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

by Conrad Black

  Madison, true to his nature and having learned his lesson, recommended retention of an army of 20,000, and most of the navy that had been built up, but the Congress reverted to its former condition, cut the army to 10,000, sold gunboats, and returned the Great Lakes to an unarmed state. Madison did have the pleasure of sending Captain Stephen Decatur to give the Dey of Algiers, and his analogues in Tunis and Tripoli, another good thrashing at sea with a 10-ship squadron, extracting concessions and return of hostages and tribute and reparations from the Barbary leaders and ending this problem (and legitimizing after all the wording of the Marine Corps anthem). A complete restoration of normal and favorable trade terms with Britain was agreed in a commercial convention in July 1816.

  In one of the last major initiatives of his administration, Madison again sounded a little like his Federalist predecessors in supporting the rechartering of a Bank of the United States. This was recommended by the Treasury secretary, Alexander J. Dallas, as necessary to patch back together the chaotic state of the country’s finances after the war with Britain. A very weak measure setting up a bank that would be severely circumscribed was passed by the Congress but vetoed by Madison. Then the men who would lead the Congress for the next 35 years, despite intermittent dalliances in the administration (all three would be secretaries of state)—John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster—joined forces and put through a serious bill. Calhoun would speak for the South, Clay for the West and Midwest, and Webster for New England. Calhoun was a Democrat, as the Democratic-Republicans were about to be called officially, and the other two would emerge as Whigs, when the Federalists metamorphosed into that party, and their relations with each other were never especially warm. But they played an immense role, greater than any of the presidents between Jackson and Lincoln, except Polk, in the long denouement of the related problems of slavery and states’ rights. The new bank would have $35 million of authorized capital, one-fifth posted by the federal government, which would name five of the 25 directors. The bank would receive federal government deposits and not pay interest on them, and in other respects resembled Hamilton’s original bank. It would be a normative and stabilizing influence, controlling the money supply and maintaining reasonable consistency of credit in the country, through, eventually, 25 branches. The bank was one of Madison’s principal presidential achievements.

  In his very last material act as president, Madison vetoed a bill for federal construction of roads and canals that Calhoun, congressional leader of the South, had put forward, to be financed from the dividends of the Bank of the U.S. This was a remarkable acceptance by Calhoun of Hamilton’s constitutional justification of implied powers, and showed also how far Calhoun would move, from advocating a generous interpretation of the federal government’s powers to enact a measure for national unity and closer union, to where he would end his career, 35 years ahead. Madison remained true to his own concepts of the Constitution, imposing his veto with the unique authority of the principal draftsman.

  The president honored the Washington and Jefferson tradition and declined to seek a third term. He would leave office a respected president, moderately popular for his unpretentious nature, thought slightly unserious after the British descent upon Washington, and remembered by the knowledgeable for his irreplaceable contributions to the Constitution.

  7. JAMES MONROE AS PRESIDENT

  Having held almost every other post, including senator, governor, minister to France and to Britain, and secretary of state and of war, James Monroe was almost a case of the office seeking the man. There was a challenge from the former minister to France, war secretary and current Treasury secretary William H. Crawford of Georgia, as a younger man (44, compared with Monroe’s 58) and not a Virginian, unlike Monroe and three of the four presidents to date. The House caucus of the Democratic-Republicans chose the nominee and Monroe won this test 65 to 54. Vice President Gerry had died in office, and Monroe and his colleagues appeased New York with the selection for that position of that state’s governor, Daniel D. (an improvised initial that did not stand for anything) Tompkins. Rufus King, respected political veteran and former vice presidential candidate, was nominated by the Federalists, who were no longer a coherent party, and did not offer a vice presidential candidate.

  The result was a foregone conclusion; Monroe won 183 electoral votes to 34 for King, who took only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. The Federalists vanished from the scene, in, as a Boston newspaper would describe it as Monroe toured New England, “an era of good feeling.” Monroe, too, had come a long way having opposed the Constitution as too centralist, he now seemed more a follower of the first Virginian president than of the next two. In his inaugural address, he called for armed forces adequate to protect the nation’s interests and a policy that would favor manufacturing. He had a strong administration, with Tompkins, John Quincy Adams as secretary of state, Crawford at the Treasury, John C. Calhoun at the War Department, and Richard Rush as attorney general. More talented than any cabinet since Washington’s first administration, it more resembled such British coalitions as Pelham and Newcastle’s “broad-bottom” government of 1744–1754, or Grenville and Fox’s “government of all the talents” of 1806.

  The long process of building a close Anglo-American relationship took its first step with what was called the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817, though it had been entirely agreed between Monroe and Castlereagh. It substantially disarmed the Great Lakes (which the Congress had unilaterally done anyway). It was also implicit that the same principle would govern the land frontier between the United States and Canada. This agreement would be supplemented by the Convention of 1818, signed for the United States again by Richard Rush, then minister in London, and by Albert Gallatin, now the minister in Paris. This convention extended the border along the 49th parallel from Lake of the Woods (northern Minnesota) to the Rocky Mountains, and agreed to negotiate the border through the Rockies to the Pacific in 10 years, in which time citizens of both signatory countries could move freely in the Far Pacific territory. The United States also obtained modest fishing concessions in Newfoundland waters.

  The fierce and Anglophobic Andrew Jackson was placed in charge of American forces on the Georgia-Florida border, across which many runaway slaves and hostile Indians had fled. There were some incidents and Jackson’s standing orders were to clear the area between the U.S. border and the Spanish forts. Jackson wrote to President Monroe that if he were advised, through “channels . . . that possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States . . . in sixty days it will be accomplished.” He received no reply, which for as bellicose an American expansionist as Jackson was all the encouragement he needed to invade East Florida in April 1818.

  He captured Pensacola in May and captured two English traders whom he accused of fomenting slave and Indian and even Spanish action against the United States (Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister). Jackson hanged the first and shot the second. British and official American opinion condemned Jackson; Clay proposed censure in the House, and the war and Treasury secretaries, Calhoun and Crawford, agreed. The secretary of state, the very able John Quincy Adams, was negotiating with the Spanish for control of Florida. Jackson’s antics considerably strengthened his bargaining position and he entirely approved Jackson’s action. Public opinion rose up in support of the general, and neither Monroe nor the Congress took any action against him. Thus reinforced, Adams negotiated the cession to the U.S. of all Florida, and the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Adams, son of the former president, had studied in France and the Netherlands, was a former senator, had served in diplomatic capacities as a teenager, and had served all the previous presidents, as minister in the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain. He had been the senior diplomat in the Ghent peace delegation and would prove one of the most capable secretaries of state in American history.

  8. THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

  At the end of 1819, there were 22 states in the Union, 11
free and 11 slave, with Maine and Missouri having applied for admission. The slave states, apart from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, were Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The free states, apart from those in the original 13, were Vermont, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The northern states were growing more quickly than the southern states, as that was where most immigrants arrived, and Europeans, the source of most immigration, did not want to move to a semi-tropical climate, and were unfamiliar with dealing with people of African origin. Most Americans were in free states, and despite the three-fifths rule, the congressional delegations of the free states were substantially larger than those of the South. When amendments were proposed prohibiting slavery in the Missouri Territory, which was a large part of the Louisiana Purchase, there was very spirited reaction from southerners, and a series of heated debates and close votes, as the strains on a country half free and half slave, with a constitutional arrangement for favoring slave states in congressional delegations and presidential and vice presidential electoral votes, began, as was widely foreseen, to tear at national unity. After acrimonious and confused debate for nearly four months, a compromise proposed by Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois was adopted. Maine and Missouri were admitted as states, Maine as a free state and Missouri without restriction on slavery, and the balance of the Louisiana Territory west of Missouri and north of the line 36°30 (the continuation of the Arkansas-Missouri border) would not be a slave-holding area.

  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.”70 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.”71 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 extre
mely 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.