LITMIR.BIZ

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their ideas about U.S. preeminence. The output of these Americans extended across a variety of disciplines, from sermons to scientific inquiry, from the well-rehearsed speeches of lawmakers to the dashed-off screeds of newspaper squibs, from the low doggerel of third-rate versifiers to the blank verse of five-act dramas. In the antebellum period, congressmen quoted poetry and scientists cited the Bible as evidence; novelists and historians tackled political subjects in their fiction that they knew intimately from their work in politics. The audiences that received this material were similarly diverse.¹⁰²

      This book describes the process by which Americans from many backgrounds and with varying agendas redefined their image of Latin America from an immature and somewhat hapless younger brother to an estranged and finally unrelated alien. Latin America’s likeness to the United States could not be entirely denied—its colonial past, its struggles for independence, its efforts at republican reinvention. Some common elements, like the contiguousness of territory, were indeed emphasized; others, like its ancient past, were effectively invented. But the crushing weight of difference was more useful than what was shared, providing the necessary cover for Americans to speak about themselves.

      Latin America provided a staging area for dramas that people of the United States preferred to rehearse out of town. Here they tried out in the 1820s the racial attitudes usually associated with Democratic politics of the 1830s. The Panama Congress debates of 1826, for example, included articulations of white arrogance and black unworthiness heard more loudly in the strident 1830s and 1840s. Within this context, the challenges of absorbing a free black population became possible to imagine. Similarly, acknowledging that Manifest Destiny pushed south as well as west, appropriating the property of a fellow sovereign republic as well as the territory occupied by Indian tribes, necessitates a reinterpretation of antebellum expansionism. From this perspective the Texas land grab anticipates the imperialist ambition the United States would demonstrate in the late nineteenth century.¹⁰³ Indeed, the chauvinistic confidence in the rightness of U.S. approaches expressed by the rejection of foreign models is much more characteristic of twentieth-and twenty-first-century America than the apologetic inferiority complex the United States assumed in its comparisons with Europe in the early national period.

      Considering the ways Americans discussed their southern neighbors illuminates and complicates many frameworks for understanding the early republic with which historians would do well to engage. Although slavery is the primary concern here, this project necessarily has implications for other historical perspectives of the antebellum United States. Because slavery was so integral to the economy, diplomacy, and reform efforts of the first half of the nineteenth century, recognizing the role played by Latin America in the national imaginary raises new questions and suggests new approaches toward our understanding of the period. Thinking about how Americans displaced their anxieties and conjectures upon Latin America clarifies some of the paradoxes of the Jacksonian era, reveals neglected aspects of the politics of Manifest Destiny, and enriches the modern picture of antebellum nationalism and transnationalism.

      In more than one way, this book is all about boundaries. It is most obviously about the physical lines on a map that separated Anglo America from Spanish America, as well as the political and social differences that made Mexico and Cuba and Peru and Brazil so exotic to travelers from the United States. It is also about the boundaries between races and national groups: how did U.S. nationalists insert the hidalgo of obviously mixed race, or the Brazilian soldier of color, into the limited dichotomies of white/black, slave/free with which most people in the United States were comfortable? The period covered in this project is one in which the physical boundaries of the United States were constantly being negotiated, with much of the new territory—Texas, the Mexican cession, the Gadsden Purchase—the former property of Mexico. Just as the mapmakers of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s were busy drawing and redrawing borderlines, Americans of the early republic had to reconsider where their counterparts south of the border belonged in relation to them.

      During this period, among the many roles Latin America played for its U.S. neighbors, the most useful was as a window through which could be viewed the vexed and volatile reality of slavery many Americans did not want to discuss openly. Through this window they gazed with condescension at their counterparts failing to live up to the United States standard even as they beheld something at once familiar and foreign, a simulacrum both exotic and uncomfortably recognizable.

      Yet sometimes in the unstable reflection of the glass, Americans glimpsed themselves. “The people of the United States are like persons surrounded by mirrors. They may catch their likeness from every quarter, and in every possible light, attitude, and movement,” declared The North American Review in 1838. “Turn we as we may, we catch our reflected features; the vista seems to lengthen at every sight.”¹⁰⁴ Whether the reflection of the United States in the mirror of Latin America was flattering or unsettling, whether it was heeded or ignored, depended upon the circumstances. But in the thirty-five years before the Civil War it consistently served as a measure by which people in the United States judged themselves.

      Chapter 1

      Never So Drunk with New-Born Liberty

      “Sir, I know there are gentlemen, not only from the Northern, but from the Southern States, who think that this unhappy question—for such it is—of negro slavery … should never be brought into public notice,” John Randolph of Virginia admonished the Senate in 1826. But, he warned, slavery “is a thing which cannot be hid—it is not a dry rot that you can cover with the carpet, until the house tumbles about your ears—you might as well try to hide a volcano, in full operation.”¹ Yet at the time Randolph chided his colleagues for ignoring the ominous rumblings of discord produced by slavery’s foes and defenders, increasing numbers of Americans hoped that slavery was a subject that could be shut away and concealed.

      Randolph was generally considered eccentric if not actually crazy (attended by slaves and accompanied by hunting dogs, he delivered rambling speeches well lubricated with alcohol, punctuated by snaps of his riding whip against his boot, and seasoned with Greek quotations and venomous outbursts), but he proclaimed what his colleagues hesitated to say.² The problem was that he proclaimed it in a national forum. His fellow Southerners in Congress sought particularly to prevent federal interference in what they called a local institution: Congress’s ability to discuss slavery, they feared, was dangerously proximate to the power to regulate it.

      Randolph spoke on the occasion of the debates over U.S. participation in the 1826 Panama Congress, a proposed gathering of the republics of North and South America. It was five years after the Missouri crisis, which exposed, to the horror of both participants and spectators, the breadth and depth of a national fissure over slavery that had been growing wider and deeper since then. There had been disputes in Congress about slavery before, notably around the 1787 Northwest Ordinance that prohibited human bondage in the future states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and around the 1808 abolition of the African slave trade. But nothing had reached the extremes of bitterness occasioned by the question of whether the federal government had the right to restrict slavery in Missouri—or indeed to regulate slavery at all.³

      Figures 2 and 3. Henry Clay—in this portrait indicating a globe turned to show South America—advocated the American System of internal improvements and commercial relations between the United States and its southern neighbors. But when in 1826 the United States received an invitation to participate in Simón Bolívar’s Panama Congress, Virginia’s John Randolph pointed out that U.S. delegates might well be seated “beside the native African, or their American descendants, the mixed breeds, the Indians, and the half breeds.” The disagreement between Clay and Randolph escalated into a duel, which ended without serious harm to either opponent, but in the following years Randolph’s characterization of Latin America as marked by racial difference trumped Clay’s understanding of shared republicanism. Henry

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