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Chapter

3

The Doctrine and the Unholy Alliance

The french revolution had scared the wits out of the rest of Europe. It was there; it could not be denied; but it was hard to believe, frightful to contemplate. That a great people should rise in revolt against archaic and discriminatory laws, against a rotten system of government, was understandable. That they might go a bit too far: This too could be accepted. But the French had turned mad. There was no other word for it. Grandly spouting grand phrases about liberty, equality, and fraternity, they had sought to impose their opinions on all their neighbors. They had permitted themselves to be taken over by a nobody who was not even French and whom they deified. They had overrun the Continent, these bloodthirsty fanatics, so that for more than twenty years nobody had known peace; and when at last Bonaparte had been put down and his armies scattered, the victors, assembling at Vienna to patch together a peace, were soberly determined that such a thing must not be allowed to happen again.

One immediate result of this attitude was the formation of the Quadruple Alliance, the principal winners, Prussia, Russia, Austria, and Great Britain, joining together in a pledge to prevent another such outbreak. France itself, under the placid Bourbons, soon proved to be one of the boys, and was actually taken into the league that had first been formed against her, so that in 1818 the Quadruple Alliance became the Quintuple Alliance.

That same year there was organized quite a different group of nations, starting, however, with Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary, which called itself the Holy Alliance. These states for no apparent reason issued a declaration telling the world that they meant “to take for their sole guide the precepts of that Holy Religion, namely, the precepts of Justice, Christian Charity and Peace . . .” This seemed harmless enough, even meritorious; but statesmen are in the nature of their calling shot with suspicion, and it was some time before other nations, though asked, agreed to subscribe to the Holy Alliance. When they did come in, though, they came fast. Soon the only princes in Europe who had not expressed a willingness to take for their sole guide the precepts of that Holy Religion—Justice, Christian Charity, and Peace—were the pope, the sultan of Turkey, and the king of England. George IV had been asked to join, but had politely declined. He, or at least his government, remained suspicious.

So did the United States of America, which was never asked. To those highly placed in Washington there was always something fishy about the Holy Alliance, which they sometimes called, as it was sometimes called in Whitehall, the Unholy Alliance.

Interest in the building of an interoceanic canal had sagged. Spain woefully neglected her opportunities, for she was busy trying to keep the American colonies in the royal fold. In 1735, Charles Maire de la Condamine, after a visit to Central America, had recommended to the French Academy of Sciences that a canal be built through Nicaragua; but the report was simply filed away and forgotten. The German poet Goethe expressed interest in the possibilities of such a waterway, which he predicted would be built by the United States government; but this turned over no earth. The prestigious Alexander von Humboldt, after spending several years of travel in South America, Central America, and North America, caused a considerable stir with his thirty-volume Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, published between 1805 and 1834, in which he listed nine separate possible routes for interoceanic travel, all the way from Saskatchewan to Patagonia, asserting that the Nicaraguan one was clearly the best. But once again, nothing was done.

One by one the Spanish colonies in America rose in revolt against a despotic mother country. In 1814 the cortes (parliament) at Madrid ordered a thorough survey to be made of the Nicaraguan route with a canal in mind; but by that time it was too late.

The breakaway came in large chunks at first, but the new states showed little power of cohesion, and soon they too were splitting up, a process that further delayed any serious talk about a canal. The original Central American republic, which embraced all that area except Panama, a province of Colombia, and the Mosquito coast of Honduras, which was held by Great Britain, very early broke up into the separate and sometimes warring states of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica, with still another, the future San Salvador, in the offing. In 1829-1830 the Dutch for the first time tried to get into the canal-planning act when they applied for a charter; but Simón Bolívar’s Granadan Federation was crumbling even at that time, and the next year it split up, loudly, into Venezuela, Ecuador, and New Granada, which later became Colombia. In that very same year, too, the Dutch were given something to think about at home when Belgium broke away from Holland.

Revolutions, indeed, were by no means confined to America. There was a good deal of antimonarchical feeling in Europe as well; and at the time that James Monroe sat down at his desk in the White House8 to frame his seventh message to Congress, there were or recently had been uprisings in Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain itself.

President Monroe was inclined to blame the Holy Alliance for much of this. The newly established Latin-American states, too strong to be taken back by a tottering Spain, yet too weak, it would seem, to govern themselves with any degree of success, made up a mighty temptation to the original professors of Justice, Christian Charity, and Peace. That these new states would be spared much longer seemed unlikely, and indeed already there were rumors that France had in mind a Bourbon dynasty in Mexico, or in Central or South America, or perhaps all three. Mr. Monroe decided to do something about this.

The idea was not his alone. It had been suggested to him by the British foreign minister, the redoubtable and witty George Canning, who in September of that same year of 1823 had proposed to the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Richard Rush, that the two nations issue a joint declaration warning against any attempt on the part of any European nation to occupy any part of America. This proposal Mr. Rush had of course passed on to the secretary of state, who placed it before the President.

British interests also coincided with the interests of the United States in the northwest coast of North America. Rusisa recently had forgotten her love of the sacred precepts of Christianity long enough to lay claim to that coast as far south as the 51st parallel of latitude.9 Great Britain did not like this any more than did the United States; and surely Russia should be spoken to.

President James Monroe

Mr. Monroe was thinking of this as he sat down to make a last, final draft of his message to Congress. He was a cautious man. When he was younger he had often been thought rash and impetuous, but elevation to the highest office in the land had sobered him, and now he did nothing without considerable advance thought. He had pondered the Canning proposal, which just at first he was inclined to favor. He had discussed it at more than one meeting of his five-man cabinet, and he had informally asked for the opinions of the two past presidents who happened to be also personal friends—Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—both of whom favored the Canning plan. But the secretary of state—short, bald, pale, watery-eyed, and with bad manners, John Quincy Adams by name—did not agree.

Mr. Adams was anything but a likable man, but his intellectual capacity was unquestioned, as was his patriotism, and as the son of the second President of the United States he had been brought up since boyhood in the ways of international diplomacy. The secretary of state approved of the Canning suggestion, but he did not favor a joint declaration. He thought that the United States should issue such a warning alone rather than tag along “as a cock-boat bobbing in the wake of the British man-of-war.”10 This idea, when he got to thinking it over, appealed to Mr. Monroe too. Mr. Adams would have done the deed through normal diplomatic channels, a quiet word here, a quiet word there, nothing that could not be retracted or, if necessary, denied. Mr. Monroe did not agree. He thought that the whole world should be told, as would be the case if the warning were incorporated into a public document such as his annual message to Congress. Mr. Monroe, being the President, got his way.

He wrote:

The occasion has been judged proper for asserting as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subject for future colonization by any European powers . . .

And later, in the same message, he wrote:

With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered, and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence, and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States . . .

He had done a great thing, but he was not aware of it. He knew only that he had acted in an emergency and acted in the best way he knew. He did not have the consent of the Senate, and so he could not be thought in any way to be setting down an immutable determination on the part of the United States government.11 If his bet was called he could not declare war; only Congress could do that. He was not conscious of giving to the world a ringing doctrine, and indeed these two parts of his annual message were not at first called or thought of as a “doctrine” but rather as the Monroe “principles” or the Monroe “declaration.” 12

The President’s warning was dismissed in most European capitals as bluster, but London, after thinking it over, decided that it did not like it. Neither was there any applause from the Latin-American nations, who thought it somewhat condescending and, in any event, without any force behind it. In the days when Madrid still ruled that part of the world there had been stem insistence upon a trade confined to the mother country; but, though the guardacostas had been busy, there was a great deal of smuggling, prices stayed high, and many South and Central Americans could not buy all the things they wanted. Now that they were free and so was their trade, there was a scramble to sell to them, with Britain, she of the mightiest merchant marine, in first place. More, there was the Royal Navy. It alone, and unassisted by any fulminations from Washington, could hold off the Holy Alliance; and the newly freed nations of the south, knowing this, just at first failed to wax enthusiastic about Mr. Monroe’s strictures.

Spain had been forced to take back her old king, the stupid, stubborn Ferdinand VII, and he, of course, aided by France, could be counted upon to do everything that he could to reimpose limitations upon Latin-American commerce. Spain still controlled Cuba, an island often eyed enviously by some Yankee expansionists; but, though she had tried several times, she had not been able to reimpose her rule upon Santo Domingo, the eastern end of the island of Haiti.

England’s command of the king of the Mosquitos made the whole matter that much worse.

The Mosquitos (the name was originally Misskitos or Moscos, and it had nothing to do with the insect that bites) were an Indian tribe that dwelt in the swamplands of the east coast of Honduras. Once pure Carib, they had been heavily intermixed by shipwrecked and runaway African Negroes, and later too by a smattering of whites. They were naturally intelligent, but wild, seminomadic, and not numerous, not well organized. The British called them Sambos.

The Spaniards never had troubled to enslave this small tribe; and therefore, said the British, it never had been a part of Honduras but was in fact a sovereign state, its chief, the king of the Mosquitos, being an independent prince. He was also, for the most part, an invisible prince, for the British kept him well out of sight in the swamp, while his “private secretary,” an Englishman, really ran the country. Just where this country was, how far it extended, was not clear, for the Mosquitos’ claims were vague; but certainly it included at least the mouth of the San Juan River, where the English themselves had various settlers, Jamaican Negroes, and also a few descendants of the earlier hard-wood cutters who had been associated with the buccaneers. The king of the Mosquitos, it will be seen, was a very convenient person to own.

The whole matter was made even more complicated by the fact that New Granada (later Colombia) claimed not only the whole of the Isthmus of Panama—nobody disputed that—but also the east coast of Central America as far north as Cape Gracias a Dios, which was north of the mouth of the San Juan.

Costa Rica too had no respect for her neighbor’s idea of a boundary, but insisted that her sovereignty extended clear up to the west bank of the San Juan River, which would give her a say in any preparations for the digging of a Nicaraguan canal.

Central America could be called the Balkans of the New World, a powder keg, a pit of snarling, spitting little states not one of which was strong enough in itself to give a real power much trouble but any one of which might bring on a war between Outsiders. Spain and Great Britain more than once had been on the brink, and toward the end of the eighteenth Century they had in fact indulged themselves in a private side war, an undeclared war, over the Mosquito Coast, Belize, and the Bay Islands off Honduras. In the next Century it was the turn of the United States and Great Britain, the scene having shifted to Nicaragua. Ardent naval officers and overenthusiastic diplomats on both sides again and again threatened to bring about a major blast, their behavior being disavowed barely in time, for neither Washington nor Whitehall really wanted to fight.

Resentment of the British behavior in Central America was one of the reasons that Spain consented to join France in going to the aid of the Colónies in the American Revolution, so that the two nations actually were at war when the first Englishman invaded Nicaragua. He was only twenty-one, the youngest post-captain in the Royal Navy, and his his name was Horatio Nelson. That was in April of 1780.

It was a joint services Operation, and the army part was in charge of a Major Polson. Nelson was exuberant. “I intend to possess the Lake of Nicaragua, which for the present may be looked upon as the inland Gibraltar of Spanish America,” he wrote home. “As it commands the only water pass between the two oceans . . . by our possession of it Spanish America is divided in two.”

They were rowed up to a moldering castle located about halfway to the lake on the shore of the San Juan River, which is 119 miles long, and this they attacked with great spirit and in vastly superior strength, so that it soon fell. They got no farther. At just about this time General Fever appeared in the field, and the men began to die right and left. The expedition was all but wiped out, a total failure. Of the two hundred men from Nelson’s own ship, only ten survived. He was one of those ten, but he was a very sick man and was sent home. He never did fully recover his health; and he never even saw Lake Nicaragua, nor did he divide Spanish America in two.

The informal war that followed was featured by a great deal of running-down of flags and running-up of other flags as one side or the other claimed this island or that cape, at the same time disclaiming the opponent’s title. After the complete break-apart of the Central American Alliance in 1838, most of Great Britain s spats were with the republic of Nicaragua, which had a flag that was blue and white. The men from London designed and had made a flag for the Mosquito people, giving their land, for the first time, a name—Mosquitia. This flag bore a striking resemblance to the Union Jack.

Another of the newly independent republics, Costa Rica, which was more or less at war with Nicaragua—a boundary dispute—asked Great Britain to take it over as a protectorate. Washington heard of this through its assiduous envoys, and took alarm. Costa Rica claimed a goodly portion of the right bank of the San Juan River, and if this claim were backed by Britain it would greatly raise the cost of building a canal. Britain, however, was too busy with other acquisitions—so nothing came of the petition.

The comic-opera air of these proceedings disappeared when James Knox Polk was elected President of the United States. A smallish, unattractive man, almost unknown before his election—the first “black horse” in American presidential politics—he was an outspoken expansionist. He restated the Monroe Doctrine but in much stronger terms, and it did not take him long to get his country into a war with Mexico. That war ended February 2, 1848, but the peace treaty, signed in the field, did not contain one of the provisions President Polk had demanded—the right of the United States to survey and, if it saw fit, to build a canal or a road or both in the isthmus of Tehuantepec. Polk did get for his country the vast sprawling southwest territory, including all of California. It was a breathtaking land grab, and it frightened the Latin-American nations, many of whom thereafter, given a choice of evils, were inclined to favor the protection of Great Britain rather than that of El Coloso del Norte.

Polk was succeeded by General Zachary Taylor, “Old Rough and Ready” to the troops, who had no use for expansion; but the Situation in Nicaragua remained grave.

An American Company of private interests had been granted a charter to build a canal across Nicaragua, but it could scarcely be expected even to start digging as long as Great Britain was holding San Juan del Norte—or Greytown, as the British themselves called it—in the name of the Mosquito kingdom; for this palm-thatch hovel guarded the mouth of the San Juan River. To make the prospect even more glum, a Royal Navy captain in the Pacific seized an is-land in the Gulf of Fonseca, raising the Union Jack there and claiming the place for his country, his given reason being that Honduras, which owned the island, had failed to pay Great Britain some money she owed, though his real reason, as everybody knew, was that the island controlled what was then thought of as the logical western end of the proposed canal. After this, on the other side of the isthmus, an American naval commander bombarded San Juan del Norte, smashing many huts, but killing nobody since he had first warned the inhabitants to get out of town. Both of these actions were to be disavowed by superiors, and apologies were to be made and reparations agreed upon; but either could have led to war.

Something had to be done.

Sir Henry Bulwer was sent as special envoy to Washington, and he conferred many times with the secretary of state, John M. Clayton. What they finally came up with was not a victory for either side, but a compromise.

The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty mentioned “the Mosquito Coast” several times in connection with other parts of Central America, but never named the tribe of Indians or their chief, and it did not disclaim the British protectorate. It would have permitted either party to build a canal across any part of Central America, but it pledged each to forego “any exclusive control over the said Ship-Canal,” to abstain from any manner of fortifications intended to protect such a canal, and never to “occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, or any part of Central America.” In the event of war between the two signatories, the treaty provided, and no matter which had built it, the canal was to remain strictly neutral, open to the vessels of all nations; and it was never to be blockaded, in any circumstances.13

This was not a good treaty, and it was to cause trouble later, but perhaps it was the best thing that could be done at the time. It met with much bitter Opposition in the United States Senate, but eventually squeaked through. It was promulgated July 5, 1850.

“And there,” many men muttered, “goes the Monroe Doctrine.”

They were mistaken.