From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (44 page)

The United States' interest in Samoa also originated from local forces. Again, the Civil War played a role, the worldwide demand for raw cotton fueling a land rush on that remote South Pacific island that drew attention to its other advantages. About halfway between Hawaii and Australia, Samoa and particularly the harbor of Pago Pago—"the most perfectly landlocked harbor that exists in the Pacific Ocean"—attracted the attention of New York shipping interests. These shippers encouraged Commander Richard Meade of the Pacific squadron to claim the harbor for the United States. Meade dutifully obliged, but a contentious Senate in 1873 scrapped his treaty. Undeterred, Grant dispatched an agent to inquire about a naval base. A treaty was subsequently negotiated giving the United States the right to a base at Pago Pago and obliging it to use its good offices should Samoa encounter problems with third-party countries. Remarkably, the Senate approved this treaty in 1878, Samoa's first treaty with a foreign nation, perhaps reflecting Grant's departure from office or that body's appreciation of the growing importance of the Pacific. That treaty provided the basis for expanded U.S. involvement in the 1880s and subsequent annexation.
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The treaties with Hawaii and Samoa mark major steps in the establishment of the United States as a Pacific power. They make clear the persistence of expansionist forces during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

T
HE YEAR
1877
MARKED AN END
to the Civil War era. The political compromise worked out in March resolved the deadlocked Hayes-Tilden presidential election of 1876 by keeping the Republicans in the White House in return for restoration of home rule in the South. That year also marked the end of an epoch in U.S. foreign policy. The sections would continue to disagree on foreign policy issues, sometimes heatedly, but the
Union victory definitively settled the fundamental question of American nationhood. Postwar non-intervention in Mexico and acquiescence in the Dominion of Canada fixed the boundaries of the continental United States. The Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The major issues on which U.S. foreign policy had focused throughout much of the nineteenth century were resolved. Over the next three decades, the nation would be dramatically transformed through immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. It would take its place among the world's great powers. Continental expansion would give way to overseas expansion.

By 1882, many Americans insisted that their country must control an isthmian canal, and when Great Britain showed no willingness to scrap the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, providing for joint ownership and operation, the ever brash
New York Herald
offered its trans-Atlantic cousin some gratuitous advice. If Britain felt compelled to impose its designs on other peoples, the
Herald
opined, it should "take another turn" at the Boers, the Zulus, or the Afghans. "She need not bother with this side of the sea. We are a good enough England for this hemisphere."
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The newspaper's boast was more than a bit inflated when rendered, but by the 1890s it would approximate reality. During the so-called Gilded Age, a reunited and increasingly industrialized America lurched in fits and starts toward great power status. Absorbed in domestic problems and less concerned with external threats than at any time in their nation's history, Gilded Age Americans elevated traditional doctrines of nonentanglement to holy writ. At the same time, they were more than ever drawn to far-flung areas in search of adventure, opportunity, commerce, and "heathen" souls to be saved. Conscious of their rising power, they were more disposed to intervene in their own hemisphere and indeed beyond. During these years, such intrusions were often clumsy and counterproductive. Expansionist initiatives were frequently thwarted by a hostile Congress or junked by incoming administrations. By the turbulent 1890s, however, an increasingly powerful and anxiety-ridden United States began to assert its claims more vociferously and back them with action. Especially under the aggressive and sometimes bellicose leadership of President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State James G. Blaine, the United States between 1889 and 1893 moved decisively to strengthen its position at the expense of potential rivals in the Pacific Basin region and the Caribbean. At least for the Western Hemisphere, it was a "good enough England" indeed.

The world of the late nineteenth century was a turbulent place of rapid—and, to contemporaries, often bewildering—change. The railroad, steamship, and telegraph shrank distances dramatically, providing the means, contemporaries believed, to "erase ignorance and isolation, erode away the misunderstandings between peoples, and facilitate the getting and distribution of the new plenty."
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People, goods, and capital moved freely across international boundaries in this first rush of what is now called "globalization," connecting disparate areas through an intricate network of commerce and investments. "The world is a city!" French banking magnate Carl Meyer von Rothschild approvingly exclaimed in 1875.
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Technological advances also made the world more dangerous. The transportation revolution permitted more rapid movement of larger military forces over larger areas, enabling the Western imperial powers to administer colonial holdings from greater distances. After almost a decade of false starts and frustrations such as fires, breaks in the line, and storms at sea, the United States and Britain in 1866 were linked by cable. Such ties soon extended to continental Europe and East Asia. The cost of sending telegraph messages initially limited the cable's utility in diplomacy, but its wider use over time speeded up communications, accelerating the pace of diplomatic activity, giving diplomatic crises a new urgency, and shifting control from diplomats on the scene to Washington.
⁴
The era also brought innovations in printing that, when combined with rising literacy rates in the Western industrialized countries, produced a rapt audience for exciting events in other places, creating both opportunities for mobilization of disparate peoples and popular pressures on those who wielded power. Above all, as the American Civil War so grimly demonstrated, the harnessing of modern technology to the once genteel "art" of war created enormous and still not fully appreciated powers of destruction.

The ethos of the age stressed competition and struggle, adding to the turbulence that marked the international system. Published in 1859,
Charles Darwin's
Origin of Species
theorized that plant and animal life had evolved through an ongoing competition in which only the "fittest" flourished; the weak fell by the wayside. As popularized and applied to international politics, Darwin's ideas emphasized a struggle among nations and survival of the strongest, encouraging peoples already inclined toward the pursuit of power and wealth to compete more aggressively for the world's resources and use force to achieve their goals. "Nations, like men, will shrink and decline when they fail to grasp firmly the opportunities for success and use them to the utmost," Alabama senator John Tyler Morgan grimly proclaimed.
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Britain remained the number-one power in a still Europe-centered world. The empire on which the sun never set encompassed by century's end some twelve million square miles of territory and nearly one-fourth of the world's population, the largest the world had ever seen. London also maintained a precarious industrial and commercial supremacy, but its strengths had increasingly become its weakness. Its vast holdings and commitments compelled it to struggle merely to hang on to its existing position.
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Newcomers to the great game of international politics increasingly challenged Britain and the other traditional powers, rattling the post-1815 equilibrium. Although still weak by European standards, a newly unified Italy posed a regional danger to declining powers such as France and Austria-Hungary. The main threat to the existing order came from Germany, which emerged with stunning speed. By late century, it had surpassed France and was beginning to challenge Britain in industry and commerce. Germany was the first power to realize the military potential of the modern nation-state. Its crushing of Austria in 1866 and even more shocking defeat of France in 1871 marked its coming of age. Through artful diplomacy, the "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck, managed to expand his nation's interests without arraying the other powers against him. The Germany of Wilhelm II (1888–1918) was more aggressive and less clever, arousing growing fears in Europe, Britain, and even the United States.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the Europeans again took their competition on the road. Colonies had fallen out of fashion at midcentury, but in the eighties they once again became sought after as sources of power
and wealth, setting off a new and furious scramble for political and economic advantages in unclaimed areas across the globe. Now joined by the Germans and Italians, the British and French competed for colonies in the Middle East, North and sub-Saharan Africa, and East and Southeast Asia and even, to the alarm of Americans, made gestures in the direction of Latin America. Between 1870 and 1900, Britain added more than four million square miles to its imperial holdings, France more than three and a half million, and Germany one million. The new rush for empire further destabilized an already unsettled world.
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Even as Europe expanded into new areas, its centuries-old preeminence was under challenge from emerging powers. Russia's vast size and wealth of resources were more than offset by its administrative and political weakness, but its enormous potential made its Continental rivals uneasy. Emulating the Europeans, Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 set out to modernize, industrialize, and build a Western-style military apparatus. The Japanese remained well behind the Europeans to the turn of the century, but their remarkable advance in a short time gained notice. Their defeat of hapless China in the so-called Pigtail War of 1894–95 marked their advent as a rising power in East Asia.

No nation surpassed the United States in economic growth, and nothing was more decisive for the future of the international system than America's emergence as a world power. Powerful and prosperous, with relatively greater individual liberties, at least for white men, than any other nation, the United States after the Civil War continued to attract millions of people searching for opportunity. Before the war, most immigrants had come from northern and western Europe; after, they came mainly from southern and eastern Europe. These millions of so-called new immigrants dramatically altered the makeup of the nation, provoked rising domestic tensions, and had profound implications for the future of U.S. foreign relations. Hordes of immigrants combined with continued high birth rates to push the population of the United States to more than seventy-five million people by 1900, second only to Russia among the world's leading nations.

Consolidation proceeded apace. The South was slowly and at times painfully reintegrated—often at the expense of African Americans on whose behalf the Civil War had presumably been fought. Railroads and the telegraph bound the vast territory acquired before the Civil War. Six
new states entered the Union between 1889 and 1893, the most in any four-year period, bringing the total to forty-four.

During the last third of the nineteenth century, at the expense of Native Americans, the United States solidified its hold on the trans-Mississippi West. The discovery of gold and silver, the 1862 Homestead Act offering cheap land to settlers, and the completion of a network of western railroads sparked yet another mass migration after the Civil War. Americans settled more land between 1870 and 1900 than in all their previous history. The population of the last frontier beyond the Mississippi more than quadrupled. As before, the mass influx of white settlers sparked conflict with Indians native to the region and some tribes removed from the East. As in the East, the government sought to deal with the problem by confining the Indians to reservations on generally undesirable lands. It was left to the U.S. Army to implement a policy the fiercely independent western Indians despised and resisted by force. For nearly a quarter century, the western tribes waged relentless guerrilla warfare against the frontier army, fighting nearly one thousand mostly small engagements. As on earlier frontiers, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The army used its mobility, firepower, superior numbers, and ruthless attacks on winter encampments to cripple resistance. Even more important was the massive influx of settlers whose crops and cattle destroyed the grass and wildlife, especially the buffalo, that provided the basis of Indian society, forcing them to the reservation—or death.
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The United States' Indian policy changed markedly during this last stage of forced displacement to western reservations. At one time treated as independent nations, by the 1830s they were viewed as what Chief Justice John Marshall called "a domestic dependent nation," what amounted to protectorate status. Treaties continued to provide a measure of self-rule, but in 1871 the government stopped making agreements with the Indians, and the Supreme Court empowered Congress legally to nullify earlier commitments. After this point, Indians were treated as dependent peoples, indeed colonial subjects. George Washington and Henry Knox's well-intentioned ideal of civilization with honor gave way to an attitude of civilization or else. Rather than enticing the Indian to white man's ways with trinkets, tools, and Bibles, the government imposed civilization on them by requiring them to use the English language, accept Christianity, hold private property, and adopt subsistence agriculture. Agents were sent to the reservations to
implement the new policies. The Bill of Rights did not apply. Indians could not even leave the reservation without permission. There was a direct line between the handling of Native Americans in the Gilded Age and the acquisition of overseas empire in the 1890s. "The ties between the Indian and foreign policy . . . were not so much broken as transformed," historian Michael Hunt has concluded. "The rationale used to justify the defeat and dispossession of one people would in the future serve to sanction claims to American superiority and dominion over other people."
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