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  Matters were also made easy for the growing Republic by the fact that none of the other European (or Europeanized) powers with territorial claims in North America posed a potentially fatal threat to the United States after 1783. In one respect, Jefferson was right. When it came to securing territory from them, this would not be an empire based on conquest. Rather, it would be an empire purchased for cash—or, to be precise, for government bonds. When the United States offered these in exchange for territory, the owners seldom hesitated to sell. The territory acquired in 1803 roughly doubled the size of the United States, including as it did all or at least a part of thirteen future states. “Louisiana,” as this vast area was then known, was bought, not fought for, because neither of its previous owners, the French and the Spanish, saw any strategic benefit in retaining it. Ironically, it was in part the British navy that made the Louisiana Purchase possible; had it not been for its dominance of the Atlantic sea-lanes, which had effectively confined Napoleon’s power to the European continent, Jefferson’s offer might not have been so readily accepted. To exchange real estate covering roughly eight hundred thousand square miles for $11.2 million in freshly printed U.S. federal government bonds was, for the French, a financial expedient. For the United States the deal was, in effect, the mother of all mortgages—and, it should be added, one brokered by the London bank Barings.18 By contrast, when the United States went to war against Britain between 1812 and 1815, it only succeeded in gaining a trifling amount of additional territory to the south; after Spanish authority in Florida disintegrated and residents around Baton Rouge proclaimed the Republic of West Florida, Madison ordered its annexa-tion.19 Dreams of annexing Canada were dispelled—despite a fleeting occupation of Toronto—by effective British resistance. The treaties of 1818 and 1819, with Britain and Spain respectively, were successes more for diplomacy than for arms. Britain agreed to a northern boundary along the forty-ninth parallel, giving up any claim to much of what became North Dakota, while Spain relinquished Florida and recognized a new western boundary along the border of what was to become Oklahoma.

  Even the acquisition of Texas owed as much to cash and peaceful colonization as to conquest. From 1821 until 1834 Stephen Austin established and ran his colony with the consent of the Mexican authorities, which were in fact more generous than the United States toward would-be settlers. In 1829 Austin wrote enthusiastically to his sister and brother-in-law, urging them to come to Texas and describing the Mexican government as “the most liberal and munificent Govt. on earth to emigra[n]ts.” “After being here one year,” he added, “you will oppose a change even to Uncle Sam.” As late as 1832 his “standing motto” was still “Fidelity to Mexico.”20 Two years before, a decree had prohibited Americans from settling in Texas. But although this prompted the settlers to summon their own convention, they resolved merely to send Austin to petition the government in Mexico City.21 Only in 1835, after Austin had spent the better part of a year in jail, and after repeated harassment by Mexican troops, did the settlers take up arms.22

  Yet when the Texans, fresh from victory over General Antonio de Santa Anna’s army, voted all but unanimously for annexation by the United States, they were rebuffed.23 Despite the fact that Andrew Jackson had previously offered to buy Texas from the Mexicans for five million dollars, he was unable to overcome resistance to annexation within Congress. In effect, the Texans had independence thrust back upon them.24 Only by flirting with Great Britain—raising the prospect of a British satellite to the south of the United States as well as to the north—was the Texan president Sam Houston able to resuscitate his country’s bid to join the Union; even then, a second proposal for accession was rejected by the Senate in June 1844. It was the emergence of Texas as an election issue that tipped the balance. Martin Van Buren lost the Democratic nomination to James K. Polk because he refused to endorse annexation, while Polk went on to defeat the Whig Henry Clay, who wanted to delay Texan accession.25 When Texas became the twenty-eighth state of the Union in December 1845, John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, portrayed it as “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent.”26 Yet the possibility of annexation had presented itself at least a decade earlier. The fact that it took so long to happen suggests that there were, after all, less manifest limits to U.S. expansion. The crucial obstacle in this case had been that in Texas slavery was permitted. Northern abolitionists detected in the campaign to acquire new states in the South and West a stratagem to increase the number of slave states in the Union. The fateful question posed by the South’s peculiar institution would hamper the expansion of the United States until it was finally settled by the bloodiest war Americans have ever fought—the one they fought against each other.

  War with Mexico came after, rather than before, the annexation of Texas; it was a war fought in part because the buyer and the vendor could not agree on the price of the Texan purchase. American citizens had claims against the Mexican government amounting to $6.5 million; these the Mexicans declined to recognize.27 In March 1846 Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to march from the Nueces River to the Rio Grande. The Mexicans declared a “defensive war”; the Polk administration replied by accusing them of spilling “American blood on American soil.” Neither side anticipated how one-sided the ensuing conflict would be; indeed, General Ulysses S. Grant later repented of what he called “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”28 In less than a year the U.S. Army won a succession of engagements decisively, smashing Santa Anna’s significantly larger force at Buena Vista in February 1847. Another army under General Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz and marched on Mexico City, capturing the capital that September.29 Yet force of arms alone did not decide the fate of Texas, or the fates of its western neighbors. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of February 1848, the Americans once again exchanged dollars for land. To be precise, by assuming up to $5 million of the claims of its citizens against Mexico, the United States acquired the territory down to the Rio Grande, and for a further $15 million, it added to its shopping basket the provinces of New Mexico and Upper California, territory that now comprises most of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah and Nevada.30 These were vast acquisitions. They were also an investment that paid an immediate return since gold had been discovered in California just months before. Moreover, because little of the new land was suitable for plantation agriculture, annexation was less controversial than it had been in the case of Texas.

  In a speech to the Senate in 1850, William Henry Seward had hailed California’s accession to the Union, declaring: “The world contains no seat of empire so magnificent as this, which … offers supplies on the Atlantic shores to the overcrowded nations of Europe, while on the Pacific coast it intercepts the commerce of the Indies. The nation thus situated must command … the empire of the seas, which alone is real empire.31 But events seemed to suggest that the real empire was the empire of diplomacy and the dollar. A year after Seward’s speech the United States had secured the territory of Oregon by agreeing that the existing border between British and American territory—the forty-ninth parallel—should be extended to the Pacific. Those bellicose voices who called for war and the pushing of the border to the fifty-fourth parallel (beyond Prince Rupert) went unheeded.32 In 1853 the American ambassador to Mexico, James Gadsden, acquired a further strip of territory from Mexico (the area south of the Gila River, which today straddles southwestern New Mexico and southern Arizona). This time the price was $10 million, the highest price per acre ever paid by the United States for territory (see table 2). And fifteen years later, at the initiative of Secretary of State William Seward, the United States acquired a further 570,000 square miles of what appeared largely to be tundra by buying Alaska from the Russian tsar for $7.2 million.

  Nothing illustrates more clearly the limits of American expansion than the failure of the United States to acquire any other territory north of the forty-ninth parallel. We should not forget
that the Founding Fathers had originally intended to unite “the inhabitants of all the territory from Cape Breton to the Mississippi.”33 Yet as we have seen, bids to seize Canada by force had failed, first during the War of Independence and again in the War of 1812. Moreover, when it came to continental expansion, Canada proved every bit as dynamic as did the United States. It was the American purchase of Alaska that precipitated the creation of the federal Dominion of Canada (1867), which by 1871 extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific (and the economic success of which demonstrated conclusively that a repudiation of British political institutions was not a prerequisite for success on the North American continent). There was and is nothing much that is natural about the northern frontier of the United States, which follows a degree of latitude for most of its length and then effectively bisects the Great Lakes; it does not even stick to the course of the St. Lawrence River. This arbitrary two-and-a-half–thousand-mile line perfectly illustrates the limits of nineteenth-century American power. The stark reality is that in the first century of their existence under an independent republic, Americans spilled far more blood fighting one another (in what was, in effect, their war of unification) than they had to spill fighting for continental lebensraum. By the 1860s the question for which Americans were prepared to fight and die was not how big their republic should be but how free it should be.

  TABLE 2. BUYING AN EMPIRE:

  MAJOR AMERICAN TERRITORIAL ACQUISITIONS, 1803–1898

  Source: Richard B. Morris (ed.), Encyclopedia of American History, p. 599; Charles Arnold-Baker, The Companion to British History.

  EMPIRE AT SEA

  The United States had already mounted a number of small-scale naval expeditions in the period before the Civil War, little forays like the wars of 1801–06 against the Barbary pirates (to be precise, the pasha of Tripoli).34 But actual annexation of territory beyond the shores of the continent was another matter. Was it even constitutional? Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s opinion in the notorious Dred Scott decision (1857) 35 stated that there was “certainly no power given by the Constitution to the Federal Government to establish or maintain colonies bordering on the United States or at a distance, to be ruled and governed at its own pleasure; nor to enlarge its territorial limits in any way, except by admission of new States.”36 This seemed to make it plain that there could be no colonies or other forms of dependent territories, only new states. Partly for that reason, when Santo Domingo (the future Dominican Republic) effectively offered itself up for annexation in 1869, the proposal was defeated in Congress.37 Thirty years later, however, A. Lawrence Lowell could argue quite differently. “Possessions may also be so acquired,” he wrote in the Harvard Law Review, “as not to form part of the United States, and in that case constitutional limitations, such as those requiring uniformity of taxation and trial by jury, do not apply.”38 The timing of Lowell’s article was significant, for by 1899 the United States had acquired a clutch of new territorial possessions, few, if any, of which seemed suitable candidates for statehood.

  Late-nineteenth-century American imperialism was in many ways similar in character to the imperialisms of Europe in the same era. Whereas the first phase of American expansion had been driven by mass migration and the colonization of very thinly populated land, this phase was motivated by a combination of strategic, commercial and ideological impulses. The fons et origo of American grand strategy was a heroic negative, the “doctrine” proclaimed by President James Monroe in 1823, which asserted “as a principle… that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”39 For decades this was little more than Yankee bluff.40 The British established the colony of British Guiana (now Guyana) out of three formerly Dutch possessions in 1831 and continued blithely to colonize north of the forty-ninth parallel as if oblivious of Monroe’s great declaration. In 1839 they seized the island of Ruatán off the coast of Honduras; in the 1850s they briefly occupied the nearby Bay Islands; in 1862 they turned Belize into the colony of British Honduras.41 The French too ignored the Monroe Doctrine, attempting to transform Mexico into a satellite under the ill-starred emperor Maximilian in the 1860s; the failure of this scheme was only partly due to American sabre-rattling. European powers made multiple interventions in Latin America, often on debt-collecting missions, before, during and after the American Civil War.42 It was only toward the end of the nineteenth century that (as Secretary of State Richard Olney put it) the United States could be regarded as “practically sovereign on this continent”—“not because of the pure friendship or good will felt for it … not simply by reason of its high character as a civilized state, nor because wisdom and justice and equity are the invariable characteristics of the dealings of the United States … [but] because in addition to all other grounds, its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable.”43

  Even that analysis left something out; until such times as the United States had a world-class navy, it could not really enforce its claim to what amounted to a hemispheric exclusion zone. In the 1880s the American fleet was still an insignificant entity, smaller even than the Swedish.44 However, inspired by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan’s hugely influential book The Influence of Sea Power upon History, the United States embarked on a navy-building program more ambitious even than Germany’s. The achievement was astonishing: by 1907 the American fleet was second only to the Royal Navy.45 With this, the Monroe Doctrine belatedly acquired credibility.46 When Britain and Germany blockaded Venezuela in 1902, in response to attacks on European ships and defaults on European debts, it was Theodore Roosevelt’s threat to send fifty-four American warships from Puerto Rico that persuaded them to accept international arbitration.47 By the early 1900s Great Britain recognized the United States as one of those rival empires serious enough to be worthy of appeasement.48

  As in the case of the European battleship mania, maritime power was justified in terms of overseas commercial interests. Before the 1880s few American businessmen had any thought for opportunities beyond the borders of the United States; there was patently more than enough money to be made at home. True, in the 1850s some southerners had dreamed of striking beyond even Texas to establish new slave states in Central America; with some such scheme in mind, the Tennessee adventurer William Walker had managed to seize control of Nicaragua in the mid-1850s.49 In 1859 a bill even went before Congress for the annexation of Cuba.50 But with the outbreak—and, more important, the outcome—of the Civil War, all such notions went into abeyance for a generation. Not until the 1880s could James G. Blaine, leader of the Republican Party and secretary of state, give voice to the idea that there might also be “openings of assured and profitable enterprise” for northern industry “in the mines of South America and the railroads of Mexico … even in mid-ocean.”51 “While the great powers of Europe are steadily enlarging their colonial domination in Asia and Africa,” he declared, it was “the especial province of this country to improve and expand its trade with the nations of America.”52 Albert J. Beveridge, senator for Indiana in the early 1890s, went further still:

  American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours…. We will establish trading posts throughout the world as distributing points for American products…. Great colonies governing themselves, flying our flag and trading with us, will grow about our posts of trade…. And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.53

  It was a commercial megalomania personified by Joseph Conrad’s character Holroyd, the bumptious East Coast plutocrat who appears in Nostromo:

  Now, what is Costaguan
a? It is the bottomless pit of 10 per cent loans and other fool investments. European capital has been flung into it with both hands for years. Not ours, though. We in this country know just about enough to keep indoors when it rains. We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to. But there’s no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s Universe. We shall be giving the word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess.54

  Yet such talk, though perhaps in a slightly less brash idiom, might equally well have been overheard in one of the London clubs. The components of economic imperialism were essentially the same on both sides of the Atlantic: a desire to reduce other people’s tariffs (hence the “Open Door”),55 a confidence that overseas investment would beget new export markets (especially important in the depression of 1893–97), but also a readiness to use political and military leverage to outwit the competition.56 Equally familiar to students of European imperialism are the ideological currents that were at work: the social Darwinism expounded by Josiah Strong, author of Expansion Under New World-Conditions (1900);57 the shrill chauvinism of the Hearst and Pulitzer papers.58