Christopher Preble, “Chapter 3: The Anti-Imperial Empire,” Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Libertarianism.org Press, 2019).

Many in America’s founding generation believed that the United States would eventually achieve greatness. How it would go about doing so was often in question.

The Founders expected to do great things in the New World. A few even believed that God willed it. Though they arrived in what would come to be known as North America, some saw the territory as a New Israel, God’s new chosen land.

They took their cue from the New Testament and their words from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” The Puritan leader John Winthrop invoked the phrase “city on a hill” in an address to his congregation sometime in 1630 while en route from Southampton, England, to New England in North America. Over the ensuing few centuries—but mostly in just the last few decades—the idea has transitioned, notes Hillsdale College’s Richard Gamble, “from biblical metaphor to nationalist myth.”

Myth or not, the idea that God had bestowed his grace on the United States and its people was widely believed. His chosen people, popular belief also went, had a special obligation to spread ideas about good governance and justice, not merely within North America but ultimately throughout the world.

But the American colonists’ bitter experience under British rule tempered their enthusiasm for imitating its methods in their quest to propagate their particular worldview. Many Americans harbored doubts about the scope of any given country’s power and influence, and whether and how that power could justly be wielded. After all, the skepticism about whether a distant metropole could exercise effective and legitimate political control over a great and growing population was one of the defining themes of the revolution that eventually threw off the British yoke. “Small islands not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care,” scoffed Thomas Paine in Common Sense, but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet, and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverses the common order of nature, it is evident they belong to different systems; England to Europe, America to itself.

Many of the Founders, and their descendants, held similar views. For the few and small to dominate the many and large defied common sense. Resistance to imperialism, British style or otherwise, thus persisted well into the 20th century and beyond.

On the other hand, Paine’s sense of what the Americans might achieve should they gain independence from England was breath-taking in its grandiosity. Indeed, it was biblical—this time of the Old Testament variety. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he predicted. “A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

In the late 18th or early 19th century, it was preposterous to think that the new nation tucked along the Atlantic seaboard in North America could wield power over others many thousands of miles away, as the British had effectively done. But as the United States prospered and grew, so did its influence.

Americans’ views on the question of what type of empire the United States could be, and should be, evolved over time. In the earliest days of independence, before the ratification of the new Constitution, Thomas Jefferson labeled the United States the “Empire of Liberty.” It would offer freedom to those already on the land and to new immigrants from the Old World. A quarter century later, after the U.S. government had enacted the Northwest Ordinance and completed the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson envisioned the United States as a great “Empire for Liberty.” “Jefferson’s revision,” explains historian Richard Immerman, “signaled a commitment to a more aggressive, proactive extension of that sphere of liberty,” throughout the New World, and perhaps someday beyond it.

This was more than a semantic distinction. Immerman notes that “empire” was not a loaded term in the late 18th century. Empire did not per se signal exploitation or necessarily imply illegitimate rule.

The American colonists who rose up against their colonial masters objected to the manner in which Britain ruled them, not its being a nascent empire. Indeed, one of the grievances against the British Crown that the revolutionaries cited as a reason for separation was the prohibition on westward expansion after the French and Indian Wars. In other words, they were offended that the British Empire was denying them the right to exploit neighboring territories.

 After the Treaty of Paris, which formalized the former colonies’ separation, the unshackled Americans got busy growing. And with each successive generation, the hunger for new land drove them inexorably west. In this sense, a number of Native American communities saw the new United States as a far more oppressive colonizer than the British Empire that came before.

 Americans justified territorial expansion throughout the contiguous landmass of North America on both economic and security grounds. They also had an eye on lands separated by water: Cuba, Santo Domingo, and other Caribbean isles; then Hawaii and the Philippines; and later Panama. By the early 20th century, the United States had in fact acquired a collection of colonies through conquest and coercive diplomacy rivaling that of many traditional European empires, though not yet close to that of Great Britain at the time.

 The single factor that may have differentiated the United States from other colonial empires was not the scale of its expansion, but the reluctance that accompanied it. The United States is, writes Immerman, “an imperialist with a history of opposing imperialism.” It encountered “an unprecedented amount of trouble imposing its will on its dependents.” In the raucous rough and tumble of American politics, there were always those who accused their political adversaries of betraying the nation’s most cherished principles whenever some major territorial acquisition was in the offing. Such charges were invariably answered by loud protestations to the contrary. “Americans’ self-image as the bastion of liberty and their identification with the Constitution,” which enshrined classical liberals’ ideas about the proper balance between the government and the people it served, Immerman explains, constrained both the politics and practice of the American empire.

 Louisiana

American history students are taught that Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 purchase of the vast territory of Louisiana from France was a signature achievement of his presidency and an essential step on the path to American greatness. Even those historians who were not generally inclined to extol Jefferson and his governing philosophy were effusive in their praise. Henry Adams recorded that the acquisition of Louisiana had been “an event so portentous as to defy measurement” and an “unparalleled” diplomatic move.

The price was a bargain: 828,000 square miles at a cost of $15 million, a mere 4 cents per acre. It paved the way for westward expansion, eventually all the way to the Pacific. The acquisition of Louisiana eliminated any lingering French threat in North America and removed a buffer between the United States and Spain, bringing new pressure to bear on the declining Spanish empire. Jefferson saw the Louisiana Purchase as a key component of his vision for creating an Empire of Liberty.

But while most Americans at the time shared Jefferson’s enthusiasm, some questioned the move. Many of these criticisms were grounded in classical liberals’ anxieties about the dangerous growth of state power, particularly in the realm of foreign affairs. Jefferson had clearly violated the limited and enumerated powers of the Constitution in concluding the purchase without Congress’s approval. By what authority, critics wondered, had he pledged to dramatically expand the supposedly limited federal government’s dominion and pay this substantial sum?

 Jefferson had to overcome his own qualms about the purchase. The Constitution, he noted, “made no provision for our holding foreign territory, still less for incorporating foreign nations into our Union.” To Sen. John Breckinridge of Kentucky, he confided that his unilateral executive action clearly constituted “an act beyond the Constitution.”

On the other hand, Jefferson was worried that Bonaparte would change his mind and renege on the agreement. Jefferson therefore hoped to conclude the deal quickly and avoid needless delays. His cabinet officers, including his secretary of state, James Madison, convinced him that a constitutional amendment was unnecessary. Jefferson convened a special session of Congress in October 1803 to approve the sale and pass the necessary companion legislation. The Senate vote far exceeded the required two-thirds for treaty ratification—a mere five senators voted against—and the House swiftly passed legislation providing the necessary funds.

The dissenters, primarily anti-Jeffersonian Federalists from New England, were a minority within a minority. The few Louisiana holdouts were accused of playing politics or downright treachery. Partisanship and a visceral distrust of Jefferson clearly played a role in their opposition. But these men, including Sens. James Hillhouse of Connecticut, Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, and William Plumer of New Hampshire, were among the first to display a fealty for Constitutional principles that might—and they said should—supersede the drive for territorial expansion. Pickering went so far as to propose northern disunion in 1804. Pickering’s plan, notes historian David Mayers, “was based upon defensible concern for the Constitution, understandable anxiety about the shifting balance of power between north and south, and premonitions of a stormy future centered on the slavery question.”

The Federalists’ strong opposition to the expansion of slavery was multifaceted. It was partly political. The three-fifths clause of the Constitution had granted slave-owning states such as Virginia a numerical advantage in Congress and the Electoral College. The Federalists, concentrated in northern states, had seen this numbers game play to their disadvantage when Jefferson, a Virginian, bested the sitting president John Adams, from Massachusetts, in the election of 1800. The addition of more slave-holding states from the newly acquired Louisiana Territory threatened to deepen the Federalists’ electoral distress.

But the Louisiana dissenters also offered a moral argument against the expansion of U.S. territory and thus the spread of what Senator Hillhouse called “a serious evil.” Hillhouse also worried that the expansion of slavery into Louisiana would threaten national security. Because “these slaves [were] men [with the] the passions and feelings of men,” the danger of slave rebellion was ever present. Louisiana dissenters recounted horrific tales from white refugees of the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) to buttress this point. The need to extinguish this danger would necessitate a standing army to keep the peace, an idea that was anathema to the Federalists—and another clear violation of the Constitution.

Such arguments failed to persuade most Americans. The right of slave-owners to carry into the new territories what the law recognized as property was never seriously in question. Slave-owners alleged that only Africans could safely cultivate the land, whereas whites would struggle to survive in the oppressive heat and humidity of the Deep South. Ensuring the most efficient use of this vast land, of importance to both the northern and southern economies, thus depended—so the argument went—upon slavery. The brief but heated debate over Louisiana presaged later arguments about slavery that would eventually tear the nation apart. They next played out in the debate over another major territorial expansion: the admission of Texas to the Union and the accession of former Mexican lands.

 War with Mexico

“The United States,” notes historian George Herring, “had long coveted Texas,” and in the 1840s other Mexican territories, including California and modern-day New Mexico, “also became objects of desire.”

The rationales in favor of acquiring these lands echoed those from the brief debate over Louisiana—especially the idea that American security and prosperity both depended on territorial expansion. But the presence of over 30,000 former U.S. citizens who had accepted the Mexican government’s offer of cheap cotton-growing land added a distinctive flavor to the Texas debate.

These men had uprooted their families—and their slaves—and moved west, but they soon grew tired of what they perceived to be an overly intrusive Mexican government meddling in their business affairs. Concern that Mexico might ban the use of slave labor only heightened the recent arrivals’ anxiety. When they declared Texas an independent state in 1836, the Mexican government attempted to put down the revolt. It instead got a war with the United States that would ultimately result in a humiliating defeat and the loss of 40 percent of its territory.

The Texas rebels had successfully drawn the U.S. government to their side. In truth, it didn’t take that much effort; President James K. Polk, an avowed expansionist, was only too happy for the opportunity.

But not all Americans were as enthused as Polk about Texas’s accession to the Union, specifically, or territorial expansion generally.

Some questioned the wisdom or even the need to expand for the purposes of defending the United States from foreign threats. The likelihood of such threats materializing, they said, was vanishingly small. According to a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln in a speech in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, the greater danger came from within:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Others voiced similar concerns. Daniel Webster fretted over the “dangerous tendency and doubtful consequences to enlarge the boundaries of this country, or the territories over which our laws are now established.” “If we would make our institutions permanent,” Webster continued, “there must be some limit to the extent of our territory.”

Several years later, Webster opposed the Mexican War on the same grounds: expanding the United States far beyond its current borders would weaken the institutions of government. He said:

We want no extension of territory, we want no accession of new States. The country is already large enough. I do not speak of any cession which may be made in the establishment of boundaries, or of the acquisition of a port or two on the Pacific, for the benefit of navigation and commerce. But I speak of large territories, obtained by conquest, to form States to be annexed to the Union; and I say I am opposed to such acquisition altogether.

Webster and other northerners correctly worried that the new states acquired from the Mexican War would likely be slave states, upsetting the delicate balance of power in Congress that had been established in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. But they also complained of how the Mexican War had provided an opening for President Polk to circumvent some of the most cherished principles of the Constitution, including especially Congress’s control over the war power.

In 1846, Polk had sent American troops into territory claimed jointly by Mexico and the United States. When Mexican forces attacked U.S. General Zachary Taylor’s contingent, Congress declared war. Polk had effectively circumvented Congress in order to precipitate a conflict. Two years later, Congress formally censured Polk for exceeding his authority, but by then the damage had already been done: Polk’s actions had disturbed the peace and upset the balance between the executive and Congress.

Polk’s actions caught the attention—and ire—of a young lawmaker from Illinois. “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,” wrote Abraham Lincoln in a letter to his law partner, “and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purposes—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.” He went on:

The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

Lincoln understood this history, but Polk understood power. He wouldn’t be the last president to exceed his authority in the quest to expand the boundaries of the United States. He also wouldn’t be the last president forced to contend with the opponents of such expansion. The most consequential period of territorial expansion concerned the acquisition of faraway lands, chiefly islands separated by hundreds or many thousands of miles of water from the American people and the American government. The next chapter focuses on the spirited debate occasioned by the United States’ brief war with Spain and especially by its handling of Spain’s former colony, the Philippines.

Christopher Preble is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and the author of Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy.

Image: Reuters