Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 Part 8

American politics as the tariff or internal improvements. He had now outgrown the uncouthness of his earlier days and had become stately and dignified in his manner. Around this unique personality there began to gather all those democratic forces which we have noted as characteristic of the interior of the country, reinforced by the democracy of the cities, growing into self-consciousness and power.

A new force was coming into American life. This fiery Tennesseean was becoming the political idol of a popular movement which swept across all sections, with but slight regard to their separate economic interests. The rude, strong, turbulent democracy of the west and of the country found in him its natural leader.

All these candidates and the dominant element in every section professed the doctrines of republicanism; but what were the orthodox tenets of republicanism at the end of the rule of the Virginia dynasty? To this question different candidates and different sections gave conflicting answers. Out of their differences there was already the beginning of a new division of parties.

The progress of events gave ample opportunity for collision between the various factions. The crisis of 1819 and the depression of the succeeding years worked, on the whole, in the interests of Jackson, inclining the common people to demand a leader and a new dispensation. Not, perhaps, without a malicious joy did John Quincy Adams write in his diary at that time that "Crawford has labors and perils enough before him in the management of the finances for the three succeeding years."[Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 391.] From the negotiation of the Florida treaty in 1819, and especially from the relinquishment by Spain of her claims to the Pacific coast north of the forty-second parallel, the secretary of state expected to reap a harvest of political advantage.[Footnote: Ibid., IV., 238, 273, 451, V., 53, 109, 290; Monroe, Writings, VI., 127.] But Clay, as well as Benton and the west in general, balked his hopes by denouncing the treaty as an abandonment of American rights; and, although Adams won friends in the south by the acquisition of Florida, Spain's delay of two years in the ratification of the treaty so far neutralized the credit that the treaty was, after all, but a feast of Tantalus. In these intervening years, when the United States was several times on the verge of forcibly occupying Florida, the possibility of a war with Spain, into which European powers might be drawn, increased the importance of General Jackson as a figure in the eyes of the public.

Next the Missouri controversy, like "a flaming sword," [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 91.]cut in every direction and affected the future of all the presidential candidates. The hope of Crawford to reap the reward of his renunciation in 1816 was based, not only upon his moderation in his earlier career, which had brought him friends among the Federalists, but also upon the prospect of attracting a following in Pennsylvania, with the aid of the influence of Gallatin, and in New York as the regular candidate of the party.

These hopes of northern support demanded that Crawford should trim his sails with care, attacking the policies of his rivals rather than framing issues of his own. But for a time the Missouri controversy alienated both Pennsylvania and New York from the south, and it brought about a bitterness of feeling fatal to his success in those two states. To Clay, too, the slavery struggle brought embarra.s.sments, for his att.i.tude as a compromiser failed to strengthen him in the south, while it diminished his following in the north. Calhoun suffered from the same difficulty, although his position in the cabinet enabled him to keep in the background in this heated contest. Jackson stood in a different situation. At the time he was remote from the controversy, having his own troubles as governor of Florida, and, as a slave-holding planter he was not suspected by the south, while at the same time his popularity as the representative of the new democracy was steadily winning him friends in the antislavery state of Pennsylvania.

To Adams all the agitation was a distinct gain, since it broke the concert between Virginia and New York and increased his chances as the only important northern candidate. He saw--none more clearly-- the possibility of this issue as a basis for a new party organization,[Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 529.] but he saw also that it menaced a dissolution of the Union.[Footnote: Ibid., V., 12, 13, 53.] He was not disposed to alienate the south, and he contented himself with confiding his denunciation of slavery to the secret pages of his diary, while publicly he took his stand on the doctrine that the proposed restriction upon Missouri was against the Const.i.tution.[Footnote: Ibid., IV., 529.] As early as 1821 he recognized that the number of candidates in the field made it almost certain that the election would be decided by the vote of states in the House of Representatives, where the vote of the single member from Illinois would count as much as that of the whole delegation of New York or Pennsylvania. What Adams needed, therefore, was to combine New England in his support, obtain, if possible, a majority in New York, and add the votes of a sufficient number of smaller states to win the election.

The seventeenth Congress, which met in December, 1821, and lasted until the spring of 1823, was one of the most ineffective legislative bodies in the country's history. Henry Clay had returned to Kentucky to resume the practice of the law as a means of restoring his financial fortunes, and the importance of his leaders.h.i.+p was emphasized by his absence. Without mastery, and in the absence of party discipline, Congress degenerated into a. mere arena for the conflicts of rival personal factions, each anxious to destroy the reputation of the candidate favored by the other.

In December, 1821, Barbour, of Virginia, was chosen speaker, by a close vote, over Taylor, the favorite of Adams, thus transferring the control of the congressional committees again to the south, aided by its New York allies. The advantage to Crawford arising from this election was partly neutralized by the fact that in this year his partisans in Georgia were defeated by the choice of his bitterest enemy for the governors.h.i.+p. It may have been this circ.u.mstance which aroused the hope of Crawford's southern rivals and led to the calling of a legislative caucus in South Carolina, which, on December 18, 1821, by a close vote, nominated William Lowndes instead of Calhoun for the presidency. Many of Calhoun's partisans refused to attend this caucus, and the vote was a close one (57 to 53). [Footnote: Ravenel, William Lowndes, chap, x.; Adams, Memoirs, V., 468, 470; National Intelligencer, January 19, 1822.] Lowndes was a wealthy South Carolina planter, judicious and dispa.s.sionate, with a reputation for fair-mindedness and wisdom that gained him the respect of his foes as well as his friends. According to tradition, Clay once declared that among the many men he had known he found it difficult to decide who was the greatest, but added, "I think the wisest man I ever knew was William Lowndes."[Footnote: Ravenel, William Lowndes, 238.] His death, in less than a year, removed from the presidential contest an important figure, and from the south one of the most gifted of her sons.

As soon as the news of the nomination of Lowndes reached Was.h.i.+ngton, a delegation of members of Congress, from various sections, secured Calhoun's consent to avow his candidacy. His career as a tariff man and as a friend of internal improvements had won him northern supporters, especially in Pennsylvania, although, as South Carolina's action showed, he was not able to control his state. The announcement of Calhoun's candidacy turned against him all the batteries of his rivals. Pleading the depleted condition of the treasury, Crawford's partisans in Congress attacked the measures of Calhoun as secretary of war. Retrenchment in the expenditures for the army was demanded, and finally, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Crawford's friends, the Senate refused to ratify certain nominations of military officers made by the president on the recommendation of the secretary of war, giving as a reason that they were not in accordance with the law for the reduction of the army. In the cabinet discussion, Crawford openly supported this opposition, and his relations with the president became so strained that, in the spring of 1822, reports were rife that his resignation would be demanded. [Footnote: Cf. Adams, Memoirs, V., 525.] Crawford himself wrote to Gallatin that it would not be to his disadvantage to be removed from office. [Footnote: Gallatin, Writings, 31., 241.]

In the summer the matter was brought to a head by a correspondence in which Monroe indignantly intimated that Crawford had given countenance to the allegation that the president's principles and policy were not in sympathy with the early Jeffersonian system of economy and state rights. Believing that Crawford was aiming at the creation of a new party (a thing which distressed Monroe, who regarded parties as an evil),[Footnote: Monroe, Writings, VI., 286- 291.] he made it clear that it was the duty of a cabinet officer, when once the policy of the executive had been determined, to give that policy co-operation and support.[Footnote: Monroe to Crawford, August 22, 1822, MS. in N.Y. Pub. Library.] In his reply Crawford denied that he had personally antagonized the measures of the administration; [Footnote: Crawford to Monroe, September 3, 1822, MS. in N.Y. Pub. Library; cf. Adams, Memoirs, VI., 390.] but he took the ground that a cabinet officer should not attempt to influence his friends in Congress either for or against the policy of the government.

His a.s.surances of loyalty satisfied Monroe and averted the breach.

It is easy to see, however, that Crawford's att.i.tude strengthened the feeling on the part of his rivals that he was intriguing against the administration. They believed, whether he instigated his partisans to oppose measures favored by the president or was unable to restrain them, in either case he should be forced into open opposition. [Footnote: Cf. Poinsett to Monroe, May 10, 1822, Monroe MSS., in Library of Cong.; Adams, Memoirs, V., 315, VI., 57.] The truth is that the government was so divided within itself that it was difficult to determine with certainty what its policy was.

Monroe's greatest weakness was revealed at this time in his inability to create and insist upon a definite policy. The situation was aggravated by the president's determination to remain neutral between the rival members of his official family, and by the loss of influence which he suffered through the knowledge that he was soon to lay down the presidential power.

Meanwhile, John Quincy Adams watched these intrigues with bitterness of soul. Debarred by his Puritan principles from the open solicitation of votes which his rivals practiced, he yet knew every move in the game and gauged the political tendencies with the astuteness of the politician, albeit a Puritan politician. Nor did he disdain to make such use of his position as would win friends or remove enemies. He proposed to Calhoun a foreign mission, suggested the same to Clay, favored an amba.s.sadors.h.i.+p for Clinton, and urged the appointment of Jackson to Mexico. These overtures were politely declined by the candidates, and Adams was forced to fight for the presidency against the men whom he would so gladly have sent to honor their country abroad.

CHAPTER XII

THE MONROE DOCTRINE (1821-1823)

The place of slavery in the westward expansion of the nation was not the only burning question which the American people had to face in the presidency of Monroe. Within a few years after that contest, the problem of the independence of the New World and of the destiny of the United States in the sisterhood of new American republics confronted the administration. Should the political rivalries and wars of Europe to acquire territory be excluded from the western hemisphere? Should the acquisition of new colonies by European states in the vast unsettled s.p.a.ces of the two Americas be terminated? These weighty questions were put to the mild Virginian statesman; history has named his answer the Monroe Doctrine.

From the beginning of our national existence, the United States had been pus.h.i.+ng back Europe from her borders, and a.s.serting neutrality and the right to remain outside of the political System of the Old World. Was.h.i.+ngton's farewell address of 1796, with its appeal to his fellow-citizens against "interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe," sank deep into the popular consciousness. It did not interfere with the process by which, piece by piece, the United States added to its domains fragments from the disintegrating Spanish empire; for so long as European states held the strategic positions on our flanks, as they did in Was.h.i.+ngton's day, the policy of separation from the nations of the Old World was one difficult to maintain; and France and England watched the enlargement of the United States with jealous eye. Each nation, in turn, considered the plans of Miranda, a Venezuelan revolutionist, for the freeing of Spanish America. In 1790 the Nootka Sound affair threatened to place England in possession of the whole Mississippi valley and to give her the leaders.h.i.+p in Spanish America. [Footnote: Turner, in Am.

Hist. Rev., VII., 704, VIII., 78; Manning, Nootka Sound Controversy, in Am. Hist. a.s.soc., Report, 1904, p. 281; cf. Ba.s.sett, Federalist System (Am. Nation, XI), chap. vi.] Two years later, France urged England to join her in freeing the colonies of Spain in the New World;[Footnote: Sorel, L'Europe et la Revolution Francaise, II., 384, 418, III., 17.] and when Pitt rejected these overtures, France sent Genet to spread the fires of her revolution in Louisiana and Florida.[Footnote: Turner, in Am. Hist. Rev., III., 650, X. 259.]

When this design failed, France turned to diplomacy, and between 1795 and 1800 tried to persuade Spain to relinquish Florida and Louisiana to herself, as a means of checking the expansion of the United States and of rendering her subservient to France. The growing preponderance of France over Spain, and the fear that she would secure control of Spanish America, led England again in 1798 to listen to Miranda's dream of freeing his countrymen, and to sound the United States on a plan for joint action against Spain in the New World. [Footnote: Turner, in Am. Hist. Rev., X., 249 et seq., 276.] The elder Adams turned a deaf ear to these suggestions, and when at last Napoleon achieved the possession of Louisiana, it was only to turn it over to the United States. [Footnote: Sloane, in Am.

Hist. Rev., IV., 439.] Jefferson's threat that the possession of Louisiana by France would seal the union between England and the United States and "make the first cannon which shall be fired in Europe the signal for the tearing up of any settlement she may have made, and for holding the two continents of America in sequestration for the common purposes of the united British and American nations,"

[Footnote: Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), VIII., 145.] showed how unstable must be the American policy of isolation so long as Europe had a lodgment on our borders. [Footnote: Cf. Channing, Jeffersonian System (Am. Nation, XII.), chap. v.]

The acquisition of Louisiana by the United States was followed by the annexation of West Florida; and the Seminole campaign frightened Spain into the abandonment of East Florida. [Footnote: Babc.o.c.k, American Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xvii.] While the United States was thus crowding Europe back from its borders and strengthening its leaders.h.i.+p in the New World, Spanish America was revolting from the mother-country. When Napoleon made himself master of Spain in 1807, English merchants, alarmed at the prospect of losing the lucrative trade which they had built up in the lands which Spain had so long monopolized, supported the revolutionists with money, while various expeditions led by English officers aided the revolt. [Footnote: Paxson, Independence of the So. Am.

Republics, chap, iii.; Am. Hist. Rev., IV., 449, VI., 508.] At first, failure met the efforts of the loosely compacted provinces, made up of sharply marked social cla.s.ses, separated by race antagonisms, and untrained in self-government. Only in Buenos Ayres (later the Argentine Confederation), where representatives of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata declared their independence in 1816, were the colonists able to hold their ground.

A new era in the revolt began, however, in 1817, when General San Martin surprised the Spaniards by his march, from a frontier province of La Plata, over a pa.s.s thirteen thousand feet above the sea across the Andes to Chili. In the course of four years, with the co-operation of Lord Cochrane (who relinquished the British service in order to command the fleet of the insurgents on the Pacific), he effected the liberation of Chili and of Peru. Meanwhile, in the northern provinces the other great South American revolutionist, Bolivar, aided by a legion of Irish and English veterans, won the independence of Venezuela and Colombia. In July, 1822, these two successful generals met in Ecuador; and San Martin, yielding the leaders.h.i.+p to the more ambitious Bolivar, withdrew from the New World. By this date, America was clearly lost to the Latin states of Europe, for Mexico became an independent empire in 1821, and the next year Brazil, while it chose for its ruler a prince of the younger line of the royal house of Portugal, proclaimed its independence.[Footnote: Paxson, Independence of the So. Am.

Republics, chap. i.]

Although the relations between these revolutionary states and England, both on the military and on the commercial side, were much closer than with the United States, this nation followed the course of events with keen interest. Agents were sent, in 1817 and 1820, to various South American states, to report upon the conditions there; and the vessels of the revolutionary governments were accorded belligerent rights, and admitted to the ports of the United States.[Footnote: Ibid., 121; Am. State Papers, Foreign, IV., 217, 818.] The occupation of Amelia Island and Galveston, in 1817, by revolutionists, claiming the protection of the flags of Colombia and Mexico respectively, gave opportunity for piratical forays upon commerce, which the United States was unable to tolerate, and these establishments were broken up by the government.[Footnote: McMaster, United States, IV., chap. x.x.xiv.; Reeves, in Johns Hopkins Univ.

Studies, XXIII., Nos. 9, 10.]

President Monroe seems to have been inclined to recognize the independence of these states on the earliest evidence of their ability to sustain it; but the secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, favored a policy of delay. He had slight confidence in the turbulent, untrained republics of Latin-America, and little patience with the idea that their revolution had anything in common with that of the United States. At the close of 1817 he believed it inexpedient and unjust for the United States to favor their cause, and he urged a friend to publish inquiries into the political morality and the right of the United States to take sides with a people who trampled upon civil rights, disgraced their revolution by buccaneering and piracy, and who lacked both unity of cause and of effort. [Footnote: Letter to A. H. Everett, in Am. Hist. Rev., XI., 112.] His own system was based on the theory that the United States.

should move in harmony with England, and, if possible, with the other European powers in the matter of recognition; [Footnote: Paxson, Independence of the So. Am. Republics, 149 (citing MSS. in State Dept.)] and he perceived that Spain would be more likely to yield Florida to the United States if the president did not acknowledge the independence of her other provinces.

Henry Clay now came forward as the advocate of immediate recognition of the revolutionary republics. In this he was undoubtedly swayed by a real sympathy with the cause of freedom and by the natural instincts of a man of the west, where antagonism to Spain was bred in the bone. But his insistence upon immediate action was also stimulated by his opposition to Monroe and the secretary of state.

Clay's great speech on recognition was made May 24 and 25, 1818. His imagination kindled at the vastness of South America: "The loftiest mountains; the most majestic rivers in the world; the richest mines of the precious metals; and the choicest productions of the earth."

"We behold there," said he, "a spectacle still more interesting and sublime--the glorious spectacle of eighteen millions of people struggling to burst their chains and be free." He appealed to Congress to support an American system by recognizing these sister republics, and argued that, both in diplomacy and in commerce they would be guided by an American policy and aid the United States to free itself from dependence on Europe. His motion was lost by an overwhelming majority, but the speech made a deep impression.

[Footnote: Annals of Cong., 15 Cong., 1 Sess., II., 1474.]

In the two years which elapsed between the negotiation and the ratification of the Florida treaty, the president was several times on the point of recommending the forcible occupation of Florida, but he withheld the blow, hoping that the liberal Spanish government established under the const.i.tution of 1820 might be brought to give its consent to the cession. The impetuous Clay chafed under this delay, and on May 10, 1820, he broke forth in another speech, in support of a resolution declaring the expediency of sending ministers to the South American states. Charging the administration, and especially John Quincy Adams, with subserviency to Great Britain, he demanded that the United States should become the center of a system against the despotism of the Old World and should act on its own responsibility. "We look too much abroad," said he. "Let us break these commercial and political fetters; let us no longer watch the nod of any European politician; let us become real and true Americans, and place ourselves at the head of the American system."

[Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 1 Sess., II., 2727.]

Clay was steadily gaining support in his efforts to force the hands of the administration: his resolutions won by a fair majority, and again, in February, 1821, he secured the almost unanimous a.s.sent of the House to a resolution of sympathy with South America. Another resolution, expressing the readiness of that body to support the president whenever he should think it expedient to recognize the republics, pa.s.sed by a vote of 86 to 68, and the triumphant Clay was placed at the head of a committee to wait on the president with this resolution.[Footnote: Ibid., 2229, and 2 Sess., 1081, 1091; Adams, Memoirs, V., 268]

Although the victory was without immediate effect on the administration, which refused to act while the Florida treaty was still unratified, Adams perceived that the popular current was growing too strong to be much longer stemmed; the charge of dependence upon England was one not easy to be borne, and Clay's vision of an independent American system guided by the United States had its influence on his mind. Five months after Clay's speech, in 1820, extolling such a system, Adams set forth similar general ideas in a discussion between himself and the British minister over the regulation, of the slave-trade. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 182]

By 1822, Florida was in our possession. The success of the arms of the revolutionists was unmistakable; several governments, of sufficient stability to warrant recognition had been erected; and it was patent to the world that Spain had lost her colonies. Acting on these considerations, Monroe sent a message to Congress, March 8, 1822, announcing that the time for recognition had come, and asking for appropriations for ministers to South America. [Footnote: Richardson, Messages and Papers, II., 116]

In the mean time, the secretary of state was confronted with important diplomatic questions which, complicated the South American problem. As Spanish America broke away from the mother-country, its possessions in North America on the Pacific were exposed to seizure by the rival powers. In 1821, when Stratford Canning, the British minister to the United States, protested against a motion, in the House of Representatives, that the United States should form an establishment on the Columbia, Adams challenged any claim of England to the sh.o.r.es of the Pacific. "I do not know," said he, "what you claim nor what you do not claim. You claim India; you claim Africa; you claim--" "Perhaps," said Canning, "a piece of the moon." "No,"

said Adams, "I have not heard that you claim exclusively any part of the moon; but there is not a spot on THIS habitable globe that I could affirm you do not claim; and there is none which you may not claim with as much color of right as you can have to Columbia River or its mouth." [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 252.]

The time had arrived when Adams's familiarity with foreign diplomacy, his belief that a new nation must a.s.sert its rights with vigor if it expected to maintain them, his very testiness and irascibility, his "bull-dog fighting qualities"--in short, the characteristics that were sources of weakness to him in domestic politics--proved to be elements of strength in his conduct of foreign relations. The individualism, the uncompromising nature, the aggressiveness, and the natural love of expansion, which were traits of John Quincy Adams, became of highest service to his country in the diplomatic relations of the next few years.

Hardly a year elapsed after this defiance to England when Adams met the claims of Russia likewise with a similar challenge. On September 4, 1821, the Russian czar issued a ukase announcing the claim of Russia on the Pacific coast north of the fifty-first degree, and interdicting to the commercial vessels of other powers the approach on the high seas within one hundred Italian miles of this claim.

[Footnote: U. S. Foreign Relations (1890), 439.] This a.s.sertion of Russian monopoly, which would, in effect, have closed Bering Sea, met with peremptory refusal by Adams, and on July 17, 1823, having in mind Russia's posts in California, he informed the minister, Baron Tuyl, "that we should contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent, and that we should a.s.sume distinctly the principle that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments."

[Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, VI., 163.] After negotiations, Russia concluded the treaty of April 17, 1824, by which she agreed to form no establishments on the northwest coast south of lat.i.tude 54 degrees 40', and the United States reciprocally agreed to make no establishments north of that line. At the same time Russia abandoned her extreme claim of maritime jurisdiction.

While the Russian claims were under consideration, the question of the future of Cuba was also giving great concern. The Pearl of the Antilles remained in the possession of Spain when she lost her main- land colonies. By its position, commanding both the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, it was of the highest importance to the United States as well as to the West Indian powers, England and France. From a party in Cuba itself, in September, 1822, advances were made to the United States for annexation, and Monroe sent an agent to investigate, meanwhile refraining from encouraging the movement. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, VI., 69, 72.]

George Canning, who became premier of England in September, 1822, was convinced that no questions relating to continental Europe could be more immediately and vitally important to Great Britain than those which related to America. [Footnote: Stapleton, Official Corresp. of George Canning, I., 48.] Alarmed lest the United States should occupy Cuba, Canning, in a memorandum to the cabinet in November, questioned whether any blow that could be struck by any foreign power in any part of the world would more affect the interests of England. [Footnote: Ibid., 52; Royal Hist. Soc., Transactions (new series), XVIII., 89] He contented himself, however, with sending a naval force to the waters of Cuba and Puerto Rico, with the double purpose of checking American aggressions and protecting English commerce. This action created suspicion on the part of the United States, and Adams issued instructions (April 28, 1823) to the American minister at Madrid, declaring that, within a half-century, the annexation of Cuba to the United States would be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself.

The laws of political gravitation would, in his opinion, ultimately bring Cuba to this country, if, in the mean time, it were not acquired by some other power. Adams's immediate policy, therefore, favored the retention of Cuba and Puerto Rico by Spain, but he refused to commit the United States to a guarantee of the independence of Cuba against all the world except that power.

[Footnote: Wharton, Digest of Am. Int. Law, I., 361-366; Latane, Diplomatic Relations with Lat. Am., chap. iii.]

The mutual jealousies of the nations with respect to the destiny of Cuba became, at this time, entangled with the greater question of the intervention of the Holy Alliance in the New World. At the Congress of Verona, in November, 1822, Austria, France, Russia, and Prussia signed a revision of the treaty of the Holy Alliance, [Footnote: Snow, Treaties and Topics; Seign.o.bos, Pol. Hist. of Europe since 1814, 762.] which had for its objects the promotion of the doctrine of legitimacy in support of the divine right of rulers, and the doctrine of intervention, for the purpose of restoring to their thrones those monarchs who had been deposed by popular uprisings, and of rehabilitating those who had been limited by written const.i.tutions. At Verona, the allies agreed to use their efforts to put an end to the system of representative government in Europe, and to prevent its further introduction. Having already suppressed uprisings in Naples and Piedmont, the Alliance empowered France to send troops into the Spanish peninsula to restore the authority of the king of Spain and to put down the revolutionary const.i.tution of 1820. Chateaubriand, the French representative, desired the congress to go further and intervene in Spanish America, but this question was postponed.

Alarmed by the prospect of French power in Spain and by the proposed extension of the system of the allies to the New World, Canning protested against the doctrine of intervention, and determined that, if France was to become the mistress of Spain, she should at least not control the old Spanish empire. In the spring of 1823 he made an unsuccessful effort to secure a pledge from France not to acquire any Spanish-American possessions, either by conquest or by cession from Spain. But the French government maintained its reserve, even after England disclaimed for herself the intention of acquiring Spanish-American territory. [Footnote: Stapleton, Political Life of Canning, I., 19.]

Having broken with the concert of the European powers, it was natural that England should turn to the United States, and it is very likely that the next step of Canning was influenced by the dispatches of the British minister to the United States, who reported a conversation with Adams, in June, 1823, in which the secretary strongly set forth his belief that, in view of the virtual dissolution of the European alliance, England and the United States had much in common in their policy. "With respect to the vast continent of the West," said he, "the United States must necessarily take a warm and decided interest in whatever determined the fate or affected the welfare of its component members." But he disclaimed any wish on the part of this country to obtain exclusive advantages there. He urged that England ought to recognize the independence of the revolted provinces, and he deprecated the conquest or cession of any part of them. [Footnote: Stratford Canning to George Canning, June 6, 1823, MSS. Foreign Office, America, CLXXVI; Adams, Memoirs, VI., 151; cf. Reddaway, Monroe Doctrine, 83.]

The first impression of the British minister, on hearing Adams's emphasis on the community of interests between the two nations, was that the secretary was suggesting an alliance; and it may well have been that Canning was encouraged by the American att.i.tude to make overtures to Rush, the American minister, shortly after these dispatches must have reached him. On August 16, 1823, and three times thereafter, Canning proposed a joint declaration by England and the United States against any project by a European power of "a forcible enterprise for reducing the colonies to subjugation, on the behalf or in the name of Spain; or which meditates the acquisition of any part of them to itself, by cession or by conquest."

[Footnote: Stapleton, Political Life of Canning, II., 24; W. C.

Ford, in Ma.s.s. Hist. Soc. Proceedings (2d series), XV., 415.]

Canning was willing to make public announcement that the recovery of the colonies by Spain was hopeless; that the matter of recognition was only a question of time; and that Great Britain did not aim at the possession of any portion of them, but that it "could not see any part of them transferred to any other power with indifference."

These professions Canning desired that the United States and England should mutually confide to each other and declare "in the face of the world."

Confronted with Canning's important proposition, Rush, who doubted the disinterestedness of England, prudently attempted to exact a preliminary recognition of the Spanish-American republics; if Canning would agree to take this action, he would accept the responsibility of engaging in such a declaration. [Footnote: Ford, in Ma.s.s. Hist. Soc. Proceedings (2d series), XV., 420, 423.] Having failed in four successive efforts to persuade Rush to join in an immediate declaration, irrespective of prior recognition by England, Canning proceeded alone, and, in an interview with Polignac, the French minister in London, on October 9, 1823, he announced substantially the principles which he had expressed to the American minister. [Footnote: Stapleton, Political Life of Canning, II., 26.]

Polignac thereupon disclaimed for France any intention to appropriate Spanish possessions in America, and abjured any design, on the part of his country, of acting against the colonies by force; but he significantly added that the future relations between Spain and her colonies ought to form a subject of discussion between the European powers. Acting on this idea, and in opposition to England's wishes, an invitation was sent to Russia, Prussia, and Austria to confer at Paris on the relations of Spain and her revolted provinces.

Rush's despatches relating the overtures of Canning reached President Monroe [Footnote: Ford, in Am. Hist. Rev., VII., 684.]

October 9, 1823, on the same day that Canning was interviewing Polignac. Adams was absent from Was.h.i.+ngton at the time, and Monroe, returning to Virginia, consulted ex-Presidents Jefferson and Madison. He clearly intimated his own belief that the present case might be an exception to the general maxim against entanglement in European politics, and was evidently willing to accept the proposal of the British government. [Footnote: Monroe, Writings, VI., 323.]