Expansionism

Expansionism is endemic to an unfinished world of sovereign states in which some nations possess the power and will to challenge the global distribution of land, resources, or people. Centuries of mass migrations and state‐building created the modern state system without satisfying the needs and interests of all its members. The resulting instability in international life took its precise form from the existence of three worlds superimposed on one another. One consists of the economic universe of plains, valleys, rivers, harbors, and waterways—elements that determined the nature, quality, and performance of national economic activity. A second is the world of people, separated by ethnicity, language, and religion into unique cultures that seldom conform to national boundaries. The third comprises the world of nations, more artificial and malleable than the others, with boundaries created over time by natural lines of demarcation or by war.

Leaders of countries whose geographic, demographic, or political status fails to coincide with their ambition, perceived interests, and power can balance the two sets of factors in only one way: through the exertion of force. Highly dissatisfied nations may forego territorial adjustment through war by reason of prudence or morality. When states unleash force in quest of land or ethnic amalgamation, they succeed or fail according to the magnitude of the reaction. For the United States, its expansionist efforts largely preceded twentieth‐century precepts of self‐determination and peaceful change that rendered resorts to force immoral, and thus unacceptable. The United States, throughout its expansionist career, never faced an invincible coalition committed to blocking its expansion and defending the status quo.

American expansionism in the nineteenth century focused on bordering regions whose acquisition would enhance its security and broaden its economic base. Except for its conquest of Indian lands and its war with Mexico, the United States achieved its continental empire mainly through diplomacy. Europe's declining role in distant North America provided the United States sufficient leverage in its confrontations to assure highly beneficial boundary settlements. France, finding its claims to the vast Louisiana Territory relatively worthless, sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803 for $15 million. Spain revealed its weakening position in North America by ceding Florida and agreeing, in the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, to a satisfactory boundary from Louisiana to the Pacific Coast. Britain defined its Canadian boundary with the United States in its acceptance of the 49th parallel from the Great Lakes to the Rockies in 1818; the Maine boundary settlement in 1842; and, in 1846, the line of 49 between the Rockies and the continental shore, then continuing on to the Pacific through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. California and the Southwest were acquired in 1848, in the war with Mexico. Alaska, no longer desired by Russia, was, like Louisiana, largely a windfall.

Expansionists in the 1840s proclaimed the doctrine of “manifest destiny” to rationalize American expansion as the mere fulfillment of the country's destiny. The concept of destiny, in discounting the role of force in the country's expansion, rested on the presumed superiority and appeal of American institutions. Notions of destiny might assuage the doubts of those who abhorred force, but expansion itself required more than convictions of political and cultural superiority. Manifest destiny neglected totally questions of power or diplomacy. It embodied no need to define ends. The hand of destiny, in promoting the extension of freedom, culture, and institutions, recognized no bounds. Quite typically, journalist John L. O'sullivan, who is credited with coining the phrase, observed in the New York Morning News on 27 December 1845 that it had become “our manifest destiny to occupy and to possess the whole Continent which Providence has given us…”

American expansion across the continent rested not on notions of destiny but on clearly conceived national policies, based on power and diplomacy, attached to specific territorial objectives. In the 1840s, the Polk administration pursued Texas's claims to the Rio Grande and businesses' desire for seaports on the Pacific Ocean, objectives achieved through the Mexican War. In Oregon, the U.S. goal was the magnificent harbor of Puget Sound, with access to the Pacific through Juan de Fuca Strait. The American demand for a settlement along the 49th parallel assured access to the desired waterways. U.S. purposes in California were no less precise than those in Oregon: the harbors of San Francisco and San Diego. These objectives Polk embodied in his war aims and achieved in the Treaty of Guadalupe‐Hidalgo (1848).

American expansionism entered the vast world of the Pacific in the late nineteenth century. The region seemed to offer limitless opportunities for the expansion of Christianity and civil liberty, and also for the acquisition of new markets to complement the impressive growth of American industrial and agricultural production after the American Civil War. What rendered the Pacific region especially inviting was the presumption that its civilizations could not resist the power, technology, and organizational skills of the Western world. Unlike other imperial powers, the United States did not create its Pacific empire by conquering previously independent peoples. Instead, it exploited opportunities for economic and territorial expansion already created by internal instabilities and weaknesses in regions regarded as strategically and economically important. Or it overthrew Spanish colonialism. After 1860, the application of American will in the Far East appeared so effortless that it ultimately led to expanded objectives, illusions of omnipotence, and wars exorbitantly expensive.

America's expansion in the Pacific advanced in spurts. By the early 1890s, it had touched China, Japan, Midway, Hawaii, Korea, and Samoa. In February 1893, the Harrison administration negotiated an annexation treaty with Hawaiian commissioners, only to have the incoming Cleveland administration reject it and condemn the previous administration's involvement in Samoa as well. The anti‐imperialists demonstrated their dominance by defeating a second Hawaiian annexation treaty in 1897. It required the Spanish‐American War, in April 1898, to break 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 Spain, Commodore George Dewey's Pacific Squadron destroyed the Spanish Fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay in the Spanish Philippines. This sudden display of naval power in the remote Pacific, and the possibilities it opened for empire‐building, were not lost on a group of well‐placed expansionists in Washington. During June 1898, Congress annexed Hawaii by joint resolution against little opposition. Meanwhile, President William McKinley dispatched an army to take control of Manila. On 13 August, Spanish officials surrendered the city to American forces. The decision to destroy Spanish power in the Philippines closed every easy avenue of escape. Having liberated the islands, the United States had either to restore them to Spain, free them, transfer them to another power, or retain them. Expansionists that summer clamored for their retention. On 16 September, McKinley instructed his peace commission that U.S. forces, with no thought of acquisition, had brought duties and obligations to the Filipinos that the country could not ignore. During December, the peace commission in Paris signed a treaty that conveyed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States in exchange for $20 million. The Senate, in February 1899, approved the treaty by a vote of 57 to 27, one more than the necessary two‐thirds. Philippine annexation set off a bitter, costly war with Emilio Aguinaldo's Filipino insurgents for possession of the islands. The American antiguerrilla campaign soon degenerated into a no‐quarter struggle of burned villages and the deaths of innocent men, women, and children. At the end, the acquisition of the Philippines demanded a heavy price.

Still, the illusion of easy success received an even more powerful demonstration in the U.S. effort to save China from dismemberment by Russia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Acceding to the American “open door” notes of 1899 and 1900, those countries accepted, in principle, China's economic, political, and administrative integrity. In the euphoria of “saving” China, the United States accepted a pervading unilateral commitment to China's independence and political integrity against Russia and Japan, whose interests in China were far greater than those of the United States. With its recent territorial accessions, the United States entered the twentieth century as the world's leading satiated power, with objectives—in China and elsewhere—anchored to the territorial status quo, but facing powers whose expansionist interests demanded further changes in the world's treaty structure, even at the price of war. For the United States, the coming century would hardly be peaceful, if no longer territorially expansionist.
[See also Native American Wars: Wars Between Native Americans and Europeans and Euro‐Americans; Philippine War; Philippines, Liberation of the; Philippines, U.S. Military Involvement in the.]

Bibliography

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.
David L. Anderson , Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861–1898, 1985.
Thomas R. Hietala , Manifest Design, 1985.

Norman A. Graebner