LITMIR.BIZ

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with the kind of circumlocution Forbes talks about but sometimes with startling directness, with the audible sound of relief as bottled-up opinions were at last vented. That Latin America was perceived as foreign, that their commitment to republicanism could not quite erase their singularity, made this frank discussion possible, and even allowed the bolder congressmen to address U.S. slavery directly.

      On Van Buren’s initiative, those in opposition to Adams and his Panama proposal settled on a strategy of delay. First Adams’s enemies in the Senate demanded a review and publication of the correspondence related to the Panama Congress and then stalled the nomination of delegates. For their part, Van Buren’s allies in the House of Representatives subsequently held up the appropriation of monies to fund the U.S. delegation.⁷⁶ Finally, on March 14, 1826, the Senate confirmed the nominations of Richard C. Anderson and John Sergeant as ministers plenipotentiary, and appropriations for their remuneration were approved by the House of Representatives in mid-April. In the event, however, Anderson, setting out during malaria season, died on the way, and Sergeant did not arrive until after the congress had adjourned.

      The Panama Congress has been read as an abrupt coup de grace for the exuberant glorification of Latin American independence and the popular enthusiasm for universal republicanism and fellowship with the region. For the first time, congressional discourse about Latin America emphasized what was dangerous, unsavory, and different about the region.⁷⁷ After the widely published debates exposed newspaper readers to the mixed-race reality and rampant Catholicism of the once-admired republics, popular enthusiasm gave way to reserve. According to this analysis, many Americans lost interest in the future of their southern neighbors after 1826.⁷⁸

      Although it was difficult to be oblivious about the racial and religious composition of Latin America after the Panama debates, it took a bit longer for public opinion to catch up with political discourse than this reading suggests. Americans remote from Latin America, and from the center of discussion in Washington, were slow to relinquish their expectations of shared republicanism and their dreams of commercial benefits. The romance of Latin American exoticism continued to hold their fascination, with both towns and babies christened in tribute well after the immediate postrevolutionary period. Simon Bolivar Hulbert, a Union private whose Civil War experiences were published as One Battle Too Many, was born in 1833.⁷⁹ Peru, Indiana, birthplace of the Broadway lyricist and composer Cole Porter was founded in 1834, and Bolivar, Missouri, in 1835. Migrants from Peru, Illinois (established 1838), settled in Peru, Nebraska (1857).

      During the semicentennial celebrations in 1826, immediately after published reports of congressional testimony had presumably awakened newspaper readers to the many ways Latin America differed from the United States, toasts reflected popular ambiguity rather than wholesale repudiation. Even among toasts reported by one Southern newspaper, the Richmond Enquirer, at celebrations in various Virginia communities, these references included the frankly cynical (“The Panama Mission; An egg laid in our Federal Cabinet by the political crusader H. Clay to hatch popularity. In the nest has been found executive corruption, let its offspring beware of Randolph the Virginia falcon”) but also the enthusiastic (“The Republics of the South! The bright example of the Republics of the North, has not been lost upon them!”).⁸⁰ These toasts reflect political faction at home and awareness of the particulars of political organization abroad, but they by no means universally ignore or condemn the new republics.

      In the U.S. Congress, the most national forum imaginable, the advocates and opponents of the Panama Congress had had a national conversation about slavery. Latin America, having been established as racially and religiously distinct from the United States, proved its worth as a setting in which issues like abolition could be safely discussed. But in more local settings, where there were established trading relationships with Latin American ports, for example, it took more than simply pointing out the racial composition of Latin America to transform the perspectives of U.S. observers. It fell to the nation’s newspapers, rather than to Congress itself, to explain what the Panama debates actually meant, and they often expressed more nuanced—because more local—analyses of the situation. Editors did not immediately fall in line with the relentless racial understanding that characterized the speeches of many of the politicians, instead continuing to celebrate the possibility of bountiful trade and rapprochement with neighboring republics. When they did connect attendance at Panama to the slavery issue, they could not always be counted upon to say exactly what the party wished. The Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette, for example, recognized, and condemned, the way Southern congressmen let their own fears of abolition influence their recognition of the new republics. From Washington, Clay noted in a letter to Cincinnati publisher Charles Hammond that the “Panama articles in the Liberty Hall are able and highly useful” but expressed a wish for “mutual forbearance” on the subject of slavery, particularly from the “Non-slavery holding states, as the stronger, safer and happier party.”⁸¹

      In New York, the pro-administration New-York Evening Post viewed the growing excitement of the congressional debates with a weary hauteur, declining to work up either any enthusiasm or any consternation over an issue it considered much ado about nothing and presuming that its readers were likewise uninterested in the whole subject.⁸² The Post suggested that the United States might do good by spreading the benefit of republican government, and it might do itself some good in the process. The way the Post conflated these two objectives suggests a reinterpretation—or at least a decidedly economic inflection—of the U.S. revolutionary goals of fifty years earlier. Rather than seeking liberty from despots, the former Spanish colonies were casting off the fetters of mercantilism. Using slavery-to-freedom imagery, the Post predicted, “Great principles are now about to be adopted; a great experiment is making in the world, by which freedom is given to commerce, and the shackles are about to be removed from the enterprise of all nations.”⁸³ The United States might claim a share in this good fortune.

      For the Old Northwest, the Panama Mission also held out the enticing possibility of enhanced trading opportunities, and western papers worked themselves into more of a lather over the importance of participation than the languid New-York Evening Post. In roughly equal measure, the Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette protested the Southern distaste for associating with nations that had abolished slavery, expressed good faith for the republican intentions of the new states, and speculated about the consequences for western prosperity if new commercial possibilities were not adequately exploited or, worse, if relations with South America soured because of Southern prejudice. “This subject is one of first importance to the United Sates generally, but particularly to the Western country,” avowed the pro-Adams Gazette on February 17, 1826. “It would not be extravagant to say, that their commerce may become, in less than a quarter of a century, of more consequence to the valley of the Mississippi, than that of all the world beside.”⁸⁴ Although on the face of it this prediction of prodigious trade would seem dubious, an article published a month later quoted statistics to back up this claim with specific regard to Haiti, the locus of much Southern disapprobation. In 1824, the Gazette stated, U.S. exports to Haiti amounted to nearly two million dollars, with flour, pork, and beef, the products of the West, making up nearly half the total. Sharp-eyed residents of Cincinnati, nicknamed Porkopolis with good reason, would notice that exports of pork totaled $378,000 and soap and candles (made from the byproducts of pork processing) $158,000.⁸⁵

      In such a case it would seem more in the interest of the West to mute its objections to the proslavery forces; after all, the intensive cultivation of cash crops in regions dominated by slave societies created markets for the products of free farmers and industrialists, but here the Gazette took the high road, condemning Southern arguments and pointing out the hypocrisy of their position. The Gazette even went so far as to approve of the potential invasion of Cuba by liberating forces from Mexico and Colombia, a possibility so unpopular with the South that even Adams warned against it.⁸⁶ “However the policy of our government, regarding chiefly the security of the slave property of the Southern states, may unite with the views of European governments, in retaining Cuba as a colonial appendage of Spain, we think it very clear that, in all other respects, its independence would be of advantage to itself and to this country,” the Gazette noted dryly, appending another chart showing the value of

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