Convinced of the special place that America had both in history and in the world of his time, Adams pursued one of the longest public careers in the country’s history, stretching from the mid-1790s until his death in 1848. He constantly strove to protect the independence of the country and to advance its prestige and standing.

In no area did his determination stand out more than in his commitment to both American territorial expansion and pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere. As a Federalist United States senator from Massachusetts, he supported the Virginia Republican President Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana from France even though his own party and his state opposed it, fearing it would in time significantly enhance Republican political strength. In Quincy Adams’s view, adding the immense Louisiana Territory stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains enhanced the greatness of his country. To him that result far outweighed the possibility that new states eventually carved from the Territory might diminish the influence of his own New England.

When Adams became secretary of state in 1817, he brought to the office a vision of his country extending all the way to the Pacific Ocean. He saw his opportunity in negotiations with Spain over the purchase of Florida, the only remaining area east of the Mississippi not then possessed by the United States.

Spain was willing to sell Florida, but worried about a powerful and expansionist United States moving closer to Mexico, the jewel of Spanish America. In those talks, Adams advocated pushing the southwestern border with Spain beyond the Sabine River, the boundary between American Louisiana and Spanish Mexico, deeper into its northern province of Texas. But, sensing Spanish apprehension on that matter, Adams instead pressed Spain to relinquish to the United States its claim to the Pacific Northwest, and Spain acquiesced.

Thus, in the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, also known as the Adams-Onis Treaty, for the first time the United States gained a legitimate claim to territory bordering the Pacific Ocean. It had become a continental nation. Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, Americans would migrate westward toward a distant frontier that Adams’ diplomacy initially made possible.

Texas would reappear in Adams’ future. As president between 1825 and 1829, he tried to purchase the province from Mexico, by then independent of Spain and the new owner of Texas. His efforts failed. Later, as a congressman in the 1830s, he opposed adding Texas to the United States—because it permitted slavery. Likewise, Adams opposed the Mexican-American War because he interpreted its origins as an aggressive move to advance slavery.

Yet, where there was no possibility of slavery, Adams remained an ardent expansionist. As a congressman in the 1840s, he vigorously backed sole American control of Oregon. Since the Transcontinental Treaty, the United States had possessed the Spanish title, but Great Britain also had a claim. And the two countries had agreed on a joint occupation, with the stipulation that with one year’s notice either party could terminate the agreement. In 1846, the United States did so, with Congressman Adams enthusiastically on the side of an American Oregon.

Adams also never stopped looking south in search of domination over the Western hemisphere. And in time, a weakened Spain would again offer opportunities.

By the early 1820s Spanish colonies in both North and South America had begun breaking away from their former colonial master. Spain simply did not have the power to hold them, but Adams worried that another European power or a concert of them would replace Spain on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

With the most powerful navy in the world, Great Britain represented the greatest potential threat. But a growing rapprochement between Great Britain and the United States led to an unexpected British overture. In the summer of 1823 the British government invited the U.S. government to stand with it and together tell the world that no other power would be permitted to replace Spain. Applauding this initiative, many prominent Americans wanted to accept.

Adams was almost alone in demurring. He wanted his country to make a unilateral declaration that the United States alone would not allow any future European colonization in the Western Hemisphere. And against considerable opposition Adams persuaded President James Monroe to adopt this position. In his message to Congress in December 1823, Monroe promulgated what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Yet, fundamentally it was the John Quincy Adams Doctrine. A major thrust of the doctrine proclaimed that the United States would not stand for any other European power establishing a new colonial empire on this side of the Atlantic. That prohibition applied to Great Britain too. The United States would dominate the Americas, Adams said, and assert its hemispheric hegemony without challenge. He wrote, “We have it; we constitute the whole of it.” From his time forward, the United States has in different ways affirmed its pre-eminence in this hemisphere.

Thus, for the future United States as a continental nation and the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, the vision and policy of John Quincy Adams were formative and far-reaching.

The post Why John Quincy Adams Was the Founder of American Expansionism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This was not Adams’ first trip to a country most Americans viewed more in the light of legend than history. Almost 30 years earlier, John Adams had sent his son, 14-year-old John Quincy, to serve as the secretary to Francis Dana, who was being dispatched to Russia to seek aid for the revolutionary cause. Catherine the Great refused to receive the American emissary, and neither diplomat nor secretary had much to do. But this remarkably perspicacious boy paid close attention to the world into which he had been cast. “The Sovereign,” he wrote to his mother Abigail, “is Absolute, in all the extent of the word … And the nobility have the same power over the people, that the Sovereign has over them. The Nation is wholly composed of Nobles and Serfs, or in other words, of Masters and Slaves.” The system, he wrote, is disadvantageous even to the ruler, for the nobles continually rebel against absolute power. Young though he was, Adams was very much a republican in the land of absolutism.

The Adams of 1809, the future president and son of a former president, was a man of wide experience. He had served as minister in The Hague and Berlin, and had represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. Adams knew Europe well, but Russia was not Europe. Adams thought about Russia much as many Europeans thought about America—as a vast, dynamic, semi-civilized, and almost dream-like place.

Even among the aristocrats who represented the nations of Europe in the Russian court, Adams cut a commanding, and quite forbidding, figure. “He sat in the frivolous assemblies of St. Petersburg like a bull-dog among spaniels,” as a British visitor put it, “and many were the times that I drew monosyllable and grim smiles from him and tried in vain to mitigate his venom.” Adams was not nearly so venomous towards other nations as he was towards America’s former colonial master, but he was a stubborn and single-minded advocate. We know from Adams’ own journal entries that he continually pressed Count Rumiantsev, Russia’s foreign minister, to break with Napoleon’s so-called Continental System, a series of embargos that kept English goods, whether carried by English ships or neutrals like the U.S., out of the ports of Europe. Russia had been compelled to enforce the system after suffering humiliating defeats by Napoleon’s army in 1806. Dozens of American ships had been bottled up in the Gulf of Cronstadt, outside of St. Petersburg.

Adams had an unexpected advantage over the much older men of the court, who had left their families at home: he had his young wife Louisa, their two-year-old son Charles Francis, and a pretty sister-in-law. While the 31-year-old Tsar Alexander trained his wandering eye on Louisa’s sister, he and his wife Elizabeth were also much taken with Charles Francis. They had lost two children before the age of two, the last one only 18 months before the Adamses arrived, and they practiced their English with Charles Francis, though the boy was more comfortable in French and German.

Whether because of Adams’ relentless prosecution of his country’s cause, or the Tsar’s fondness for his family, or perhaps even Alexander’s partiality to the United States, it had become clear by late 1809 that Russian policy was tilting away from France and towards the U.S. and other neutrals. On December 31, 1810, the Emperor issued a ukase lifting all restrictions on exports from Russia and on imports coming by sea, while at the same time imposing a heavy tariff on goods arriving overland, most of which came from France. Alexander thus broke decisively with the Continental System. This was a tremendous diplomatic triumph for the U.S., since most cargo carried to Russia by ship came in American vessels, whether the cargo was American or English. Napoleon concluded that he could not subdue Europe unless he invaded Russia, which he would do, suicidally, 18 months later.

In the early 19th century, when correspondence traveled no faster than a horse and carriage or a sailing ship could go, diplomats had a great deal of time on their hands. Adams engaged in learned banter—always in French—with his fellow ministers, several of whom were as erudite as he. (One of Adams’ colleagues whiled away his time translating Horace’s Latin Odes into Greek.) He went on long walks even in the blinding white winters, often meeting no one save the Tsar himself, out with his carriage.

The most painful rituals were social. Adams and Louisa were invited to lavish dancing parties, balls, masquerades, luncheons, and winter carnivals where ladies shot down ice hills on sleds. Everyone gambled, at cards and dice. Louisa was even more shocked at the debauchery than was her husband, who by now felt that he had seen everything. However, Adams barely survived on a modest American salary, and could reciprocate nothing, a source of great embarrassment.

Adams was deeply impressed by Russian piety, noting that even the gentry fasted for the 40 days of Lent—and then gorged themselves on the stupendous feats of Easter. Everything was strange and outsized. Men wagered on which day the ice on the Neva would break; and when, in mid-May, it finally did so, the governor of St. Petersburg brought the Tsar an ice-cold glass of river water, and the Tsar rewarded him with a hundred ducats. The Russian palaces were vast, the furnishings dazzling. At Catherine’s palace in Tsarskoye Selo—the Winter Palace—the magnificent decorations were decaying from wanton neglect. But Adams found the gravestones of three imperial greyhounds—”Sir Tom Anderson, Duchesse, and Zemire”—with inscriptions written in impeccable French verse.

Adams never lost his fascination with Russia; nor did Tsar Alexander’s fondness for the United States flag. But the bond between the two nations, the one the defender of autocratic orthodoxy, the other of republican liberty, was not a natural one. After Russia defeated Napoleon and humbled France, the Tsar placed himself at the head of the Holy Alliance, a league of princes dedicated to stamping out all traces of republican thought in Europe. In 1817, Adams became Secretary of State in the administration of President James Monroe. He was the chief intellectual force behind the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which stipulated that since “the political system of the allied powers”—the Holy Alliance—was “essentially different” from that of the United States, the U.S. would “consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” The New World, that is, would be republican, and the U.S. would be its guarantor. The ideological struggle that would come to define U.S. relations with the Soviet Union in the 20th century was thus prefigured by the friction between republican America and autocratic Russia.

Adams himself delivered a version of Monroe’s speech—in the form of a note verbale—to Baron de Tuyll, Russia’s minister to the U.S. He wanted Russia to understand that the United States would not tolerate any attempt to transplant authoritarian rule to North or South America.

The Adams of 1823, like the Adams of 1781, was a zealous patriot and a passionate republican. He would never permit his partiality towards Russia to supersede his defense of liberty.

The post America’s Relationship With Russia Has Always Been Complicated appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.