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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 Clay, 1843, John Neagle, American, 1796–1865. The Union League of Philadelphia, gift of Henry Pratt McKean, Courtesy of The Abraham Lincoln Foundation of The Union League of Philadelphia; John Randolph, 1804/1805, Gilbert Stuart, American, 1755–1828, Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

From the beginning of the republic, politicians both within and outside the United States had sensed the wisdom of sweeping the subject of slavery under the carpet. The insistence that words do not mean what they seem to mean, the recourse to coded language when discussing difficult topics, goes back to the founding documents of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” was a declaration subsequent generations took considerable pains to explain away. The Articles of Confederation and the Constitution usefully referred to “interstate commerce” and “property” and “other persons,” circumlocutions whose meaning was transparent to those who could interpret them. Foreign visitors attuned to the subtleties of national politics knew to shun this controversial subject: Edmond-Charles Geneˆt, hoping to win U.S. support in France’s wars with England and Spain in the 1790s, kept his opposition to slavery to himself on a fundraising tour of the U.S. South.⁴

In retrospect it is quite easy to understand why, early in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a subject that had been successfully relegated to the shadows for so long suddenly seemed to pop out from every unlikely corner. In the years following the invention of the cotton gin and the purchase of Louisiana, slavery had become an economic lynchpin of the South and, indirectly, the North as well.⁵ Meanwhile, the abolition of slavery in Northern states proceeded apace, and audible antislavery voices both at home and abroad grew louder. In the years after the Missouri Compromise, avoiding the contentious subject became increasingly difficult.

Then an unexpected opportunity for safely airing concerns about race and slavery appeared. In 1825 the United States received an invitation to Panama to participate in a congress of all the republics of America. Mexico, Peru, Chile, Buenos Aires, Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia had recently emerged from prolonged wars of independence with Spain. Simón Bolívar, aware that the infant nations were still vulnerable to Spanish attacks, and eager to solidify trading treaties with England, proposed an assembly to discuss a defensive alliance and to forge commercial relationships. Bolívar was disinclined to jeopardize the arrangements recently established with Britain, which was sending an observer to the conference, by having the United States present. But Mexico and Colombia, who hoped for better trading relations with Washington, extended an invitation to the United States to attend the assembly when it would be held in the spring of 1826.⁶

Like many issues in the thirty-five years before the Civil War, the Panama Congress apparently bore only a tangential relation to slavery. Stated objections to U.S. participation in the congress touched on a variety of issues, from despotic overreaching by President John Quincy Adams to the dangers of implied foreign commitments. But as members of Congress held forth in an extended period of debate about the implications of participating in this gathering of all the American republics, they frequently emphasized everything about the populations of Latin America that made them seem unfit to participate in the republican project. In proclaiming these differences, congressional leaders discovered that they could talk about slavery in the most national forum imaginable without dire consequences.

That the Panama Congress debates would lead to American perceptions of Latin America as a second-rate region defined primarily by aspects of racial difference was not foreordained. The years before the announcement of the Panama Mission had been characterized by popular enthusiasm for the former Spanish colonies’ struggles for independence and embrace of republican government as well as canny, acquisitive expectation about how a liberalization of trade policies might benefit producers and exporters in the United States.⁷ Americans following the debates in their local newspapers did not always pick up on the racist cues their representatives were supplying, responding instead out of interests that were alternately idealistic or economically shrewd.

But much of the testimony marked a decided shift in the way Latin Americans were described and the limitations imposed by the characteristics they embodied. Rather than partners in the global republican project who happened to speak Spanish, practiced Roman Catholicism, and sometimes had African blood, Central and South Americans appeared in Congressional speeches as knaves and fools playing an absurd and possibly dangerous game of dress-up. After U.S. Senators and Congressmen finished their harangues in opposition to sending ministers to Panama—and even defenses of the idea—the eager, hopeful sense of republican fellowship yielded, if not to active disdain, certainly guarded hesitation.

The shift in national attitudes was neither immediate nor universal. As with many historical turning points, this one is easier to recognize in retrospect than it was at the time. It did not mark a shift as abrupt and complete as some historians assert.⁸ But the widely publicized congressional characterizations of Latin America established a vocabulary of difference, and both domestic and international developments made it easy to fall back on this vocabulary. A new way of understanding the identity of the United States through its relations with its southern neighbors took hold of the national imagination. Members of Congress referred directly or obliquely to the complexion of the republicans in whose company the U.S. ministers would convene and the effect this association might have upon white slaveholders’ ability to manage their bond people. This perception of racial difference, and the way slavery was understood, would prove pervasive in the way the United States would define itself against a Latin American foil in the coming decades.

The aspects of race and slavery that figured in the debates assumed an importance in the context of the time. It might not have been irreversible without the rise of the second-party system, the explosive importance of the slave economy in the United States, and the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. It corresponded, significantly, with a transition to a second-generation nationalism in the United States, from a colorblind one that invoked the universalizing possibilities of political ideology to one more narrowly connected to race. Most important, as slavery assumed a new role in the nation’s social and economic identity, Latin America provided a context—and the Panama debates set the tone—for the way slavery would be discussed for the next thirty-five years.

Writing in 1854, at the end of a thirty-year career in the Senate, Thomas Hart Benton recalled the 1826 Panama Congress as an “abortion” “long since sunk into oblivion.”⁹ At the time, however, the debate over U.S. participation in this now-forgotten assembly dominated much of the business of the Nineteenth Congress. More than sixty legislators participated, at length, in a debate that had far-ranging implications for future foreign policy and relations between the United States and its southern neighbors.¹⁰

In the United States, the debates over the implications of sending ministers on the Panama Mission coincided with the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when citizens had occasion to reflect on the accomplishments of half a century.¹¹ The Fiftieth Jubilee was marked everywhere by patriotic speeches, poems, and a series of thirteen toasts (one for each of the original thirteen colonies). Mixed with the cheers of festivity was not a little nostalgic awareness that the revolutionary era was fast fading away. “That was not the Lafayette that I remember!” mused eighty-nine-year-old John Adams when the last surviving general of the Revolutionary War, now an elderly visitor, appeared in Quincy, Massachusetts, on his 1824–1825 tour of the United States.¹² The founding generation was in eclipse. “Columbia’s sires have gone to rest,” mourned the poet “Zero” in the National Intelligencer on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.¹³ As if to underscore the passing of the old order, on the Fourth of July, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of one another.

The termination of the independence struggles by the former colonies of Spain that occurred just in time for this U.S. anniversary added poignancy to a national atmosphere that was at once triumphant and tinged with melancholy. Spain’s former colonies had followed the example of the United States in declaring themselves republics and producing written constitutions, in many cases copying whole passages verbatim. These were heady days: what stains of religious bigotry, superstition, and cultural backwardness could republican government and free trade not erase? Why should not the Spanish or Portuguese American, living in a modern, enlightened state, become the ally who would help defend the United States against European 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 South America will act with us. In respect to commerce, we shall be most benefitted: this country would become the place of deposit of the commerce of the world.”³³ Clay predicted this American System, by encouraging better transportation and more robust domestic commerce, would foster mutual economic dependence among regions with different social and economic interests.³⁴

The Panama Congress debates followed in the wake of the divisive four-way presidential race of 1824—in which there had been no clear winner—which had been resolved when Clay threw his support behind John Quincy Adams, spoiling the chances of Andrew Jackson, the popular favorite. Adams subsequently appointed Clay secretary of state, an arrangement Adams’s pro-Jackson adversaries branded a “corrupt bargain.” (John Randolph, already quoted at the beginning of this chapter, characterized the relationship between the president and his secretary of state as “an alliance, offensive and defensive, … got up between Old Massachusetts and Kentucky, between the frost of January, and young, blithe, buxom May—the eldest daughter of Virginia—young Kentucky—not so young, however, as not to make a prudent match, and sell her charms for their full value.”³⁵) But the new president scarcely acknowledged his lack of a mandate. His first message to the Nineteenth Congress in December 1825 presented a startling presumption of presidential power. He proposed that the national government take the lead in constructing canals and turnpikes, fund a national university, and build astronomical observatories (the latter immediately pilloried with his own locution, “lighthouses of the skies”). Europe was harnessing the power of government to effect similar ends, and the United States ought not to fall behind. Adams’s mention that the United States had been invited to participate in a Pan-American conference, and his request for congressional approval of the designated plenipotentiaries and funding for their trip, should have been the least contested of Adams’s proposals. Richard C. Anderson of Kentucky, who would be tapped to be a minister plenipotentiary, predicted in July 1825 that “probably some more specific statement of the questions to be discussed there is required, before a decisive step is taken.”³⁶ Anderson seriously underestimated the obstacles that lay ahead. In fact, Adams’s proposal for participation in the Panama Mission blew up among accusations of secrecy and continued for much of the Congress’s first session, to expose serious reservations about the universal applicability and potential exportability of American ideals.

Adams had an agenda for participating in the Panama Congress that he acknowledged in his diary: cementing good relations with the nation’s southern neighbors might help facilitate the eventual purchase of Texas and smooth the way for an interoceanic canal through the Isthmus of Panama.³⁷ In his public defense of attendance at the Panama Congress, however, Adams focused on three other themes: the duty to extend a neighborly hand to the new republics, the wisdom of providing a good example and steering the infant nations from self-inflicted hazards and external dangers, and the practical benefits of neutrality and commerce to be gleaned from participation in the meeting.³⁸ When they were not actively engaged in deflecting the attacks of Adams’s critics, his supporters in the Senate and the House of Representatives amplified each of these points.

First, the argument seemingly most colored by goodwill and least tainted by self-interest was that the United States ought to acknowledge the great accomplishment of the Spanish republics in winning their independence and recognize them with what Representative Charles Miner of Pennsylvania called “parental regard.”³⁹ The invitation to the congress had been tendered in a spirit of friendliness and sincerity, with no hidden conditions the president’s supporters could discover; to refuse the outstretched hand of amity was to risk offense.⁴⁰ Francis Johnson, Representative from Kentucky, pointed out that there was no shame in being called a friend of liberty.⁴¹

Second, many of the politicians who spoke in Adams’s defense alluded to the ways the United States might help Latin America avoid pitfalls in establishing republican governments. “Let us be first to meet them, and, if in our power, afford them useful advice as to the improvement of their condition, and in perpetuating their independence and liberty,” urged Representative John Reed of Massachusetts.⁴² It was in the best interests of the United States, so long as it could avoid active involvement in foreign military affairs, to help position the new republics on a footing secure enough for them to be free of threat of reconquest by Spain or the Holy Alliance of Catholic countries in Europe. Furthermore, as the president himself had suggested, a gentle nudge from the United States might encourage the new nations to turn away from a policy of established religion, specifically Roman Catholicism.⁴³

Third, the potential profits of trade played no small part in the calculations of those who advocated sending representatives to Panama. “These South American States contain twenty millions of freemen: they will require the supply of manufactured goods to the amount of one hundred millions of dollars,” predicted Representative Silas Wood of New York.⁴⁴ If American industry needed a goad to expansion, here it was. The vast market would stimulate American manufacture better than any tariff. Senator Asher Robbins of Rhode Island estimated the population of South America still higher, at thirty million, and pointed out that nations of freemen were energetic and prosperous—a natural market for the products of the United States.⁴⁵

Even among the administration’s supporters there was a limit to assertions of fellowship with Latin America. In their defense of attendance at the assembly, they refrained from suggesting that ministers from the United States would sit down with their equals. Despite their calls for friendliness and courtesy, in the remarks of the mission’s advocates a damning-with-faint-praise undertone hinted that the emerging Latin American nations were unformed if not slightly foolish. Representative Daniel Webster of Massachusetts spoke firmly in favor of attendance in the congress of “sister Republics,” among the “great American family of nations,” but at the same time he made clear their lowly status: they were “pupils” in a school from which the United States had presumably graduated with honors.⁴⁶ Rejecting the opposition’s refrain that the United States might somehow be contaminated by association with its neighbors south of the border, the Adams men suggested that their superiority would prevent their being flecked with pitch even if they touched it. The upstart republics existed not simply at an earlier stage of political development. They belonged to a wholly distinct order. The problems that might plague them and the diseases to which they might succumb represented no danger to the United States, a member of another species entirely and therefore not susceptible to infection.

Far more colorful than the defenders of the Panama Mission were speakers from the opposition. The objections to the Panama assembly were striking in their variety. Among the charges were these: Adams’s actions bore the hallmarks of the tyrant. There were no precedents for attendance at this congress. By appearing at Panama, the United States would find itself committed to undesirable, expensive, or dangerous policies. The United States would be drawn into war with Spain. The Panama Congress would encourage instability in the strategically significant—and nearby—Caribbean. And perhaps most damningly: the abolition of slavery in Latin America would exert a demoralizing effect on white Southerners and a dangerous influence on U.S. slaves.

Actually the opposition was more organized than it appeared. The forging of a unified coalition out of these assorted objections was the work of New York senator and future president Martin Van Buren, who took it up as a convenient Adam’s rib around which to fashion a new political coalition made up of the enemies of John Quincy Adams.⁴⁷ Besides the outrageous John Randolph of Virginia, Van Buren’s allies included Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, Robert Hayne of South Carolina, John Holmes of Maine, John Berrien of Georgia, and Adams’s own vice president, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a geographically assorted group, each member of which addressed a critical aspect of an opposition position that Van Buren skillfully stitched together. In Van Buren’s efforts to unify Adams’s enemies, it is possible to see him erecting the foundation of the nation’s second party system, to achieve through political organization what Clay attempted through his integrated economic program. One of many people who understood and feared the growing sectionalism exposed by the Missouri crisis, Van Buren believed party politics might distract the citizenry from sectional fragmentation over the issue of slavery.⁴⁸ Later in 1826 Van Buren would begin his party-building project in earnest, but he laid the groundwork here. The irony of his attempt to escape sectional animosity was that among the assorted agendas he hoped to reconcile, whether aversion to potential military commitments or entangling alliances or John Quincy Adams himself, many masked support for slavery and resistance to interfering with its profitability. As with many issues of the antebellum era, slavery was frequently the unspoken subtext and could not so easily be escaped.

Despite the fact that the agendas of Adams’s enemies were so varied—“It is not identity of principle; it is merely identity of feeling that forms the bond of their association,” scoffed former New Hampshire representative Salma Hale in an 1826 pamphlet—what most of them shared was an abhorrence to associating with people so clearly different from themselves.⁴⁹ The United States ought not submit to anything that looked like an alliance with Latin America because such a union would be an unnatural one, a kind of political miscegenation. Although there were too many parallels with the North American situation for the most skeptical critic to overlook them entirely, the proclamation of republicanism was not enough to make the entire hemisphere one.

Not all these differences were specious. Whereas in North America the Continental Congress had coordinated the actions of the thirteen British colonies long before their independence, the Latin American states were coming together for the first time. The original thirteen British colonies emerged as one nation (admittedly one loosely bound together at the beginning), while the former Spanish colonies took another route, with the erstwhile viceroyalties declaring independence on different schedules and as wholly separate nations. Although many of the new states enthusiastically copied the U.S. Constitution, they departed from it in telling ways. They built in provisions for what one historian calls “regimes of exception,”⁵⁰ making constitutional provisions for the suspension of civil rights during periods of political unrest and allowing for domestic control by the military. And they elected not to follow the U.S. practice of disestablishing religion, retaining Roman Catholicism as not merely the sole state-supported church but the only faith tolerated by the government.

On the other hand, they took a more enlightened approach to slavery, in some cases providing for its eventual elimination and in others abolishing it totally. In many cases these nations took much more literally, and embraced much more inclusively, the language of liberty and equality employed by the Founding Fathers of the United States. And if Haiti offered any preview, subsequent interpretations might be even more generous. In a series of decisions culminating in its constitution of 1816, the Republic of Haiti radically broadened the idea of freedom and redefined the concept of property familiar in the United States. Property included the right of the individual to control the disposition of his or her work, effectively forestalling understandings of “property” that allowed the ownership of human beings. Further, President Alexandre Pétion’s interpretation of the constitution in an 1817 case in which fugitive slaves from Jamaica were given freedom characterized slavery as a form of oppression for which asylum should be granted. While the notoriety of these decisions was limited and their influence circumscribed, they suggest the challenge Latin American manifestations of republicanism could pose to the existing order of the U.S. South.⁵¹ By elevating people of mixed race, people of full African descent, and Catholic clerics to positions of political authority, the Latin American nations were already implicitly challenging the United States to realize its self-proclaimed ideals.

Religion and national origin provided immediate markers of foreignness for both sides of the debate in the U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri attempted to startle his auditors into understanding just how different a nation with an established church looked: “Who is the negotiator contending with our Minister in Mexico for this doctrine of exclusive privileges? Is it not Don Ramos Arispe? And who is Don Ramos? A Catholic Bishop; (and I do not mention this in derogation of his character …).”⁵² The gulf between Catholicism and Protestantism, between established religion and the separation of Church and State, was an easy one to understand. Seemingly just as vast a divide, though somewhat harder to describe succinctly, characterized the European ancestry of North Americans and South Americans. James Hamilton of South Carolina, citing common language, philosophy, religion, and letters, claimed that people in the United States felt more “real sympathy … for the People of Old England, than any States of Spanish origin, whether miscalled or rightly named Republics.… Rest assured, moreover, if free principles are ever in danger—if a combination of despots should endeavor to put out the light of liberty—we shall be found fighting by the side of England against the powers of blood and darkness, whatever may be the alliances the Spanish Republics may form.”⁵³ Republicanism was not so transformative a rebirth that it could wash away one’s European origins, however distant: there was a fundamental, even an essential, difference between Americans of English stock and Americans of Spanish descent. And simply speaking the right words—republic, congress, independence—did not suffice: it mattered whether those words were uttered in English or in Spanish.

But opponents of the Panama Mission, going beyond a comparison of the European ancestors of the North and South Americans, went much further when they vilified their southern neighbors for the fact that too much non-European blood ran in their veins. The racism expressed by Adams’s enemies in 1826 anticipates the assumption of white supremacy that would underlie Jacksonian democracy a few years later. Senator John Holmes of Maine coyly suggested that “When our fresh and fair Ministers shall enter the hall of that Congress, and look round on their associates, I apprehend that they will deem it invidious and indelicate to talk about color.”⁵⁴ As usual, John Randolph was the most direct: should U.S. delegates go to Panama, they might well be seated “beside the native African, or their American descendants, the mixed breeds, the Indians, and the half breeds.” Indeed the racial purity of all Latin America was suspect: Randolph pointed out that plenty of African blood ran in the veins of the peninsular Spanish; and Guatemala, adjacent to the province in which the congress would be held, he believed, “was considered as much a black Republic at this time as Hayti itself.”⁵⁵

Some of the congressmen were more discreet in admitting that the true barrier to hemispheric solidarity was a racial one. A certain amount of reading between the lines is required, but the lines are sufficiently far apart to permit an unobstructed view. Opposition Senator John Berrien of Georgia employed a policy of indirection in talking about race and slavery, though his tack was more to assume the whispered complicity of racial supremacy than to threaten and terrify. Berrien suggested that there were certain loyalties that sent all political ones into eclipse: “I have been educated in sentiments of habitual reverence for the Constitution … The feeling is no where more universal, or more strong, than among the People of the South. But they have a stronger feeling. Need I name it? Is there any one who hears, and does not understand me?”⁵⁶

Once this insistence on racial differences between the United States and Latin America was established, it was possible for senators and representatives to mention slavery without violating the informal ban on its discussion in the federal arena. Ever since the debates over the Missouri Compromise had exposed the fateful fault line between Northern and Southern interests, a tacit understanding had made raising the issue of slavery in the federal Congress an unofficial taboo. While no formal embargo existed, the memory of the acrimony of 1819 and 1820 was still fresh enough to make legislators think twice before raising the subject of slavery: “deeply shocked by the volcanic anger and potential for sectional division revealed by the Missouri debate, Congress would rarely discuss slavery without recourse to euphemism and circumlocution,” wrote Robert Pierce Forbes.⁵⁷ With memories of the rancor still fresh, Southerners in particular insisted that the very mention of slavery had no place in Congress; it was an issue for state legislation only.

While there would be no formal gag rule in Congress until 1836, the ritual of tabling resolutions and petitions dealing with slavery was common in the early 1820s. The professed refusal to talk about slavery reached absurd extremes. In the Senate in 1825 Rufus King of New York introduced a resolution to establish a fund for the emancipation and colonization of slaves. The resolution was tabled, removing it from debate, much to the consternation of Robert Hayne of South Carolina, who submitted a counter-resolution “intended as a solemn protest” against the very suggestion of federal interference in slavery. Hayne’s counter-resolution was similarly tabled.⁵⁸

But in the context of Latin America, legislators could express themselves with uncharacteristic bluntness. Though they often approached the dangerous subject of slavery in a roundabout way, they discovered they could shed much of their customary caution. Representative John Floyd of Virginia stated his objection to the Panama Mission thus: “Shall we not be told by this Congress that every man, on this Continent, is entitled to liberty?”⁵⁹ That representatives of the South American states might point out the contradiction of slavery in the United States was problematic enough; but one of the stated objectives of the congress was to discuss the fate of Cuba and Puerto Rico, still under Spanish rule and still flourishing slave societies, enriching their mother country with slave-generated wealth and supplying a staging area for counterrevolutionary activities. Looking at the future of Cuba, Senator James Hamilton of South Carolina predicted revolution followed quickly by servile revolt, threatening both the Southern states specifically and U.S. access to the Gulf of Mexico more generally.⁶⁰ Hamilton, who had served as mayor of Charleston when the city’s Vesey conspiracy was exposed in 1822, had particular reasons for suspecting connections between free discussion of abolition and rebellion.⁶¹

Representative William Brent of Louisiana used the same Southern fear of abolition in Cuba and Puerto Rico in support of the Panama Mission, arguing that U.S. involvement might prevent the colonies’ precipitous liberation from Spain. He likewise spoke about race through indirection, pointing out that while of course his sympathies lay with any people still in the thrall of a monarch, Spain’s islands presented a special case, one a Southern man must “feel,” though “I need not refer to the population of Cuba, to justify my fears.”⁶² Brent proceeded to sketch for Congress various scenarios that would follow in the wake of the liberation of islands with black majorities, scenes of “ruin, horror, and desolation, too painful to be portrayed” all indicated through suggestion, intimation, and artful rhetoric. Like the narrator of a ghost story who achieves his effects through dramatic pause and innuendo, letting the imagination of the hearer supply the details, Brent allowed his listeners to make associations with Haiti and the resulting threat for neighboring Louisiana: “the very thought of the consequences flowing from such a state of things, excites feelings too heart-rending to be dwelt upon for one moment. I must turn from them.”⁶³

Race clearly trumped professed republicanism even more explicitly in some of the testimony. Without a shadow of hesitation, Georgia’s John Berrien defended colonial status for colonies with a black majority. Should the United States participate in the congress, it would be expected to assist in freeing Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish control, spawning two new states with black majorities and insufficient white supervision. In such a case Berrien could imagine no other possibility than that “these Islands [would] pass into the hands of bucaniers, drunk with their new born liberty” who would reenact “the horrors of St. Domingo.” There was but one course: “Cuba and Puerto Rico must remain as they are.”⁶⁴ The safety of the South—by which he presumably meant the white South—depended upon prevailing over those so literal-minded as to insist that “he who would tolerate slavery is unworthy to be free.”⁶⁵ But in championing colonialism over republicanism, Berrien only seconded John Quincy Adams. Owing to the “peculiar composition of their population.… It is unnecessary to enlarge upon this topic, or to say more than that all our efforts in reference to this interest, will be to preserve the existing state of things,” Adams had admitted.⁶⁶ However much the defense of European colonization in the Western Hemisphere and the limitation of liberty would seem to be inconsistent with U.S. ideals, the complexion of Latin America demanded a new and more limited understanding of liberty than that proclaimed in Boston in 1776—or even Buenos Aires in 1826.

One way around this conundrum—in which liberty was not available to everyone—was to define liberty in a particular way. The fulfillment of the promise of freedom—from the standpoint of the abolition of slavery—would seem to be one area where the South American students had vaunted ahead of their so-called teachers. But this mark of superiority depended entirely on what liberty signified. “The fundamental principle of all liberty, Mr [Samuel] H[ouston of Tennessee] said, in his opinion, was equal rights, equal privileges, laws that give protection to individuals, to their lives, persons, and property: where the People are represented, and where every man has liberty of conscience guarantied.”⁶⁷ “Liberty of property” presumably included slave property, a right denied in nations with universal emancipation; “liberty of conscience” was code for the absence of established religion. The Spanish American republics failed to make these vital distinctions.

Liberty to African slaves, insisted some congressmen, threatened the entire social order. Representing the grain-growing state of Pennsylvania, James Buchanan made a remarkable attempt to characterize the United States in a way that would transcend both party division and section. “The cause of liberty in South America is the cause of the whole American People, not of any party,” he declared.⁶⁸ The investment of the United States in the republicanism of its Southern neighbors was something upon which the whole country had to agree. On the other hand, added Buchanan, the entire country could find benefits in the continuation of Cuba’s colonial status. Cuba accounted for both one-seventh of the imports and nearly as much of the exports of the United States—a greater proportion than the new southern republics. Particularly if it assisted in Cuba’s struggle for independence, Mexico would represent a potential rival for this trade, and its liberation of the island would hurt the West.⁶⁹ For the South, the threat of Cuban liberation was even more obvious, involving “a subject to which I have never before adverted upon this floor, and to which, I trust, I may never again have occasion to avert. I mean the subject of slavery.” Though slavery was an evil, Buchanan insisted, its elimination would involve dangers to the prosperity and even safety of the “high-minded, and the chivalrous race of men in the South” that could not be permitted. “For my own part I would, without hesitation, buckle on my knapsack, and march in company with my friend from Massachusetts (Mr. Everett) in defense of their cause.”⁷⁰

Where the subject of slavery in Latin America was concerned, Southerners, who were usually the most strident in insisting the federal Congress had no business discussing the matter, were often more eager to speak than Northerners. Sometimes they spoke out even as they insisted on silence. “Let us then cease to talk of slavery in this House; let us cease to negotiate upon any subject connected with it,” directed Senator Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, before immediately taking up the thread again: “One word more upon this point, Mr. President, and I will dismiss it. If there be any gentlemen in the United States who seriously wish to see an end of slavery, let them cease talking and writing, to induce the Federal Government to take up the subject, because by the course now being pursued, by some, they are protracting a measure which they profess a wish to hasten the accomplishment of.”⁷¹ So great was the relief he evidently felt in being allowed to violate this taboo, however, White proceeded to discuss Haiti and the possibility that the abolition of the slave trade would be brought up in Panama.⁷² Similarly, Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina insisted that all questions of slavery, because of their “extreme delicacy,” “belong to a class, which the peace and safety of a large portion of our Union forbids us even to discuss.” Yet he supplied a detailed description of the likely effect on U.S. slaves that might be produced by any formal association of the U.S. participants at the Panama Congress with “men of color” from Haiti. One of the proposed U.S. ministers, Hayne suggested darkly, was “a distinguished advocate of the Missouri restriction—an acknowledged abolitionist.”⁷³

Some Southern congressmen expressed the fear that complicity with Latin America would force emancipation upon them. Would participation in the congress signify recognition for Haiti? asked Hamilton of South Carolina.⁷⁴ “Is this Congress to tell the gentleman from South Carolina, and all of us from the Southern States, that ‘all men are free and equal;’ and if you join us to command the Emperor of Brazil to descend from his throne, we shall then turn round to you, and say to the United States, ‘Every man is free; and if you refuse to make them so, we will bring seven Republics, in full march, to compel you …?’ ” demanded Representative John Floyd of Virginia.⁷⁵

In their discovery that no one tried to abort discussion of emancipation in Cuba or colorblindness in Guatemalan society, these legislators had stumbled upon a kind of outlet, a safety valve: talking about nations next door to the United States allowed the airing of proscribed subjects in public. The debates over the Panama Congress supplied an occasion for public figures to speak at length and in detail about slavery, sometimes 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 exports to Cuba.⁸⁷

At New Orleans, the Mississippi port 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 immigrants expected greater economic opportunities in the United States. And as the years went by, the north-south routes made imperative by riparian and maritime transportation were supplanted or at least rivaled by west-east canals and railroad routes, which turned the U.S. West into a breadbasket for the industrializing East. By the early 1840s the value of exports to independent Mexico still amounted to less than half of those to colonial Cuba, leading Representative Archibald Lin of New York to propose saving the expense of sending a minister there.¹⁰⁹

The so-called Transportation Revolution also had an effect on perception by collapsing the distance that had separated far-flung locations. But in this case the strangeness of Latin Americans in the U.S. imagination was little reduced by propinquity, while their presence in the neighborhood now seemed undesirable. Fellowship with republicans regardless of complexion became more problematic when they suddenly seemed to be living next door. Unflattering reports of the laziness and prodigality of Spanish Americans reached the United States more quickly and were disseminated more widely. Adrian R. Terry’s Travels in the Equatorial Regions of South America, in 1832, advertised as being available in Boston, New Haven, New York, Albany, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston, reported that “internal commotions, and a disjointed and precarious state of society; and … a low standard of morals and education” counteracted the natural advantages of the port of Guayaquil, Ecuador, resulting in the paralysis of industry and the stultification of trade.¹¹⁰

Similarly dramatic changes were afoot on the domestic scene. Most importantly, the boldness and vigor of the slave-based economy in the United States exceeded all expectations. Critically, U.S. slavery in the post-1826 period was a dynamic new institution. In defiance of all the predictions of the revolutionary period, human bondage was in no sense withering away. The institution needed fresh fields of operation, which conveniently opened up throughout the antebellum period. It needed new technologies to facilitate its spread, also appearing in the form of steel plows, railroads, and steamboats. It needed manpower, which was forcibly marched from the Upper South where slavery was moribund to the Black Belt where all was speed and sweat. New financial instruments facilitated the movement of capital. The corn and wheat of the West, the calicos and brogans of the northern factories that were supposedly destined for Mexico and Colombia found eager buyers in the U.S. South, where they filled the bellies and shod the feet of slaves.¹¹¹

Because of the remarks made about race and slavery in Latin America, the Panama Congress debates ultimately cast a long shadow. As alarm over real and supposed threats from the federal government to the peculiar institution grew, many Southerners remembered Adams’s presumption in accepting the invitation to Panama. The kind of power he wielded could be used to wrest control of slavery from the states. The emergence of the Democratic Party under Andrew Jackson became for his supporters a safeguard of their rights as slaveholders.¹¹² Opponents of slavery in the North had an even longer memory. In an 1847 pamphlet published during the U.S. War with Mexico, Massachusetts abolitionist Loring Moody quoted Senator Berrien’s remarks in the Panama Congress debates to show just how far short of the example set by the Latin American republics the United States fell in its commitment to liberty: “In what respect did the United States differ from ‘these new republics,’ which this sturdy democrat here [Berrien] stigmatized as ‘Bucaniers?’ ” asked Moody. “Certainly there is a broad difference,—the United States—whether bucaniers or not—never got so ‘drunk with their new born liberty,’ as to demolish their human flesh shambles, in the boisterous merriment of their intoxication. They were always sober enough to keep the watch-dogs of their plantations well trained.”¹¹³

Something of the complexity of the initial post-Panama reactions is revealed in Timothy Flint’s Francis Berrian, or, the Mexican Patriot, a fictional work that appeared in American bookstores “in the fifty-first year of the Independence of the United States of America,” as the publisher noted.¹¹⁴ It was the first U.S. novel with a Spanish American setting.¹¹⁵ Published even as the Congress of Panama assembled sans representatives of the United States in 1826, the novel documents the shifting meanings of race and nation, fraternity and foreignness during that memorable summer, demonstrating that wariness and ambiguity concerning the implications of future U.S.-Latin American relations were expressed in many varying contexts. In the novel the two regions do not share the blood of brothers, but their ultimate marital union becomes much more intimate than the fraternity invoked by U.S. congressmen. Yet Flint refrains from promising the success of this marriage.

Flint was a New England native like his hero, who traveled to Cincinnati as a minister but became a novelist, short story writer, and editor of the short-lived journal Western Monthly Review (1827–1830). His novel depicts the creation of the new Mexican republic through the eyes of a Massachusetts native who plays a pivotal role in the war for Mexican independence in 1821 and 1822.¹¹⁶ This character becomes in effect an American Lafayette, a foreign visitor swayed by the vision of independence and singularly efficacious in its realization.¹¹⁷ On the surface, Francis Berrian is a story of battle, romance, and upward mobility, resolved by marriage at the end of the second volume. On another level, the novel can easily be read as an allegory, informed by the hopeful prediction that republicanism will bind the United States and Mexico in a union of well-matched partners.¹¹⁸ But beneath its adventure-story veneer lurks skepticism about the heroics of revolution, the hardiness of republicanism, and the future of relations between the United States and Latin America.

Francis Berrian, off to seek his fortune, heads from New England to the southwest where he rescues a Spanish captive, the noble Dona Martha, from a band of Comanches. Martha becomes Berrian’s love interest, and consistent with the conventions of the typical nineteenth-century novel, differences of background and temperament must be overcome. Martha is the titled daughter of a Conde committed to suppressing the incipient rebellions for independence throughout Mexico—a foil for Berrian’s intrepid republicanism. Her nobility sets her on a social plane above Berrian, who despite his Harvard education is only a farmer’s son. Her Catholicism contrasts with Berrian’s sober Protestantism. But Flint takes care not to let the differences between the central characters stray too far. Romantic alliances between people of different races are out of the question (Berrian is bothered by advances of one of the “copper-colored daughters of the savages”).¹¹⁹ When Berrian rescues her, Martha throws herself upon his mercies, citing their common background: “Stranger! you are of our race.”¹²⁰

Although Martha does not renounce her religion, she becomes a devout convert to republicanism. She instinctively understands and appreciates the political ideals Berrian takes for granted, if anything, surpassing him in her enthusiasm. People of Spanish origin do not lie beyond hope of republican redemption, Berrian recognizes: “Enlighten their ignorance;—break their chains;—remove the threefold veil of darkness with which your priesthood has hoodwinked them. My heart tells me that nothing can be more amiable than the Spanish character,” he says.¹²¹ Unfortunately, those of Spanish character do not form the majority of the Mexican population. When Berrian is drawn into the Patriots’ struggle for independence, he musters little sympathy for the Indian, mulatto, and Creole “rabble” that makes up the Patriot army; indeed it is suggested that they are not worthy of liberty.¹²² The select group Berrian looks forward to incorporating into the polity seems to be a tiny minority.

Two celebrations bookend Berrian’s adventures (even as the national jubilee served as the context of the novel’s publication). Early in the story, after Berrian’s rescue of Martha, the Conde has a party to celebrate her safe return.¹²³ Berrian disapprovingly observes that during a fandango, titled guests smile upon the Terpsichorean efforts of the humble, and servants share the dance floor with the great. When Berrian turns up his nose at this demonstration of unexpected democracy, Martha challenges him, not out of noblesse oblige but out of a more inclusive interpretation of his own political creed: “Our national manners call for all this, and allow strangers privileges here, which would not be tolerated in any other place,” she says. “I should think it would be conformable to your republican notions to see the rich and the poor mixing together in the same sports, in which their ancestors mixed in the generations of the past. Will you have the goodness to walk this dance with me?”¹²⁴ To Martha’s annoyance, Berrian stiffly refuses. After a sleepless night of torment, however, he accepts the justice of her rebuke and begs her forgiveness.¹²⁵

Then at the end of Francis Berrian, Flint’s hero takes his new bride on a visit to his family in Massachusetts. What impresses Martha is the level of prosperity enjoyed by the general population, but her new husband wants her to see his family occupying a position above the common herd. Berrian sends Bryan, his clownish but loyal Irish servant, ahead of the bridal party “with a good round sum of dollars” to be invested in “plenty of wine, turkies, and pies for a sociable visit of a whole winter” as well as new clothes for his family and a fresh coat of whitewash for his father’s stone fence.¹²⁶ Bryan, a veritable Potemkin preparing a village for the state visit by the empress, does his work well: Berrian finds his mother decked out in “false ‘everlastings,’ false teeth, and every thing false but her maternal heart” and his father suitably unrecognizable in a “long-tailed wig.”¹²⁷ Berrian’s whole village proceeds to partake in an extended orgy of “invitations, and dinners, and parties without number” where his less fortunate neighbors vie with one another in their degree of fawning adulation.¹²⁸ “The people there all possess, at least, a most accurate sense of the real and practical utility of dollars; and much as they look down upon all assumption of every sort, they think none the less of a man for being rich.”¹²⁹

A curious contrast, to be sure: two festive occasions, the one in aristocratic Mexico where “old and young, parents and children, masters and servants, on these occasions … join in the same dance;” the one in the United States characterized by whitewash, false hair, and envy, where “merits” are equated with dollars.¹³⁰ Martha’s kindness has a surprising allegorical significance. Much the way she cited “republican notions” to justify the inclusion of the unwashed masses in a dance, Mexico’s new government took seriously the era’s professed commitment to liberty. In 1821 the Patriots issued a provisional constitution called the Plan de Iguala extending citizenship rights to Indians, mestizos, and free afromestizos. The Constitution of 1824 began a process of gradual emancipation of slaves.¹³¹ Meanwhile Berrian supports not only the separation of the races—no “coppercolored” maidens for him—but also the reinforcement of an economic hierarchy. Looked at from one perspective, Hispanic “amiability” bodes well for the future relations of the United States and the Spanish republics. But from another angle, some troubling ambiguities emerge. The relationship points up ways in which the United States falls short of its own professed ideals—as it did in working to oppose the independence of Cuba for fear of immediate emancipation. Is Flint suggesting that it is in this failed goal of republican equality that the success of the project of independence is marred? Except for Martha’s challenge concerning Berrian’s fastidiousness about the fandango, there seem few suggestions that Flint regards Berrian’s segregation by class as unnatural or undesirable. Still, Martha’s censure hangs in the air.

Her compatible political ideals do not seem to explain Martha’s suitability as a partner for Berrian. Republicanism is easy. Seemingly more relevant are the essential characteristics of her pedigree. First, she is white. As the undisputed daughter of Gachupin (European-born) parents, Martha’s racial background is above suspicion. (In marked contrast, nine years later the novelist Robert Montgomery Bird would acknowledge that even “among the southern provinces of Spain and Portugal … the blood of Europe has mingled harmoniously with the life-tides of Africa.”¹³²) But almost as important is her breeding and secure upper-class status. What Berrian champions about Martha is not her empathy for the hoi polloi (which is suspect), nor her harmonious political inclinations, but her refinement and dazzling fortune. It is the ignorance and laziness of the mixed-race majority, not the aristocratic expectations of Martha’s family and the other members of the elite, that present the greater threat to the new order.

Analyzing Martha’s suitability as a fit spouse for Berrian suggests one more reason why U.S. suspicion of the Latin American population grew during the early nineteenth century. The fading confidence that mastering the lessons of republicanism would bring Latin America into fellowship with the United States reflects a turn away from the late eighteenth-century faith in the effects of culture and improvement to a nineteenth-century emphasis on heredity and ultimately race.¹³³ The Enlightenment had promised that inborn skills and talents could be developed and twisted habits straightened out; nineteenth-century thought tended to see determinism in bloodlines. The French Revolution and its aftermath (which included its echo in Saint Domingue) did part of the work of discouraging faith in human perfectibility.¹³⁴ Race and “blood”—noble or otherwise—would increasingly be credited with an unopposable power that no subsequent training could correct.¹³⁵ White fear of pollution by the nonwhite races contributed as well to an awareness of genetic difference that would reach its zenith (or nadir) in scientific racism.¹³⁶

That Flint himself became increasingly conflicted about the probable future of republicanism south of the U.S. border (and increasingly able to see Latin America as a context for discussing U.S. slavery) is demonstrated a few years later among the pages of his journal The Western Monthly Review. In September 1829, supplying his readers with a digest of Robert Owen’s visit to Mexico, Flint mentions the “ignorant, factious, bigoted and versatile inhabitants, who seem as little fitted to enjoy that liberty, for which they are struggling through revolutions, as the slaves of our southern country would be, if they were at once emancipated.”¹³⁷ Flint also produced “Paulina, or the Cataract of Tequendama,” a short story set in Colombia that reprises in eight pages many of the situations of the 600-page Francis Berrian. Published in 1830, its hopes for the proximate progress of republicanism were decidedly tepid, amid “the heavy, monotonous and sickening chronicle of politics, and Bolivar, and what knave of to-day has supplanted the fool of yesterday.”¹³⁸

In the years following the Panama Congress debates of 1826, many of the new states of Latin America failed to live up to the rosy predictions of U.S. optimists. Some of the republics slipped into a period of caudillismo, where local strongmen and petty dictators snatched the reins of power over separate territories. At the same time, some took the concepts of liberty and republicanism to an extreme to which the United States would not follow. Democratic politics in the post-1826 United States would furnish a dance floor where different classes might “mix together” as long as the dancers were white. In the United States the meaning of the newly emerging democracy was trimmed to exclude men of color and women generally. In the years that followed, the franchise was increasingly withheld from black freemen, and the possibility of manumission for individual slaves was similarly circumscribed. The Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, demonstrating how sorely slaves chafed under bondage, was met not with a less burdensome yoke but with heavier chains. The new republics of Latin America had extended an invitation to attend a congress, but also challenged the United States to accept an enlarged definition of its own ideals. Like Francis Berrian answering Martha’s invitation, the United States refused, instead erecting higher barriers between slavery and freedom.

The multivariate nature of U.S. responses to the Panama Mission both in and out of Congress suggests that what happened in 1826 was not an abrupt change in attitude by citizens of the United States concerning their southern neighbors. But the proclamations of difference, particularly racial difference, began crowding out expectations of fellowship and communion. The debates laid the groundwork necessary for displacing representations of slavery: they established Latin America as essentially different from the United States. In 1826 the understanding of race and slavery was only one of the ways the United States differed from Latin America, but it would come to be the most conspicuous because of changes taking place in the United States. That difference made Latin America the perfect proxy for the United States in a variety of situations.

In the years that followed, the United States continued to hold up its southern neighbors for purposes of comparison. But with the rise of Jacksonian democracy, scientific racism, and virulent abolitionist and proslavery rhetoric, the differences between Latin America and the United States became more useful than the similarities. A national print culture enabled by steam presses and cheap postage that could reach large sections of the country—indeed the nation as a whole—fostered a rhetoric that presumed to speak for the United States, and that rhetoric was often racist and xenophobic. Americans in many situations discovered what the legislators in the Panama debates had realized: Latin America provided an excellent cover for the discussion of their apprehensions and anxieties about slavery before a vast audience. In the process of redefining the relationship between the early republic of the United States and the new republics of Latin America, the definition of republicanism became more limited, and the exceptionalism and racial composition of U.S. nationalism became more pronounced.