The Monroe Doctrine

Concern with defining the boundaries of the United States did not reflect a desire to limit expansion; rather, most Americans felt that quibbling and quarreling with foreign powers might prove a distraction from the great task of national development. The classic enunciation of this point of view, the completion of America’s withdrawal from Europe, was the Monroe Doctrine.

The harbor of New Archangel in Sitka, Alaska, part of the Russian empire's expansive claims to North America.

Two separate strands met in this pronouncement. The first led from Moscow to Alaska and down the Pacific coast to the Oregon country. Beginning with the explorations of Vitus Bering in 1741, the Russians had maintained an interest in fishing and fur trading along the northwest coast of North America. In 1821 the czar extended his claim south to the fifty-first parallel and forbade the ships of other powers to enter coastal waters north of that point. This announcement was disturbing.

The second strand ran from the courts of the European monarchs to Latin America. Between 1817 and 1822 practically all of the region from the Rio Grande to the southernmost tip of South America had won its independence. Spain, former master of all the area except Brazil, was too weak to win it back by force, but Austria, Prussia, France, and Russia decided at the Congress of Verona in 1822 to try to regain the area for Spain in the interests of “legitimacy.” There was talk of sending a large French army to South America. This possibility also caused grave concern in Washington.

To the Russian threat, Monroe and Secretary of State Adams responded with a terse warning: “The American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments.” This statement did not impress the Russians, but they had no intention of colonizing the region. In 1824 they signed a treaty with the United States abandoning all claims below the present southern limit of Alaska (54°40'; north latitude) and removing their restrictions on foreign shipping.

The Latin American problem was more complex. The United States was not alone in its alarm at the prospect of a revival of French or Spanish power in that region. Great Britain, having profited greatly from the breakup of the mercantilist Spanish empire by developing a thriving commerce with the new republics, had no intention of permitting a restoration of the old order. But the British monarchy preferred not to recognize the new revolutionary South American republics, for England itself was only beginning to recover from a period of social upheaval as violent as any in its history. Bad times and high food prices had combined to cause riots, conspiracies, and angry demands for parliamentary reform.

In 1823 the British foreign minister, George Canning, suggested to the American minister in London that the United States and Britain issue a joint statement opposing any French interference in South America, pledging that they themselves would never annex any part of Spain’s old empire, and saying nothing about recognition of the new republics. This proposal of joint action with the British was flattering to the United States but scarcely in its best interests. The United States had already recognized the new republics, and it had no desire to help Great Britain retain its South American trade. As Secretary Adams pointed out, to agree to the proposal would be to abandon the possibility of someday adding Cuba or any other part of Latin America to the United States. America should act independently, Adams urged: “It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly. . . than to come in as a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”

Monroe heartily endorsed Adams’s argument and decided to include a statement of American policy in his annual message to Congress in December 1823. “The American continents,” he wrote, “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.” Europe’s political system was “essentially different” from that developing in the New World, and the two should not be mixed. The United States would not interfere with existing European colonies in North or South America and would avoid involvement in strictly European affairs, but any attempt to extend European control to

PACIFIC

OCEAN

The United States, 1819 As American settlers ventured farther westward, the United States government sought to extend the nation's boundaries, negotiating with Spain for control of Florida and border sections of the Southwest, and with Britain for the Oregon Country.

Countries in the hemisphere that had already won their independence would be considered, Monroe warned, “the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States” and consequently a threat to the nation’s “peace and safety.”

This policy statement—it was not dignified with the title Monroe Doctrine until decades later— attracted little notice in Europe or Latin America and not much more at home. Obviously the United States, whose own capital had been overrun by a mere raiding party less than ten years before, could not police the entire Western Hemisphere. European statesmen dismissed Monroe’s message as “arrogant” and “blustering,” worthy only of “the most profound contempt.” Latin Americans, while appreciating the intent behind it, knew better than to count on American aid in case of attack from European powers.

Nevertheless, the principles laid down by President Monroe so perfectly expressed the wishes of the people of the United States that when the country grew powerful enough to enforce them, there was little need to alter or embellish his pronouncement. However understood at the time, the doctrine may be seen as the final stage in the evolution of American independence.

From this perspective, the famous Declaration of 1776 merely began a process of separation and self-determination. The peace treaty ending the Revolutionary War was a further step, and Washington’s Declaration of Neutrality in 1793 was another, demonstrating as it did the capacity of the United States to determine its own best interests despite the treaty of alliance with France. The removal of British troops from the northwest forts, achieved by the otherwise ignominious Jay Treaty, marked the next stage. Then the Louisiana Purchase made a further advance toward true independence by ensuring that the Mississippi River could not be closed to the commerce so vital to the development of the western territories.

The standoff War of 1812 ended any lingering British hope of regaining control of America, the Latin American revolutions further weakened colonialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the Transcontinental Treaty pushed the last European power from the path of westward expansion. Monroe’s “doctrine” was a kind of public announcement that the sovereign

United States had completed its independence and wanted nothing better than to be left alone to concentrate on its own development. Better yet, Europe should be made to allow the entire hemisphere to follow its own path.

•••-[Read the Document Monroe Doctrine at myhistorylab. com