Slavery and Silence - Paul D. Naish

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into which South America-bound produce from the West flowed, attitudes about participation in the Panama Congress were lukewarm, at least in the pages of the Louisiana State Gazette. A bilingual newspaper (English and French), the Gazette emphasized regional news; it took two to three weeks to get dispatches from Washington, New York, or Philadelphia. Its maritime register mentioned cotton more than Cincinnati hams, and it reflected the interests of the slave South more than the grain-growing West. Its objections to the Panama Mission focused less on the fate of Cuba or executive overreaching than the threat of entangling alliances. “If South American independence is threatened, this government can give to our neighbors aid and succor, without alliances.”88 Explicitly disavowing antiadministration motivations for its opposition to the mission, the Gazette maintained a consistent reluctance against “intermeddling” in Latin American affairs.89 Andrew Jackson’s providential victory in the Battle of New Orleans had occurred only eleven years earlier; perhaps the Gazette’s lack of enthusiasm for anything that suggested a military commitment also reflected that recent experience in which disaster and dishonor had so narrowly been avoided. The Gazette recognized that one difference between the United States and the republics of Latin America was the reliance among the latter on standing armies. “An unemployed army in sight of our coast, flushed with victory, and panting for future conquest, may create no alarm at Boston—but it will excite deep and painful thoughts to the reflecting inhabitants from the mouth of the Sabine to the mouth of the Potomac.”90

      After the Senate confirmation of Anderson and Sergeant as ministers plenipotentiary to Panama, “P. Henry,” writing in Thomas Ritchie’s Richmond Enquirer, decided that the results of the votes were “curious, and ominous.”91 “By reference to the map … it will be seen, that the whole country south of the Pennsylvania Line, and of the River Ohio, to the Gulph of Mexico, [save Maryland, immediately in the focus of Presidential influence, and Little Delaware, who, I apprehend, is about to fall from ‘her high estate,’] is opposed to this novel, if not dangerous scheme of international diplomacy.”92 What was “ominous” was not the fact that the vote had broken on clearly sectional lines, but that the kind of intelligent statesmen (at least in “P. Henry’s” estimation) who dominated the slave-holding regions were so obviously absent from the North and West.

      Actually the situation was a bit more complex than “P. Henry” suggested. The interests of the South further diverged according to geography. Maryland and Louisiana, with port cities heavily invested in South American trade, endorsed the Panama Mission. Meanwhile, the North and West were even less solid in their support: while the Northeast was relatively firm in backing the administration, in the West, the Susquehanna and Ohio River valleys demonstrated more interest in the potential benefits of the congress than rural areas remote from water-born trade.93 But the protection of slavery and increased opportunities for commerce, more than other, more abstract causes, determined voting patterns.94 In extending actual assistance to the Latin American revolutionaries generally, and in backing the Panama Congress more specifically, national self-interest figured as a prominent motive.95 A young republic, its resources tied up in its own defense and development, the United States concentrated on ways of “helping” its neighbors that would bring about better opportunities for itself. Americans were willing to overlook race where money was involved.

      Yet this analysis may be unnecessarily cynical; at any rate it hardly tells the whole story.96 Let one example of a less than purely self-interested popular response suffice. On July 4, 1827, “Philanthropos” published a book called Essays on Peace and War, Which First Appeared in the Christian Mirror.97 “Philanthropos” was William Ladd, a Maine antiwar activist who was shortly to establish the American Peace Society. He devoted one of his essays to the Panama Mission, writing, “I view the Congress of Panama as one of the links in the great chain of events, by which Providence designs to bind all the nations of Christendom,—which will be, finally, all the nations of the world,—in one grand bond of permanent and universal peace.”98 Ladd also noted a correspondence between the opponents of the mission and the supporters of slavery. “Thus, in this case, as in all others, we find a natural alliance between liberty and peace, slavery and war.”99 At the Panama Congress, Ladd saw a remarkable confluence of opportunities not for profit but for the complete abolition of the slave trade; the end of privateering; a system of international law that would, at a minimum, define contraband and the right of blockade; and the ultimate extension of religious liberty. He beheld the gathering as a potential prototype for the eventual establishment of something that sounds very much like the United Nations.100

      On the surface, it seems clear that in 1826 Americans at home analyzed the Panama situation from many perspectives, not simply racial ones. They had to be coached to pick up on racial cues, and they did not pick them up immediately. But the often-repeated refrains of the Panama Congress debates, that Latin America was different from (and therefore inferior to) the United States, that the most important difference concerned race, and that Latin America was therefore safe ground upon which to consider slavery, indeed penetrated regional consciousness over the next decade. What happened?

      The main selling points of the Panama Congress—that Latin America would complete the work of bringing republicanism to the hemisphere, and that the new nations would form a vast market—evaporated. By the time Ladd’s Essays on Peace and War was published in 1827, it was becoming clear that the vision of Pan-Americanism proffered by the Panama Congress would ultimately come to naught. Although Buenos Aires and Chile refrained from attending, ministers from Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala did meet and approved tentative agreements providing for a common army and mutual defense, adjourned, and agreed to reconvene in Tacubaya, Mexico, after their governments had ratified the treaties. But only Colombia went so far as to take that step. With considerably less fanfare than in 1826, Congress approved the posting of John Sergeant and Joel Poinsett to Tacubaya in 1827, but that convocation never took place.101

      By any measure, in the years following the Pan-American conference in Panama, the new republics of Central and South America experienced growing pains. U.S. politicians and diplomats sent home damning accounts of encounters with their counterparts in the fumbling young nations and their failure to realize republican ideals. Joel Poinsett, minister to Mexico, wrote in 1828, “I had a lonely time in this Babylon … this country is doomed to experience a long & disastrous civil war, which I should have preferred hearing of rather than experiencing.”102 Mexico was to undergo some fifty changes of presidential administration between 1821 and 1857.103 In 1832 Francis Baylies, a former Federalist congressman serving as the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Argentina, wrote to Gulian C. Verplanck in New York, “I wish our moonstruck, imaginative romantic politicians who have deluded themselves with such notions of South American liberty and South American greatness could stay here one-week—I think their hallucinations would be dispelled.” The Argentines had no aptitude for creating a republic: “I have no hesitation in saying that I think that any well regulated tribe of Indians have better notions of national justice—national dignity—and national policy than the rulers of this Sister Republic of ours.”104

      To the extent that high hopes for the Panama Congress were inflated by dreams of a mighty commercial coup, Latin America soon enough proved disappointing.105 On a typical day in 1826 a port city advertised a dozen ships preparing to sail for Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, Havana, and Montevideo.106 But what commercial advantages could be obtained at the Panama Congress were scooped up by Great Britain’s Edward Dawkins, who represented a nation with products and credit the United States could not supply and who refrained from speaking out against the invasion of Cuba.107 Meanwhile, the vision of Latin America as a vast marketplace conjured by Buchanan and the Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette proved elusive. There was a reason Cuba was such a good market for American products: its colonial economy had not been devastated by a war for independence. Mexico, by contrast, took a long time to recover economically. “There is no cash in the country except in the hands of a few individuals, who are already supplied with more goods than they can consume in two years,” complained the National Intelligencer in 1825.108 A Latin American population swelled by European immigration never quite materialized: European

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