preemptive insurrection made that necessary to preserve the Union.
 
War of 1812. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History
 
10. THE 1824 ELECTION AND PRESIDSENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
 
As the Virginia Dynasty ended, there was jockeying for the succession in Monroe’s talented cabinet. John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and John C. Calhoun were all presumed to be running for president, as was the populist general Andrew Jackson. The country was practically a one-party state, and the states objected to the practice of the Democratic-Republican caucus of the House of Representatives choosing the party’s nominee and, effectively, the president. The Tennessee legislature selected General Jackson as a candidate in 1822, which was a year after Calhoun had thrown his hat in the ring, and so fierce was the rivalry that Crawford, who had great influence in the Senate, blocked the promotion of officers favored by Calhoun as war secretary, sometimes even when they were supported by the president himself. The Massachusetts and Kentucky legislatures nominated their favorite sons, Adams and the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, all in 1822. Monroe launched the concept of the “lame duck” president, well before it was called that.
A stroke effectively eliminated Crawford, who had been selected by the House caucus in the traditional manner, in 1823, and Calhoun withdrew to run for vice president with both Jackson and Adams. Jackson ran in favor of popular election of the president, but against federally paid internal improvements, which were held to be intrusive by the federal government, and if permitted, likely to be followed by federal meddling in the status of slavery. Most of the candidates favored tariff protection for American manufacturing. The ballot yielded 99 electoral votes for Jackson, 84 for Adams, 41 for Crawford, and 37 for Clay. As there was no majority, the election went to the House of Representatives, which would consider only the top three candidates. Clay urged support for Adams and, as Speaker, exercised considerable influence, starting with causing the Kentucky congressmen to ignore the instruction of the state legislature to vote for Jackson, and vote for Adams instead. Adams won 13 states to seven for Jackson and four for Crawford. Clay accepted Adams’s offer of secretary of state, leading to the allegation of a “corrupt bargain” by the two to throw the House election to Adams. There was never any evidence of this, but it was much bandied about, including by the erratic and volcanic John Randolph, who also described Adams and Clay as “the Puritan and the blackleg.” This led to a duel, in which neither aggrieved party (Clay and Randolph) was injured. Calhoun was easily elected vice president.
After this election, the Adams and Clay groups became National Republicans, while the Jacksonians became the successors to Jefferson and Madison as Democratic-Republicans. Adams declined to politicize the civil service and dismissed only 12 federal government employees in his term, and those for objective cause. It was an admirable stance, but nothing was going to stop the charge of Jackson, swearing vengeance for the corrupt bargain and claiming to be the spear of the people as they seized control of government from the elites. In his address to the Congress in December 1825, Adams proposed an extensive program of roads and canals, a national university and observatory, and further exploration of the interior. It was an ambitious program, but one bound to offend the states’ rights advocates, which included all the South and much of the Southwest, essentially because of fear of attacks on slavery. This was the key to discussion of federal aid to public works, and was indicative of self-defeating government minimalism. It was held that if the federal government had the power to build public works all over the country, there would then be nothing to stop it from tampering with slavery. The South was already retreating into a slave mentality. Calhoun, as president of the Senate, elevated many opponents of the administration, as he was now the South’s leading political figure and used his position to advance his own status and not to support the administration (having probably received more votes for his office from followers of Jackson than of Adams).

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