LITMIR.BIZ

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aggression? Why should Latin America not serve as the great supplier and market of its northern neighbor? The independence of the new nations held out the possibility that they would come to favor (in both senses of the word) the United States. Republicanism promised to replace the lockstep submission and deference of the former Spanish subjects and turn them into thoughtful, responsible citizens. Liberalism would open Central and South American ports to U.S. exports and offer in return minerals and agricultural products to which the United States did not have access within its own borders. That these new nations imitated their northern neighbor demonstrated that U.S. ideals were imitable and exportable. While still a raw and callow nation in many respects, in its relation as an elder sibling to the growing family of republics, the United States assumed a kind of venerability: “we sowed the seed, and others are also reaping the fruits of it. On this continent we have witnessed the establishment of five new Republics, animated by our example and enlightened by our precepts,” exulted the Richmond Enquirer in a July 4 editorial in 1826.¹⁴

      Simultaneously, the emergence of these new Spanish-speaking Catholic republics also necessitated national stock-taking in the United States. The freedom-fighters of Central and South America called themselves Patriots, and they championed liberty, established republics, and now assembled a congress. But what, asked the senators and representatives of the Nineteenth Congress, did those words mean in an area geographically contiguous with the United States and yet foreign? In the course of the debates over the Panama Congress, both in and out of the Congress of the United States, the essence of many words came up for consideration: liberalism, liberty, republic, equality, nation. Now that they were being applied in new ways, their universal application could no longer be assumed. Was a black republic a republic? Were the oppressed subjects of a Spanish despot ready for the same prerogatives as a people with a heritage of English freedom? Could equality really stretch to accommodate everyone? The year 1826 was hardly the first time Americans asked these questions, but there was a new resonance, if not a new urgency to them. These words, and the ideas behind them, were claimed by people who were neither white nor Protestant nor of English descent.

      Before the Panama brouhaha, American attitudes toward the independence of Latin America as expressed in newspaper coverage and in political discourse were generally positive. If the number of U.S. cities and counties named for Bolívar and other Latin American heroes and places, or the number of toasts to Spanish American independence, are a measure of popular support, Americans certainly cheered the wars of independence against Spain and the establishment of republican governments in the period 1810 to 1822.¹⁵ Even when newspaper accounts made clear the race of the republicans in the pre-Panama Congress period, they were more inclined to praise their bid for liberty than shudder at the color of their skin.¹⁶ Southern newspapers were no less likely to run positive accounts of these revolutionary struggles than Northern ones, even though Bolívar was using Haiti as a staging ground for his attack on the royalist forces in Venezuela and accepted military and financial assistance from the island’s mulatto president.¹⁷ To be sure, there were qualifications to this rule: news accounts were quicker to blame the race of the insurgents when they suffered defeat than to mention it in celebrations of their victories. The nearer their struggles to the United States, the more the racial identity of the rebels became a problem, so, for example, journalists noted the race of the revolutionaries in Spanish Florida in 1817 and 1818.

      Geography similarly illuminates the complex reactions to Haitian independence a generation earlier. Northern Federalist Rufus King saw the revolution in Saint Domingue as the first step to “accomplishment in South America to what has been so well done in the North.”¹⁸ Even Southern Federalists respected the revolutionary goals of the island’s oppressed and saw an independent Haiti as a useful threat to despised France.¹⁹ Americans toasted Haitian independence in 1804 and continued their trade with the citizens of the new black republic—including trade in arms.²⁰ On the other hand, in 1793 many Southerners were convulsed with fear of rebellion inspired by the Haitian precedent, particularly if French refugees brought their slaves, infected with dangerous ideas of liberty, to U.S. shores.²¹ Free Africans in Saint Domingue were not threatening in the way free African Americans in South Carolina or Virginia were.²²

      There was a limit to the nation’s support for Haiti, the second republic of the Western hemisphere, which existed beyond the pale of official American diplomatic recognition.²³ The transition from John Adams’s Federalist administration to the Democratic-Republican presidency of Thomas Jefferson in 1801 signaled a chilling of U.S.-Dominguan relations, not exactly warmed by the violence perpetrated against the island’s whites in the early nineteenth century. Although the former French colony seized its independence in 1804, the so-called “black republic” did not win recognition from the United States until 1862. On the other hand, the United States recognized Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico in 1822, with additional nations joining their company in the next few years.²⁴ What made Haiti unique and prevented its official recognition was effectively summed up by Missouri Senator Benton in 1826: “the peace of eleven states in this Union will not permit the fruits of a successful Negro insurrection to be exhibited among them.”²⁵ Slaveholders came to fear the influence the Haitian template might have among their enslaved population. In Louisiana in 1811, Haitian native Charles Deslondes organized a short-lived reign of terror.²⁶ Haiti actively inspired the slave revolts led by Denmark Vesey in 1822, and quite possibly Gabriel in 1800. Although Nat Turner was not directly motivated by Haiti, the Turner Rebellion was quickly linked with the island in the popular white imagination.²⁷ As Benton pointed out, other Latin American nations had “already put the black man upon an equality with the white, not only in their constitutions but in real life,” but this equality had not been achieved through a terrifying race war, as had happened in Haiti.²⁸ This difference was important enough to determine political recognition, but cultural acknowledgement would be another matter.

      If until this moment Americans tacitly accepted what Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson in 1767 called “civil society” and what is today called civic nationalism, the national venting of racial and religious prejudices against neighboring republics forced a reconsideration of what being American meant.²⁹ In 1826, the invitation to the Panama Congress that implied a shared political identity among the United States and the republics of Latin America led to the expression of all the ways the United States differed from its neighbors. The claiming of commonality from abroad provoked cries of distinctiveness—indeed, exceptionalism—at home. The Panama Congress served as a kind of test to see whether Spanish America, which had achieved its independence without a Jacobin bloodbath, which imitated U.S. precedents in such a number of flattering ways, came close enough to the U.S. paradigm to join its company. The answer was, apparently not close enough.

      Possibly the popular enthusiasm for Latin American achievement never had run deep; it was based on minimal information if not outright misinformation concerning conditions in the new republics, particularly the fact that many of the citizens Americans claimed to admire were not entirely white. As they toasted “The Patriots of South America,” nationalistic Americans celebrated themselves, rejoicing in independence and self-government, ideas by which they identified their own nation.³⁰ Commercial prospects also drove much of the enthusiasm for the independence of Latin America from Spain in the 1820s.³¹ “The commerce of Spanish America is very interesting to all nations, on account of two essential considerations,” noted Manuel Torres in a pamphlet published in Philadelphia in 1816. “First, Because that country consumes yearly, the value of one hundred millions of dollars in articles of foreign manufacturing industry. Secondly, Because it is there, and only there, that all nations can obtain, with facility, those precious metals, which have become so necessary to trade throughout the world, and particularly with Asia.”³²

      Independent nations not under the thumb of Spain promised the possibility of liberalized trade (although many U.S. exporters resentfully expected that Britain would corner uniquely favorable privileges). As if by magic, trade in free Latin American ports would stimulate the manufactures so necessary to what Henry Clay called the American System. Hoping to promote national unity in a country of clearly defined sectional differences, Clay insisted in 1820, “It is in our power to create a system of which we shall be the centre, and in which all

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