From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (37 page)

The notorious William Walker put Borland to shame. Also a former physician—and lawyer, journalist and gold rusher—the hundred-pound "grey-eyed man of destiny" plunged headlong into the maelstrom of Nicaraguan politics. Attaching himself to the faction out of power, he and a band of adventurers he called "the Immortals" landed in Nicaragua in June 1855, imposed peace on the group holding power, and established a puppet government giving Walker control. Walker subsequently "won" the presidency through sham elections, reinstituted slavery, and established English as a second language. An overt racist who dismissed the local elite as "drivelers," he dreamed of creating a Central American union, based on slavery and run by white men, with himself as head and closely tied to the southern states. In time, he overextended himself. Otherwise unable to cooperate, the Central American nations banded together in what is still proudly called the "National War" to throw out the Yankee intruder. They received crucial support from Vanderbilt, whose interests Walker had challenged, and from the British, who saw him as an instrument of U.S. designs. Walker managed to escape and returned to New Orleans a hero. The U.S. Navy foiled a second expedition in 1859. The following year, on yet a third try to regain power, he was captured in Honduras, tried, and executed.
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United States intervention in Central America had significant results. No new territory was annexed, but U.S. interests and involvement expanded significantly. The nation acquired rights to the major canal routes, increased its political influence, and established a naval presence. North American companies controlled the existing routes across the isthmus. Most important, as the United States established its preeminence,
Britain began to withdraw. Preoccupied with events in Europe, officials refused, as Lord John Russell put it, to permit the "miserable States in Central America" to provoke a needless war. They may even have developed a certain admiration for their offspring as an imperialist "chip off the old block."
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They rationalized that U.S. control might be expedient politically and profitable economically. Britain thus initiated a gradual withdrawal from a region it had once dominated.
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For Central Americans, U.S. intrusion was at best a mixed blessing. The United States contributed to their economic development. Central Americans on occasion exploited the U.S. presence to their advantage. But North American racism and expansionism left a bitter legacy. Following the Walker affair, Costa Rica and Nicaragua declared themselves under the protection of Britain, France, and Sardinia against the "barbarians of the United States."
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While Walker has remained an object of amusement for later generations of Americans, and has even been hailed as a "valiant idealist," his intervention in Nicaragua remains a major event in Central American history, a stark symbol of the ambitions and aggressiveness of the colossus to the north.
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The Buchanan presidency typifies the contradictions of U.S. expansionism in the 1850s. An experienced and successful diplomat, Buchanan, like his mentor Polk, was his own secretary of state. Indecisive and even timid in dealing with the nation's increasingly urgent domestic problems, he was belligerent with other nations and pursued numerous expansionist schemes. Like Polk, he looked John Bull straight in the eye. He defended Walker beyond the point of propriety. He dispatched a naval force of nineteen ships to avenge tiny Paraguay's killing of a single U.S. seaman. To secure payment for dubious financial claims against Mexico, he asked Congress for authority to detach its northern provinces and then to invade. He vigorously pursued the acquisition of Cuba. Anticipating twentieth-century chief executives, he sought and nearly secured from Congress a resolution giving him a blank check to use military force in Latin America. Caught up in the secession crisis, a preoccupied Congress wisely rejected Buchanan's wilder schemes, sealing the fate of expansion.
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D
URING THE AGE OF
M
ANIFEST
D
ESTINY
, the United States greatly expanded its territory and acquired vast riches in natural resources, swelling national pride and laying the foundation for its future status as the world's greatest power. Popular myth to the contrary, foreign policy was central to the national experience in the antebellum era. Even in the 1850s, when little territory was added, Americans continued to operate across the globe. The United States expanded its involvement and interests in places like East Asia and Central America.

In terms of solving the nation's immediate problems, expansion did not live up to its billing. The Asian market did not meet expectations and did not absorb the nation's agricultural surplus. Commercial and territorial expansion did not head off industrialization and urbanization, as the Jeffersonians had hoped. The expansionism of the 1850s had generally negative results. To be sure, U.S. government aggressiveness, along with the filibusters, helped spur British withdrawal from Central America, a region deemed increasingly important to the United States. The "Yankees" were such "ingenious Rogues," Prime Minister Lord Palmerston complained, that they would get their way in Central America through the "indirect agency" of people like Walker—"Texas all over again." British withdrawal in turn ensured eventual U.S. dominance of the region. On the other hand, the filibuster expeditions provoked staunch opposition in Mexico and Cuba to the sale of territory to the United States. Along with relentless U.S. efforts to purchase territory to the south, the filibusters aroused fear and hatred of the United States in Central and indeed South America. Even Chileans feared that the "Yankee nation" was awaiting a chance to "devour them." Some Latins turned to Europe for protection against their rapacious northern neighbor. At least for the short term, filibustering slowed U.S. commercial expansion in Central America.
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Most important, expansion exacerbated rather than solved the nation's most urgent problem. Southern efforts to preserve their way of life through expansion aroused growing opposition in the North. Northern frustration of their designs sapped southern confidence in their ability to survive within the federal union, sparking secessionist sentiment. The emergence by 1856 of the Republican Party, a political alignment committed to stopping the expansion of slavery, suggested the extent to which Manifest Destiny had become a sectional issue. Rejection by leaders on both sides of the 1860 Crittenden Compromise, which would have extended
the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific—and possibly beyond—made clear the issue could not be resolved. Foreign policy was important to the calculations on each side. Southerners feared their loss of control of U.S. foreign policy doomed them to inferior status in the Union. For Republicans, on the other hand, slavery prevented the United States from achieving its higher global mission. It "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world," Abraham Lincoln asserted in 1854; it "enables the enemies of free institutions to taunt us as hypocrites."
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The irrepressible conflict over expansion and slavery led straight to Fort Sumter. The nation had swallowed Emerson's dose of arsenic.

The American Civil War was an event of great international importance.
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Union and Confederate leaders recognized that their success or failure might swing on actions taken or not taken by the European great powers. European leaders, in turn, saw enticing opportunities and grave threats in the conflagration across the Atlantic. For Europeans, the Civil War also had momentous ideological implications. Conservatives welcomed the breakup of the Union, which some had long predicted, hoping that it would eliminate the menace of U.S.-style democracy throughout the world. Along with President Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, liberals viewed the Union as the "last best hope of earth," agreeing that upon its survival hinged the future of republicanism for "the whole family of man."
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The triumph of the Union, as Lincoln seems to have understood, ensured that within a short time the United States would emerge as a major world power.

The Civil War was part of a worldwide mid-nineteenth-century flowering of nation-building, a broader effort on the part of peoples across the globe to affirm, often through force of arms, their national identity. In Europe, Hungarians and Poles rose up in unsuccessful revolts against Austria and Russia. Modern nations took shape in Italy and Germany through military conquest. After a short war, the Swiss formed a federal union binding together cantons previously divided by religion. The Taiping "rebellion" raged for years in China at gruesome cost; the 1868 Meiji Restoration converted Japan from a feudal entity into a modern nation-state. The quest for
national identity extended to North America. With indirect U.S. support, Mexicans frustrated France's attempt to reestablish an American empire. The threat of U.S. annexation during the Civil War forced Britain to shore up Canada's vulnerability, leading in 1867 to creation of a united nation under a federal constitution with a centralized government.

The war also had enormous global implications. In the United States before 1861, union was an incomplete concept, especially in the South. The Civil War can thus be seen as an effort to establish a nation still not completely formed. Like similar struggles elsewhere, this was accomplished by force of arms. The Union victory also marked a turning of the tide internationally in favor of nationalism, solidifying a worldwide trend toward nation-states. More important, the Civil War fused nationalism with liberalism, giving significant moral purpose to nationalism, assuring that popular government could survive, and renewing hope among liberals across the world.
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The steamship, telegraph, and trade brought nations closer at the same time nationalism was highlighting differences and provoking conflict. Other nations closely watched the U.S. internal struggle. Americans were more aware of events elsewhere because of increased immigration, faster and cheaper communication, growing literacy, and mass-circulation newspapers.
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Still clinging to dreams of imperial glory in the Western Hemisphere, Europeans attempted to exploit America's absorption in its domestic struggles. Spain invaded Santo Domingo in March 1861. In the spring of 1863, France's Napoleon III sent troops into Mexico. Europe itself was wracked with conflict during these years, however, putting a premium on caution in its handling of the American war. Crises erupted in 1862 from the Italian
Risorgimento
and Austria's conflict with Prussia. In 1863, the Polish rebellion against Russia threatened a general European war. By dividing the great powers against each other, these events rendered less likely any form of intervention in U.S. affairs. By increasing problems for France in Europe, German and Italian unification influenced Napoleon's eventual withdrawal from Mexico.
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For both Union and Confederacy, diplomacy was vital. Should the Europeans recognize the belligerency and eventually the independence of the South, offer economic and military aid, perhaps even send military forces, they could ensure its survival and ultimate independence. Their neutrality and refusal to intervene, on the other hand, would help the Union, perhaps even seal Confederate doom. Americans on both sides remembered, in this regard, that French intervention in 1778 had ensured the success of their revolution.
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Confederate diplomacy was founded on naïveté and illusion. Facing a huge disadvantage in such essential sinews of war as population, natural resources, and industrial capacity, the South might have looked abroad to make up the deficiency. In fact, southerners were strangely ambivalent toward the outside world. They believed themselves sophisticated and in touch with European elites. But they were quite out of tune with the prevailing currents of liberal nationalism in Europe.
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Certain of their rectitude and invincibility, they badly misread European attitudes toward their cause and their own need for outside assistance. Especially in the Confederacy's first years, they undervalued the importance of diplomacy. President Jefferson Davis appointed incompetents to the vital position of secretary of state. He and his advisers did not actively seek foreign recognition and aid. If recognition was not forthcoming, some leaders arrogantly reasoned, so what? The "sovereign State of Mississippi can do a great deal better without England than England can do without her," its governor boldly—and recklessly—proclaimed.
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For years, southerners had fancied that they held a trump card. King Cotton, it was called, and it was based on the fundamental—and ultimately flawed—assumption that Europe in general and Britain in particular so depended on southern cotton that they had to ensure its continued import. In theory, at least, it made sense. When the Civil War broke out, about one-fifth of the population of Great Britain made a living from the manufacture of cotton, 80 percent of which came from the American South. France imported 90 percent of its cotton from the South; its textile factories employed 250,000 people. Should the cotton supply be cut off, the theory went, the European powers would be reduced to economic ruin and threatened with revolution. Southerners thus concluded that if
the Union attempted a blockade, which they fully anticipated, Britain and France would have to intervene to ensure their own survival. To underscore the point, they burned some 2.5 million bales at the start of the war.
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The architect of Union diplomatic strategy and the individual mainly responsible for its implementation was Secretary of State William Henry Seward. Seward was in many ways a strange person: "I am an enigma even to myself," he once remarked. A man of enormous energy, sloppy in appearance, he was also a genial host, a lover of fine cigars and brandy, a great raconteur, a person of such magnetism, Henry Adams once said, that he could "charm a cow to statesmanship." A man of considerable vision and sophistication, he was also earthy and a total political animal. He was brash, impulsive, and hot-tempered, given to bluster and threats. But he was most dangerous, associates said, "when he pretends to agree a good deal with you."
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