Expansionism

Expansionism. Expansionism—the desire of nations and empires to annex lands, peoples, or resources belonging to others—is a peculiar characteristic of a world order where boundaries are subject to the ambitions of those with the power and will to challenge them.War, as the instrument of coercion in the transfer of territory, dominated the history of the ancient world as successive conquering armies changed imperial configurations in accordance with their power and political designs. In Europe, the centuries of mass migrations and the slow emergence of the modern state system established myriad political boundaries without satisfying the needs and interests of the peoples affected. Conflicting expansionist interests and the resulting instability in international life were shaped by the interactions of three great historical realities: the economic universe of agriculture and trade, with its focus on rivers, harbors, and waterways; the cultural universe of ethnicity, language, and religion, which seldom conformed to national boundaries; and the political world of nations, more artificial and malleable than the others, with boundaries arising from natural lines of demarcation or war.

America's expansionism in the nineteenth century conformed to the European pattern of territorial change. It focused on bordering regions whose acquisition would enhance the nation's security and add valuable lands, resources, or waterways. Expansionism was usually justified by precepts of Manifest Destiny, and throughout its expansionist career, the U.S. government never faced an invincible coalition committed to maintaining the status quo. Moreover, on every territorial issue the United States possessed the overwhelming strategic advantage. In its conflicts with such dominant European powers as Spain, England, and France, it always benefited from European rivalries and the weakening effects of distance. In conflicts with Indian nations, it benefited from tribal divisions, better armaments, and the sweep of European diseases that had decimated Native peoples over the preceding two centuries. The United States achieved its continental empire in North America through the combination of diplomacy with Europe and wars against Indian nations and Mexico.

Continental Expansion

. After the Revolutionary War, U.S. continental expansion began with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which at one stroke and with a cost of $15 million added 828,000 square miles to the national domain, from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains.

Thomas Jefferson's acquisition of Louisiana raised the issue of Florida's future. In 1764, Britain, then in possession of all Florida, divided the region at the Apalachicola River east of the Perdido, the historic line between French Louisiana and Spanish Florida. This created East and West Floridas. All Florida reverted to Spain in the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Spain resisted U.S. efforts to acquire both Floridas, but in 1810, Spaniards in West Florida revolted against Spanish rule, took possession of Baton Rouge, declared their independence, and requested U.S. recognition. President James Madison denied them recognition as American forces entered West Florida with orders to advance to the Perdido River. With Spanish garrisons defending Mobile and Pensacola, the Americans halted at the Pearl. When Britain protested the American occupation, Congress on 15 January 1811 passed a resolution declaring that the United States could not, “without serious inquietude, see any part of the said territory pass into the hands of a foreign power.” While the United States continued to strengthen its position in West Florida, Congress early in 1812 annexed West Florida west of the Pearl River to Louisiana and added West Florida east of the Pearl to Mississippi Territory.

East Florida's disposition awaited the continuing decline of Spanish power in North America and the shrewd diplomacy of John Quincy Adams. By 1817 Spain was too plagued with political and military disorders to maintain its authority in Florida. President James Monroe in 1818 dispatched General Andrew Jackson to fight against the Florida Indians. When Jackson captured and executed two British agents as well as two Indian chiefs, all members of the cabinet except Secretary of State Adams argued that Jackson had exceeded his instructions and committed an act of war against Spain, which required an official disavowal. Adams retorted that Jackson had discretionary powers to terminate the Indian depredations; to disavow his actions was unthinkable. Adams carried the argument. On 23 July 1818, Adams reminded the Spanish minister, Don Luis de Onís, that Spain had an obligation to maintain order in Florida. Spain, recognizing its weakness, agreed to cede East Florida to the United States if the United States would assume the claims of U.S. citizens against Spain, estimated at five million dollars. Onís then raised the issue of the still‐undefined southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Convinced of his diplomatic advantage, Adams determined to push the boundary as far to the south and west as possible. Finally, on 20 February 1819, Onís capitulated. Spain ceded Florida and accepted a boundary from Louisiana to the Pacific coast highly favorable to the United States. Two days later, the two negotiators signed the Adams‐Onís Treaty.

Meanwhile, the boundary between the United States and Canada remained unsettled. In the Convention of 1818, Adams negotiated a boundary line from the Lake of the Woods westward along the 49th parallel to the Rocky Mountains. West of the Rockies, British fur trading interests centered largely in the Columbia River valley. Britain, therefore, demanded the Columbia River as the boundary between the mountains and the Pacific. Adams, however, seeking control of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound, one of the world's finest internal waterways, demanded the extension of the 49th parallel to the Pacific. When British negotiators proved intractable, Adams accepted a ten‐year joint occupancy of the Oregon country.

Adams had delayed the final Oregon settlement until the United States could gain the diplomatic advantage. That came in the 1840s when American settlers began to occupy Oregon south of the Columbia. By late 1844, London was prepared to settle the Oregon question at the 49th parallel. This provided, in its estimation, an equitable distribution of waterways, with the United States acquiring Puget Sound and the British the magnificent harbor of Vancouver. This concession was a triumph for the congressional moderates, who favored a peaceful settlement at the 49th parallel, in contrast to the Democratic expansionists who demanded a line at 54°40′. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 established the boundary line of the 49th parallel between the Rockies and the continental shore. The line then continued to the Pacific through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Meanwhile, in 1842, the United States and Britain reached a settlement of the disputed Maine boundary. The Alaska Purchase of 1867, encompassing a region no longer desired by Russia, was, like Louisiana, largely a windfall.

Mexico's reluctance to part with its possessions in the American Southwest meant that their acquisition by the United States would require threatened or actual force. The Republic of Texas, having established its independence in 1836 with the aid of American frontiersmen, entered the Union in December 1845, its boundary with an embittered Mexico still undefined. Following Texas's annexation, the James Knox Polk administration pursued Texas's border claims to the Rio Grande. Early in 1846 Polk sent General Zachary Taylor's army into the disputed region between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande to underscore those claims. In May, the predictable clash of arms led to the U.S. declaration of war against Mexico. From the outset, Polk and Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft were determined to secure Mexico's California territory as well, from San Francisco and Monterey in the north to the magnificent bay of San Diego in the south.

American victories in Mexico and California during 1847, ending with the occupation of Mexico City in September, provided the U.S. negotiator, Nicholas P. Trist, sufficient leverage to achieve the desired territorial settlement. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the United States acquired a boundary from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific that terminated just south of San Diego Bay. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853, which added a strip of land in Arizona and New Mexico south of the original Gila River boundary, permanently fixed the borders of the United States on the North American continent.

Expansion in the Pacific and Caribbean

. In the late nineteenth century, American expansionist impulses turned to the vast Pacific region, with its seemingly limitless opportunities for profit and adventure. Rendering the Pacific region especially inviting was the presumption that the civilizations of this area could not resist the power, technology, and organizational skills of the West, especially the United States.

America's advance into the Pacific came in incremental stages. Prodded by Anson Burlingame, the first U.S. minister to China (1861–1867), the United States developed a paternalistic attitude toward that amorphous empire, eventually making its defense the keystone of U.S. policy in the Pacific. At the same time, the United States contributed much to Japan's nineteenth‐century modernization and entertained some feelings of paternalism toward that country as well. Meanwhile, in 1867, the United States claimed the Midway Islands in the north‐central Pacific. In subsequent years, Washington demonstrated a growing interest in Hawai'i, Korea, and Samoa, where it faced powerful German and Japanese competition. Despite the potential dangers, two forces accelerated America's Pacific encroachments. One was the missionary zeal to bring Christianity, order, and progress to the world's “backward” regions. To expansionist Josiah Strong, a Congregationalist minister, Christianity and civil liberty, as keys to western civilization, had contributed most to the elevation of the human race. “The Anglo‐Saxon, as the great representative of these two ideas,” Strong wrote in Our Country (1885), “is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother's keeper. Add to this the fact of his rapidly increasing strength in modern times, and we have well nigh a demonstration of his destiny.” The more tangible incentive to American expansion in the Pacific lay in the quest for markets that accompanied the rapid post–Civil War growth of American industrial and agricultural production. Alfred Thayer Mahan's influential book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), advocated the acquisition of island outposts to protect and service the country's shipping.

Except for Midway, the foundations of America's empire in the Pacific were laid during the administration of President Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893). In August 1891, Secretary of State James G. Blaine wrote to Harrison: “There are only three places that are of value enough to be taken that are not continental. One is Hawaii and the others Cuba and Porto Rico. Hawaii may come up for decision at any unexpected hour.” In February 1893, the Harrison administration negotiated an annexation treaty with Hawaiian commissioners, only to have the incoming Grover Cleveland administration reject it and condemn the Harrison administration's involvement in a tripartite protectorate over Samoa (1889) as well. Anti‐imperialists warned the nation against assuming commitments outside the Western Hemisphere. Colonial acquisitions, declared Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, would be burdens, not assets. The anti‐imperialists demonstrated their strength by defeating a second Hawaiian annexation treaty in 1897.

It required the Spanish‐American War of 1898, the result of journalistic jingoism and Americans’ concern over conditions in Cuba, to stay the power of anti‐imperialism and project the United States onto the world stage. Shortly after the outbreak of war, fought ostensibly to free Cuba from Spanish control, Commodore George Dewey's Pacific Squadron destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. This display of naval power in the Philippines, and the possibilities it opened for empire building, was welcomed by well‐placed expansionists in Washington. In June 1898, against little opposition, Congress annexed Hawai'i by joint resolution. Meanwhile, President William McKinley dispatched an army to occupy Manila, which Spanish officials surrendered to American forces on 13 August 1898. Having liberated the Philippines, the United States had either to restore them to Spain, free them, transfer them to another power, or retain them. As expansionists clamored for their retention, McKinley on 16 September instructed his peace commissioners to demand cession of the Philippines on the grounds that U.S. forces, with no thought of acquisition, had imposed upon the United States unavoidable obligations to the Filipino people. In the peace treaty signed that December in Paris, Spain conveyed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States in exchange for twenty million dollars. Critics warned the administration that it was assuming territorial commitments that the country could not defend. After a long and sometimes prophetic debate, the Senate, in February 1899, approved the treaty by a vote of fifty‐seven to twenty‐seven, one more than the necessary two‐thirds. Philippine annexation triggered a costly war with Emilio Aguinaldo's Filipino insurgents for possession of the islands. The U.S. antiguerrilla campaign soon degenerated into a no‐quarter struggle of burned villages, the torture of prisoners, and the deaths of many innocent men, women, and children. A special senate committee in 1902 heard harrowing testimony about this war, which cost the lives of some four thousand Americans and as many as twenty thousand Filipino independence fighters.

In the aftermath of the acquisition of the Philippines, anti‐imperialist opposition grew so strong that the United States embarked on no more territorial acquisition. In 1903 Cuba and Panama became protectorates, and the United States came to exert administrative control over the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Liberia, and Nicaragua during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. But, generally, twentieth‐century American expansion emphasized economic and cultural connections rather than territorial acquisition.

Thus, at the turn of the century, the United States made efforts to prevent China's dismemberment by Russia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, having Secretary of State John Hay send his Open Door notes of 1899 and 1900. These countries, in principle, accepted China's economic, political, and administrative integrity and agreed to support equal access to China's trade. With U.S. policy objectives, in China and elsewhere, now anchored to the territorial status quo and supporting an “open door” trading system, the United States was prepared to oppose, at least in principle, any territorial expansion based on coercion or any spheres of special interest. In doing so during the 1930s, it confronted new expansionist powers—Japan and Germany—and a future threatened by global war.
See also Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Agriculture: The “Golden Age” (1890s–1920); Anti‐Imperialist League; Business; Capitalism; Economic Development; Foreign Relations; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Wars; Industrialization; Insular Cases; Mexican War; Missionary Movement; Multinational Enterprises; “Open Door” Policy; Protectorates and Dependencies; Spanish Settlements in North America; Texas Republic and Annexation.

Bibliography

E.W. Lyon , Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 1759–1804, 1934.
Arthur P. Whitaker , The Mississippi Question, 1795–1803, 1934.
Albert K. Weinberg , Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History, 1935.
Ernest R. May , Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power, 1961.
Frederick Merk , Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation, 1963.
H. Wayne Morgan , America's Road to Empire: The War with Spain and Overseas Expansion, 1965.
Norman A. Graebner , Manifest Destiny, 1968.
Richard E. Welch , Imperialists and Anti‐Imperialists: The Debate over Expansionism in the 1890s, 1972.
Goran Rystad , Ambiguous Imperialism: American Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics at the Turn of the Century, 1975.
David L. Anderson , Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861–1898, 1985.
Norman A. Graebner , Foundations of American Foreign Policy: A Realist Appraisal From Franklin to McKinley, 1985.
Thomas R. Hietela , Manifest Design, 1985.

Norman A. Graebner