Monroe’s Doctrine

“I believe strictly in the Monroe Doctrine, in our Constitution, and in the laws of God,” said Mary Baker Eddy in 1923, a century after Monroe propose his doctrine. It’s an interesting list, in an interesting order.

One of the virtues of Jay Sexton’s The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America lucid and illuminating history of “Monroe’s Doctrine” is the way he explains Eddy’s passion for what was originally a narrow, prosaic compromise meant to address a specific set of demands in foreign and domestic policy. Sexton shows with clarity that Monroe’s statement about the America’s is not a “Doctrine” or a “Declaration” but a site of controversy. It has been used to support pro- and anti-slavery causes, pro- and anti-imperialism ideologies, pro- and anti-interventionist policies. As every American leader has to coopt the Declaration and Constitution to their political ends, so too everyone has to genuflect before the Doctrine.

Another of Sexton’s achievements is to demonstrate that Monroe did not actually accomplish his aim. His aim was accomplished, but not by him.

Monroe warned off European powers from setting up new colonies in the Americas, but included no specifics about how the US would respond. As it turned out, it wasn’t up to them anyway. Britain had already been making overtures to the US to cooperate against the freshly aggressive monarchist powers of the Continent, bound together in the Holy Alliance, and by siding with the US Britain effectively ensured that no European power would even attempt to set up a beachhead in America’s backyard. British leaders saw the commercial advantages of an American alliance; Americans saw that they could benefit from cooperation with Britain both economically and in security terms. Not that anyone in Europe really wanted to colonize the Americas anyway, though the absence of threat did not keep politicians from milking rumors for their own purposes. Plus choses changent . . . .

Sexton is also very good on noting the interactions between British policy and the US more generally. The British abolition of slavery, for example, sent tremors through Southern politicians: “Once the engine behind the slave trade and its entrenchment in North America, the world’s most powerful nation now committed itself to ending slavery. It is hard to overstate the significance to the United State of the United Kingdom’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which began the process of emancipation in British possessions in the Caribbean. British abolition further radicalized both sides of the slavery debate in the United States,” both encouraging radical abolitionists to demand an immediate end to slavery and making Southern politicians dig in their heels.

He also has these important observations about American exceptionalism: America thought itself unique, “Yet it emerged and evolved in relation to the foreign policies of other expansionist powers. The British empire most often provided a model – both positive and negative – for nineteenth-century Americans. Its diverse forms allowed Americans to find in it what they wanted. Anticolonialists scored political points at home by condemning British practices in Ireland and India; proponents of nonintervention pointed to the state papers of Lord Castlereagh, which articulated this principle before the 1823 [Monroe] message; naval theorists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan marveled at the triumphs of the Royal Navy; businessmen and exporters mimicked the strategies employed by their British counterparts; American statesmen found inspiration in the tactics of ‘informal imperialism’ employed by the British in Latin America and East Asia. Though the Monroe Doctrine aimed to supplant British power in the Western Hemisphere, it drew deeply from the practices of the British Empire in Latin America.”