IMPERIAL RIVALRY IN THE AMERICAS

The struggle of the United States for independence and post-Revolutionary development occurred in the context of a contest between the European imperial powers to achieve geopolitical, commercial, and cultural dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Once independent, the United States became an actor in this larger drama of imperial rivalry.

european empires in the americas in the mid-eighteenth century

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the contest for the Americas primarily occupied three of the great European powers—the kingdoms of Spain, France, and Great Britain. Spain claimed the largest empire—all of South America except Brazil and the Guyanas, all of Central America, all of modern-day Mexico, most of what is today the western United States, Florida and the Gulf coast, and the largest Caribbean islands (Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico). France laid claim to most of the eastern half of modern-day Canada, the Great Lakes basin, the Ohio-Mississippi-Missouri drainage, and a few islands in the Caribbean, including modern-day Haiti, then called Saint Domingue. Great Britain held the thirteen American colonies, Nova Scotia, the area around Hudson Bay, the islands of Jamaica, Barbados, and the bulk of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean, in addition to the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua and modern-day Belize.

In addition, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Russia all claimed territories in the Americas: the Dutch in Guyana and the Caribbean, the Portuguese in Brazil, and the Russians in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. These powers were minor players in the contest between European empires in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In all of the European empires, the amount of territory claimed exceeded the amount of territory actually controlled. In North America especially, the indigenous population retained control of much of the land and its resources. Much of the rivalry between empires played out in a contest of Europeans trying to win political and commercial alliances with the various communities of American natives.

The American Indians of North America were a numerous and diverse lot, and it is difficult to generalize about them. Language, political organization, and culture varied among different tribes and nations. Modes of subsistence tended to vary by region, with temperate-region nations being more sedentary and arid-region nations being more mobile, although there are important exceptions even to this rule. By the middle of the eighteenth century, nearly all American Indian communities had been transformed by contact with the Europeans.

The American Indian communities that survived the onset of Old World diseases and had not been displaced by settler colonies gradually worked out a set of customs and practices with their European neighbors that facilitated cross-cultural interaction. These relationships were centered around commerce—one historian has characterized the European empires of the early and middle eighteenth century as "empires of trade." American Indian hunters provided furs and hides—generally of deer, beaver, or buffalo, depending on the region—in exchange for European-made metal goods, firearms, and alcohol. The contest among the Europeans through the middle of the eighteenth century was over who would dominate access to these trading arrangements.

the seven years' war

The Seven Years' War (1754–1763), or the French and Indian War as it was known in America, was a continuation of the conflict Britain and France had fought in America during the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748). British colonial subjects desired to bring the Indians of the trans-Appalachian region into their commercial orbit and expand the frontiers of their settlement. The French hoped to pull Britishallied Indian nations into their orbit and check British settler expansion. British traders had crossed the Allegheny Mountains in the mid-1740s, attempting to open trading relationships with the Algonquian-speaking communities of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes basin. In 1749 a French expedition under the command of Céloron de Bienville officially claimed the Ohio Valley for France, and a subsequent French expedition destroyed British trading posts. In 1754 an expedition from the British colony of Virginia under the command of Colonel George Washington attempted to counter the renewed French military presence in the Ohio Valley and touched off the war in America.

From Virginia northward, the war pitted the French and their predominantly Algonquian allies against the British (both colonials and the regular army) and their predominantly Iroquois allies. Initial French success, under the command of Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, was soon checked. The emergence of William Pitt the Elder as head of the British government in 1757 transformed the British war effort. Pitt saw the North American theater as crucial. Pitt directly paid the American colonies for the goods and troops he requisitioned, spent the British government into debt, and appointed new and more competent field commanders. Under James Wolfe, the British consistently won on American battlefields, his campaign culminating in a daring and successful attack on the city of Quebec in 1759. Success continued the next year when Jeffrey Amherst took Montreal and drove France from North America.

King Charles III of Spain formed an alliance with Louis XV of France in 1762. Yet Spain fared no better than France. The British Royal Navy took Spanish ports in Havana and the Philippines, as well as nearly all of France's island possessions in the Caribbean.

The Seven Years' War ended in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris. The peace settlement transformed the geopolitical dynamic of North America. Britain ceded Havana back to Spain and Guadeloupe back to France. Britain retained all of Canada and the Ohio Valley and was awarded the two Floridas by Spain. Spain acquired the Louisiana Territory, the western drainage of the Mississippi. Of course, these claims were still more notional than real, as Europeans still had to negotiate with Indians for the land they claimed. In the immediate aftermath of their victory, the British commanders in North America, notably Amherst, forgot this and downplayed the need to conciliate the Indians. As a result, warfare between the Algonquians of the Great Lakes basin and the British regulars (Pontiac's Rebellion) erupted and ensued for nearly two years. The late 1760s found North America contested by only two major European empires—Great Britain and Spain.

the era of the american revolution

The new geopolitical situation proved unstable. The French government resented the loss of its empire. The Comte de Vergennes, foreign minister to the new French king Louis XVI, was committed to returning France to the preeminent position it had once held in Europe and the Americas. Vergennes began preparing for a new war with Britain, which he viewed as inevitable. In 1775 the prospect of a rebellion by Britain's American colonies offered Vergennes and the French government the opportunity to strike a blow at their mortal enemy.

The American Revolution would not have been successful had the American movement for independence not enmeshed itself in the larger European rivalries. When the thirteen North American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain and called themselves "the United States," their leaders knew that they needed recognition and assistance from other European powers. Under Vergennes, France provided the United States with clandestine assistance (materiel and financing) during the first two years of the war. Following the American victory at Saratoga in 1777, France openly allied itself with the United States in early 1778. A French expeditionary army under the Comte de Rochambeau aided George Washington's Continental Army upon its arrival in America in 1780, and the French navy under the Comte de Grasse defeated the British navy off Hampton Roads to ensure the American-French victory at Yorktown.

It was Vergennes and the French, not the Americans, who turned the other European empires to the American side. Vergennes signed a treaty of alliance with the Conde de Floridablanca, the Spanish foreign minister, at Aranjuez in April 1779. The French-Spanish alliance did not explicitly include the Americans, and Spain did not recognize the United States until after the war. But Spain was fighting Britain, thus weakening the overall British position. The Netherlands too entered the war as a French ally, but unlike Spain, the Dutch government recognized American independence and offered the Americans financial assistance. The peace settlements of 1783 ended the American war, granted the United States independence, and returned the Florida territories to Spain.

Even before the 1783 Treaty of Paris formally ended the American Revolutionary War and secured American independence, the United States became an actor in the ongoing imperial rivalry for the Americas. The United States contested the right to navigate the Mississippi River with Spain, and Great Britain retained alliances with American Indian communities that were technically inside the borders of the United States. In 1778–1779, Virginian George Rogers Clark had led a militia expedition down the Ohio River that captured British posts at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes. While some Indian communities, such as the Kaskaskia and the Delaware, allied themselves with the United States, others, notably the Shawnee, did not. Britain continued to trade with Indian communities in the Northwest, and Spain continued its trade with the Indians in the South. This unstable border situation was a key impetus behind the American states' coming together to strengthen the Union by ratifying the Constitution of 1787. Although the United States was still a weak power, it had the military and diplomatic muscle to rival Spain, France, and Britain for access to trade and alliances with the American Indians.

the french revolution and the napoleonic wars

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 transformed the political balances in Europe, affecting the Americas as well. The greatest changes occurred following the arrest of King Louis XVI by the Paris Commune in August 1792. Soon the radical National Convention replaced the National Assembly as the head of the French government. With the new regime's public execution of the king in January 1793, the vast majority of European monarchies declared war on revolutionary France. The War of the French Revolution quickly became a world war. France required materiel from the Americas to support its war effort, and it hoped at the same time to disrupt the flows of materiel to its British enemy. The National Convention's minister to the United States, Edmond Charles Genêt, actively (and controversially) sought out American citizens to embark on privateering raids against British merchantmen. The administration of George Washington did not want European politics brought into the Americas in this manner and publicly declared the United States neutral in the conflict.

As the War of the French Revolution escalated, the polities of the Americas were drawn deeper into the conflict. Great Britain sought to interdict all commerce bound for France, and even seized the ships of neutral nations, notably the United States, that were trading with belligerents in the war. The preponderant power of the Royal Navy led to two important outcomes. First, it induced the United States to negotiate a commercial accord with Britain that tended to favor British interests. This commercial treaty, known in America as the Jay Treaty, was ratified in 1795. Perceived closeness between Britain and the United States alienated France, and the Directory, which replaced the radical National Convention after a 1794 coup, began seizing American ships. A low-scale, undeclared naval war (the Quasi-War) between France and the United States ensued between 1797 and 1800.

At the same time, the French Revolution and resultant war wreaked havoc in the Caribbean. In August 1791 the African slaves of the French colony of Saint Domingue, hearing of the Revolution, rose in rebellion, and aided by Spanish forces on the island, demanded their liberty. The National Assembly responded by granting full citizenship to Saint Domingue's free blacks and mixed-race population. The National Convention abolished slavery in 1794. Saint Domingue remained a French province, with prominent people of color, notably Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in charge of its civil and military affairs. The image of former slaves wielding political and military power shocked many Anglo-Americans and Europeans.

In November 1799, with the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon Bonaparte became First Consul of France. At the head of the French state, Napoleon transformed French foreign policy. He ended the Quasi-War with America in September 1800 and, with the Peace of Amiens (1802), the long war with Great Britain. Even before peace in Europe, Napoleon sought to expand France's empire in the Americas. By the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800), France reacquired the vast Louisiana Territory. In November 1801, Napoleon ordered General Victor Leclerc and a large army to Saint Domingue. Leclerc carried orders that provided for the re-enslavement of large portions of the black population on Saint Domingue. Plans also existed for the colonization of the Louisiana Territory: settler farms in Louisiana would feed the slave plantations of the French Caribbean. These plans came to nothing when disease and defeat decimated Leclerc's army. In April 1803 Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States and abandoned the colonial project in Saint Domingue. That colony declared its full independence as the Republic of Haiti in 1804. France's role in the imperial rivalry for the Americas ended.

In Europe, the war between France and the rest of the European powers began again in 1803, and it too spread to the Americas. After Napoleon defeated Prussia, Austria, and Russia and knocked each power out of the war, only Britain remained in the fight. After the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), the Royal Navy had complete control of the Atlantic, and the British government sought to restrict the flow of New World goods to France and its allies. The British government resumed seizing neutral ships bound for the European mainland, with most of these seizures being of American ships. Similarly, the British impressed sailors of suspected British origin into service in the Royal Navy. This affront to American sovereignty was deeply humiliating. The combination of these policies led to war between the United States and Great Britain in June 1812. The War of 1812, or Anglo-American War, lasted until the early weeks of 1815. Though essentially a draw, the War of 1812 did confirm the dominant position of the United States vis-à-vis the American Indian communities within its borders.

after the congress of vienna

With the Restoration of the European monarchies at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) and the conclusion of the War of 1812, the United States became the preeminent player in the imperial rivalry for the Americas. The United States forcibly annexed West Florida from Spain in 1810 and acquired East Florida from Spain in 1819. At the same time, Spain and the United States concluded the Transcontinental Treaty, which fixed the boundary between New Spain and the United States, from the Sabine River to the Pacific Ocean. Between 1815 and 1820 the United States and Great Britain concluded a series of treaties. The Rush-Bagot Agreement (1817) essentially demilitarized the Great Lakes, while two Commercial Conventions (1815, 1818) resolved the commercial issues that had caused the War of 1812 (except impressment) and fixed the U.S.-Canada border (except for the Maine boundary).

The final point of contention was how the United States and the European powers would respond to the disintegration of the Spanish Empire. Gran Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and the United Provinces of Central America all declared independence between 1815 and 1825, and the United States recognized these states between 1822 and 1826. When it appeared that Spain and its European allies might attempt to reconquer these new states, British foreign minister George Canning offered to make a joint statement with the United States standing against European intervention in the Americas. American Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and President James Monroe decided that it would be better for the United States to make such a statement by itself. Their statement, the Monroe Doctrine, told the world that the United States would resist European attempts to interfere in the political life of the Americas. Though born from the European imperial rivalry for the Americas, the United States presumptuously declared the rivalry to be at an end.

See alsoEuropean Influences: The French Revolution; European Influences: Napoleon and Napoleonic Rule; French and Indian War, Battles and Diplomacy; French and Indian War, Consequences of; Quasi-War with France; War of 1812 .

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