by James Traub
Clay enthusiastically endorsed the idea. But Adams worried that the South Americans would embroil the United States in their ongoing hostilities against Spain, with which they remained in a formal state of war. Adams had no intention of compromising American neutrality. He instructed Clay to respond that the United States would attend the conference only to discuss relations with the new nations, not between them and Spain. Moreover, the starting date would have to be postponed, since the United States could not send ministers there in time. Clay waited for a response, and the October 1 date slipped past with little notice.
In fact, Spain was far too feeble to pose any threat to the new republics; it was Spain’s weakness, not its aggression, that threatened to destabilize the region over which President Monroe had thrown the mantle of America authority. Spain exercised increasingly flimsy authority over Cuba, “the pearl of the Antilles,” and a mad global scramble was forming over its fate. It is hard to imagine that this small island off the coast of Florida could have provoked such a covetous frenzy, but Cuba’s sugar plantations made it a source of great wealth, while the port of Havana was ideally situated for the trade between the United States, South America, and Europe. In sheer tonnage, though not in value, American trade with Cuba almost equaled its trade with England. Great Britain worried that France would seize or buy the island from Spain, or that the United States would invade. The United States worried about the ambitions of England, Mexico, and Colombia. And everyone worried that either the colonists themselves or—inconceivably worse—the slaves would overturn Spanish rule and declare independence, as the Haitians had with France two decades earlier.
Plots were being hatched across the region. General Santa Ana of Guatemala was said to be preparing an expedition against Cuba. President Guadelupe Victoria of Mexico was planning to mount a Junta Promotora de la Libertad de Cuba with a group of Cuban revolutionaries—a kind of proto-Bay of Pigs. (The Mexican legislature ultimately scotched the plan.) Clay wrote to the American minister in Mexico City instructing him to admonish Mexican officials that while the United States had no desire to annex Cuba, if the island were to become a colony, “the law of its position proclaims that it should be attached to the United States.” American statesmen from the time of Jefferson had coveted Cuba, and Adams and many others assumed that no territory so close to the United States could long remain in foreign hands. The United States could enjoy a booming trade with Cuba without taking possession. It could not, however, permit a violation of the noncolonization principle at the heart of the Monroe Doctrine: existing colonies in South America could remain, but no new ones could be created. And no colony could be transferred from one master to another—unless the new master happened to be the United States. Adams’ goal was thus to preserve an extremely unstable status quo.
In May 1825, the president explained to Baron de Tuyll, the Russian minister, that “Cuba was to the United States an object of paramount commercial importance.” The United States would respect Cuba’s independence and would demand that others did likewise. The United States had already acted to restrain Mexico and Colombia. But the South American countries could not accept ongoing harassment from the pirates and freebooters who used the islands for sanctuary and whom Spain had failed to control. The baron was too subtle a diplomat to need to be told that Bolívar or others might use the argument for self-defense as a pretext for annexation or an anti-colonial war of liberation. If Spain wanted to keep the island, it had better put a stop to the attacks. The president hoped the Russian minister would ask the tsar to communicate to King Ferdinand America’s ardent wish that Cuba remain in the custody of Spain. The baron promised to convey the president’s message to his foreign minister and bowed his way out.
The administration later learned that the tsar was prepared to preserve the peace in South America, a welcome turn of events from a few years earlier, when he had plotted to outfit a force to reclaim the errant republics. Clay wrote to the foreign ministers of Mexico and Colombia to inform them that Russia had agreed to intercede with Spain. He urged “suspension for a limited time, of the sailing of the Expedition against Cuba or Porto Rico,” which was said to be even then outfitting in Colombia. The United States, deprecating any ambitions of its own, thus had a chance to play the role of international peacemaker and guarantor of South American independence.
The president and his secretary of state continued to worry about Cuba, which seemed equally threatened by revolution or by conquest. Apparently they were not convinced by whatever assurances they had received from the South American republics, for in the weeks after Adams delivered his message to Congress, he and Clay appointed a secret agent, Thomas B. Robertson, a former legislator and judge from Louisiana, to go to Cuba under the cover of repairing his health. Robertson was to be paid a ministerial salary. Clay instructed him to look into the island’s wealth and resources, its capacity to resist foreign invasion, and “the disposition of its inhabitants” in regard to independence or annexation by one of the republics. Robertson ultimately declined to go, and a year later Clay appointed Daniel P. Cook, the congressman who had delivered Illinois to Adams despite tremendous pressure from the Jacksonites. The reward for loyalty turned out to be a poisoned chalice: Cook fell sick in Cuba, returned home within a month, and died soon thereafter.
Nevertheless, the diminishing prospect of war in Cuba in 1825 may have changed Adams’ lukewarm feelings about the Pan-American Congress. He now had good reason to hope it would not be a war parley and would not place the United States between South America and Europe. In November, the Colombian foreign minister sent a formal invitation to the conference that allayed the administration’s concerns and made the event far easier to sell to Congress and the American people. The United States would not be asked to discuss any issue that might compromise its neutrality, but rather questions of international law, the formulation of an American alliance to enforce the anti-colonial principle, the abolition of the slave trade, and the concerting of continental policy toward Haiti. These last two matters posed a potential problem for the administration, but the first two were greatly to the president’s liking. Adams agreed that the United States would attend.
In his message to Congress, Adams spoke of a new treaty of commerce and navigation just then being concluded with Colombia, and he noted that his administration hoped to conclude such treaties with each of the republics. Any pact, he said, would be based on the core principles of reciprocity and of most-favored nation status, which is to say that US exports would not be subject to more onerous duties than any other trading partner. The republics had liberated themselves from “the thralldom of colonizing monopolies and exclusions” despite the resistance of “certain parts of Europe to the acknowledgment of the Southern American republics as independent states.” Having thus established the true independence of the republics, Adams turned to the invitation to the Pan-American Congress, which, he said, the United States had agreed to attend so far as it was compatible with the supreme principle of neutrality.
The Pan-American Congress was shaping up to be the most popular initiative of Adams’ young presidency. Many newspapers had campaigned for American attendance and extolled the prospect of American leadership of a community of independent republics. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, an avowed opponent of US attendance, conceded that the project had “captivated all young and ardent imaginations.” The invitation had been tendered to the United States with great deference to its senior status and great sensitivity to its domestic political concerns. It felt like an acknowledgment that the United States, once the most junior among nations, had in the space of a few decades reached a threshold of moral and political leadership.
And yet the Pan-American Congress was to be Adams’ Waterloo. In his first year in office, Adams had given his opponents no reason to fear him and plenty of evidence that he was a hapless politician, a noble Roman who disdained politics, a scholar-president who submitted a schoolboy’s thesis to Congress rather than
a practical program. He had entered as a weak president elected without a majority, dogged by allegation of a “corrupt bargain.” But by proposing so little, he had given the opposition few chances to marshal its forces against him. Even his ambitious domestic program could be neutralized by nothing more than inaction. But the Pan-American Congress was different. He had agreed to attend without consulting Congress, save after the fact. The son of America’s alleged monarch-president was both disdaining the legislative branch and contracting foreign alliances in violation of the bar laid down by George Washington. And even if he wasn’t, it could certainly be made to appear that he was.
The ever-resourceful Martin Van Buren, now a New York senator, recognized that Adams had provided “the first tangible point for the opposition,” as he would later write. In early January Van Buren paid a visit to Vice President Calhoun at the latter’s Georgetown home. Calhoun had held himself aloof from the administration. The South had decisively repudiated Adams; Calhoun could have no political future at the side of this New England ex-Federalist. And Calhoun had recoiled in disgust at the election’s denouement: what Van Buren said through crocodile tears the vice president actually felt. The deal between Adams and Clay, he had told a correspondent, was “the most dangerous stab, which the liberty of the country has ever received.” He would not side with them. “I am with the people,” he declared grandly, “and shall remain so.” By the time Van Buren visited, Adams and Calhoun, who had sought one another out for long talks about first principles, who had admired one another despite profound disagreements, had been driven into opposite corners.
Van Buren and Calhoun agreed that American attendance at the Panama conference constituted a usurpation of congressional prerogative—an early example of Congress’ fight for an equal status with the president on foreign affairs. Calhoun would instruct his supporters to do what they could to block the president’s plans. Nothing was said between the two men of larger political prospects, but both understood that by trying to thwart the president on so deeply important an issue Calhoun was throwing in his lot with the administration’s Jacksonian rivals. Van Buren then met with other opposition leaders to plot out strategy. They could trip up the president in the House, which had to appropriate funds for the delegation, or in the Senate, which had to confirm the nominated ministers. They decided to start with the Senate, where Vice President Calhoun had appointed committee chairmen with an eye to helping his own cause rather than that of the president. In mid-January the Foreign Relations Committee issued a report asserting that Adams ought to have consulted with Congress beforehand, questioning the necessity of American participation in the conference, and accusing the president of abandoning the neutrality that was the cornerstone of American foreign policy. Adams had hoped to send his ministers by the end of the month; now, instead, he would have to fight to send them at all. It is often asserted that in a less fractious age politics stopped “at the water’s edge.” It was rarely so, and certainly not in 1825.
The Foreign Relations Committee was dominated by figures from the Deep South, including Littleton Tazewell of Virginia and Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina. For them, and for many others who led the debate against Panama, the underlying issue was not South America but slavery. Many were incensed that the United States would countenance discussion of the slave trade or Haiti. The black republic was “a firebrand in the Southern half of our Union,” Thomas Hart Benton would later write. To receive ministers from the island would “give to their fellow blacks in the United States proof in hand of the honours which await, for a like successful effort on their part.” On this issue, as on Indian removal and so many other apparently unrelated policies, the immense outlines of the South’s slave economy could be dimly made out like a mountain shrouded in fog.
Opposition members now further clogged the debate with resolutions defending the alleged privileges of the legislative branch. They demanded that the president turn over the diplomatic correspondence with the Latin republics—correspondence that was by tradition secret. Adams refused and was vexed enough to say that he did not trust their motives for asking. Van Buren introduced a resolution stating, with no constitutional evidence, that the power of creating “new political associations,” such as Adams proposed to do, was reserved for the states. Another resolution specifically accused Adams of upsetting the neutral principles laid down by Washington. The debate consumed six more precious weeks. When it finally came time to vote, on March 14, Adams was able to muster a majority, with his supporters rejecting the committee report 24 to 19, as well as the various resolutions. But the opposition had shown its teeth. Southerners and pro-slavery men of the west made up most of the opposition. Adams’ supporters showed little of the passion or tenacity of his rivals.
The issue now moved to the House, and Adams chose this opportunity to fully clarify his views on the congress. He began by acknowledging that the idea had not, after all, originated with the United States, a sore point with critics, but, he noted in a poetic turn of phrase, that it had arisen from the urgent condition of new states “struggling for independence and, as it were, quickening into life.” The invitation had been extended with a due regard for America’s own national interests. To have responded to such an invitation with “a cold repulse” would have contradicted “the warm interest in their welfare with which the people and Government of the Union had hitherto gone hand in hand through the whole progress of the revolution.” Here was the eager language of Henry Clay—of hemispheric fraternity—rather than Adams’ own usual cautious reserve.
Adams went on to say that the congress would dwell on “objects of the highest importance” to mankind as well as to the interests of the United States. It was scarcely imaginable that such an opportunity would offer itself again. The congress could serve as the stage on which new principles of international law were enacted. As secretary of state, Adams had proposed a treaty to outlaw privateering. Old Europe had shown no interest. But the new world might well embrace such a visionary plan. In the Monroe Doctrine the United States had declared that no new colonies would be permitted in the Americas; the Congress might issue a “joint declaration” of the anti-colonial principle signed by all the American states. American principles might not yet become universal ones, but they could become hemispheric ones.
Adams briefly referred to the neuralgic issues of the slave trade and Haiti, promising that American ministers would not deviate from the policy of nonrecognition of the island. He argued that the congress would give the United States the chance to prevent any planned invasion of Cuba or Puerto Rico and to “preserve the existing state of things.” He reiterated that the assembly would be merely “diplomatic and not legislative,” that nothing agreed there would be binding on the United States absent congressional approval. It was an argument that prefigured the one Woodrow Wilson would make on behalf of the League of Nations, for both men sought to overcome the fear that the United States would surrender a portion of its sovereignty to a multinational body.
And, like Wilson a century later, Adams had to confront the unquestioning faith in Washington’s Farewell Address. Imprudent as always when faced with the chance to sharpen a categorical distinction, Adams asserted that the Pan-American Congress might well “change the policy . . . of avoiding all entangling alliances and all unnecessary foreign connections.” This was heresy in many quarters; it was the equivalent in foreign policy of Adams’ assertion that in domestic affairs “liberty is power.” But, Adams went on, Americans no longer lived in Washington’s world. Then the United States had been surrounded by European colonies that might as well have occupied “another planet.” Now its neighbors were sovereign states with which the United States had growing commercial and diplomatic relations. The United States was “entangled” with them, willy-nilly. Adams also noted that since Washington’s time “our wealth, our territorial extension, our power—physical and moral—have nearly trebled.” Washington had declared that “the period was not far distant whe
n we can defy material injury from external annoyance.” That period, Adams suggested, had now arrived. The president was careful to add that Washington himself would view the Panama congress as consistent with his own principles, but no one could miss the assertion that American had reached a new stage in its relations with the world.
In foreign policy, as in domestic affairs, Adams had signaled a decisive break with the past. And yet his decidedly old-fashioned sense of his role as a political leader meant that he was unable or unwilling to muster support in the face of well-organized opposition. Adams had, yet again, delivered himself into the hands of his rivals. In the immediate aftermath of his message, the ongoing debate produced a level of invective in the Congress rarely heard before, which is saying a great deal. John Branch of North Carolina veered from his exegesis of the constitutional obligation to seek the advice and consent of the Senate to declare that the president “came into office in opposition to three-fourths of the American people” and “by the total disregard of the right of instruction, the basis of Republic.” But Branch was a mere bonfire compared to the roaring inferno that was John Randolph, senator from South Carolina.
Randolph had been haunting the Adams family for a generation and more. He had jeered at the first President Adams as a monarchist and a despot, the fountainhead of “the House of Stuart.” Of ancient Virginia stock, Randolph had broken with Jefferson, a distant cousin, whom he considered far too compromising with the Federalists, and become a leader of a purist faction known as the Tertium Quids (or “third thing,” neither Federalist nor Republican). Randolph was a dandy, a self-conscious throwback who had been known to show up in Congress with riding clothes and a whip. His speeches made for famous, if exhausting, theater; he is credited with inventing the filibuster. Adams considered him a lunatic, a view shared by many congressmen of all political persuasions. But he was not a man to be underestimated.
