Who Speaks for America? Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy

SECTION I

The Rise and Fall of a Liberal Republic: A Short History

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Virtue, Commerce, and Perpetual Motion

"I am not among those who fear the people."
--Thomas Jefferson, 1816

The historical record of the relationship between America's foreign policy and the democratic desires of its people is decidedly sketchy. Perhaps because historians have shared the elitist biases of foreign policymakers, or perhaps owing to the paucity of reliable data, the historical profession has often failed to do better than offer patriotic cliches or some rough equations that fail to stand up to scrutiny. For instance, Dexter Perkins, perhaps the most respected American diplomatic historian of his day, argued in the 1950s that "In a sense that is true in no such degree in other nations, American diplomatic action has been determined by the people." However, he neglected to present any evidence for this assertion. For generations, Melvin Small observes, "historians interested in public opinion have concentrated on elite opinion and confused the two." The most obvious examples occur when historians equate the views of publishing conglomerates and newspaper editors with those of the masses. Small notes that even Thomas A. Bailey, like Perkins a leading postwar historian, used the words "the people" when he meant "the Washington Post." Rare indeed, says Small, is the scholar sufficiently scrupulous to qualify his assertion with a caveat like "the people, who may have agreed with the New York Times when it stated editorially...."

    Were historians to cite their sources more carefully, however, the problem would still remain. Newspaper editorials are a poor substitute for public opinion. Historically, many publishers have acted as self-conscious cogs in a given politician's machine, or vice versa. (John Quincy Adams once complained of how expensive it was to buy newspaper editors.) Historians and political scientists, moreover, have had a great deal of trouble demonstrating what, if any, effect newspaper editorials have on public views--to say nothing of the difficulty of gauging the public's impact on policymakers. Certainly senior officials regularly credit "public opinion" for inspiring their decisions, but to accept such assertions at face value is naive in the extreme. As Bernard Cohen points out, when a policymaker attributes a decision to the dictates of public opinion, "he is explaining away a variety of complicated delicate political constraints on his and his colleagues' behavior by passing them onto the one legitimate political actor that cannot answer back, defend itself, or take offense at the charge."

     Polling data can be helpful when viewed over a sufficient time continuum, but the process did not begin in earnest until the 1930s. Regarding the first 140 years of the nation's history, we are frequently forced to reconstruct the public's views by inference. This task, however, is a thankless one. With the exception of the Founders' generation, Americans have not traditionally cared passionately about foreign affairs beyond issues of war and peace, and neither have their local newspapers. The traditional tools of the historical trade--letters; diaries; and birth, marriage, and death certificates--are of precious little value in reconstructing foreign policy attitudes.

    Ironically, the problem of evidence is least apparent in the nation's earliest days. The Revolutionary generation of Americans demonstrated a remarkable commitment to the politics of foreign policy. True, the franchise was limited in many states to propertied white men. But not since ancient Athens, in Gordon Wood's estimable opinion, had even so limited a group appeared to practice the art of self-governance with such passion and dedication. The colonists who made the Revolution were a people obsessed by politics. The Revolution made common people not merely voters, but, for the first time in history, rulers. "The celebration of common people in government," observes Wood, "became the essence of American democracy." And foreign policy, notes Richard Barnet, whose Rockets' Red Glare is perhaps the most penetrating examination of the impact of regular people on America's debate on war and peace, became "a burning issue in the infant Republic because it was a metaphor for the political struggle to define what the United States was to be."

    Revolutionary Americans argued over the finer points of foreign and military policy in churches, in taverns, at local guild meetings, and at assemblies called specifically for those purposes. Political pamphlets and posters appeared everywhere. In 1776, Tom Paine's Common Sense required nineteen editions and perhaps as many as 150,000 copies printed, a degree of saturation that would be equivalent to roughly 20 million copies in today's market. This commitment to public life spilled over into the Republic's early life, filling the wide-open spaces that would determine political precedents for centuries to come.

    Battle lines were drawn between Federalists and anti-Federalists. The former, led by Alexander Hamilton, generally supported measures designed to enlarge and strengthen the federal government, while the latter, led by Thomas Jefferson, concerned themselves primarily with restricting the government's capacity for arbitrary and tyrannical rule. Although the divisions between the two sides were serious and significant in their own contexts, for our purposes they obscure more than they reveal. Each side shared an overarching ideological commitment to a vision of political life that was itself conflicted and often self-contradictory: the quest for a simultaneously republican and liberal political order. The conflicts and contradictions between these two ideals defined the ideological parameters of the first century of debate on American democracy and foreign policy. The painful irony of this history is that the perceived practical underpinnings of this ideology--ceaseless commercial and material advancement coupled with increasingly expanded executive power--ultimately undermined the survival of the very values they were intended to uphold.

"Republicanism" is among the most elusive of political concepts. John Adams complained that "there is not a more unintelligible word in the English language." Still, it meant a great deal to the Founders. Self-consciously modeled on what they interpreted to be the values of classical Athens and Rome, updated by Niccolo Machiavelli, the Founders' republicanism sought to regenerate the human spirit by reordering the society that nurtured it. Good government and good people would reinforce each other in a dynamic that called forth the virtuous qualities that lay dormant in the human soul. The very act of self-government would ennoble those who participated in it.

    Democracy comprised a rather insignificant portion of these virtues. It was not, moreover, intended to be expanded beyond the class of leisured, well-educated gentlemen whose clearheaded and unsentimental leadership had made the Revolution possible. John Adams, for instance, believed "the people" to be "ignorant, strongly prejudiced, vindictive in their resentments, incapable of being influenced except by their fears of punishment." James Madison simultaneously reinforced and moderated Adams's viewpoint with the Burkean notion that the common people could be trusted to choose their leaders and no more. Madison believed that what political "virtue" rested in common people could be found exclusively in their "intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom" to lead them. He insisted on the need to "refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations." Democratic republicans did not dare argue that the people in eighteenth-century America were competent to rule themselves. Rather, they rested their hopes in the creation of an educated polity. As radical democrat Samuel Adams explained to James Warren during the Continental Congress, "No People will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can they easily be subdued, when Knowledge is duffused [sic] and Virtue preserved." Sam Adams's abiding faith in the essential educability of the common citizen for democratic governance remained an essential component of American liberal thought through John Dewey's arguments in the mid-twentieth century, while his cousin John's skepticism could still be heard in George Kennan's and Walter Lippmann's respective responses.

    As with so many revolutionary leaders, the Wise Men of Philadelphia lost control of the minds they inspired, albeit to a far milder degree than most. All this talk of freedom, liberty, and equality filtered into taverns, churches, and political pamphlets from whence it emerged carrying considerably different connotations. In republican discourse, the working man found a powerful engine for a transformation of his self-understanding. Hating taxes and distrusting most forms of centralized power, white male Americans embraced democratic politics with verve and passion. Authority became so dispersed it almost ceased to exist. Social and political distinctions between the rulers and the ruled following the Revolution all but dissipated. The soil of republican liberty fertilized the roots of democratic self-rule, however inadvertently.

    No less important than republicanism to the Founders' conception of politics was John Locke's conception of liberty. Locke, the foremost English philosopher of the seventeenth century, wrote his two treatises on government during the period in which his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, sought to exclude James, then Duke of York, from succession to the throne. He therefore argued for a consensual basis of self-government to replace that of divine rights. Lockean liberty was born of the belief that personal freedom was "bounded only by such limits as are necessary if others are to enjoy the same extensive personal freedom." Locke's vision meshed quite easily with the Reformist Protestant character of most Americans' religious self-definition. Locke's Second Treatise outlined a social contract whereby individuals, "for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates," were willing to forego some of the rights found in "the state of nature" so that they might pursue those rights they deemed to be most important to what the Founders would call "the pursuit of happiness."

    Needless to say, Locke's notion of liberty evinced a decidedly problematic relationship to the word's republican connotation. The republican tradition asked its citizens to control their private passions and subordinate their individual interests to the public good, with the latter resting on deference and hierarchy. Liberty, in republican political theory, depends on a sharing of self-government; on deliberating, in Michael Sandel's words, "with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community." To be "virtuous" in republican terms implied a willingness to sacrifice private interests for the sake of the public good. This required of its citizens a degree of freedom and independence from the petty interests of the marketplace that would prove impossible in a democratic capitalist society that took this same marketplace as its template. How to resolve this dichotomy? One group of historians poses a division that identifies the Federalists as the party of Locke and the anti-Federalists as that of Machiavelli. Another insists that the crucial distinction lies between the ruling and the ruled. But the lines between the two overlap so frequently that they functionally disappear. The conflict between liberalism and republicanism took place not merely between the leaders and the led, but inside the hearts and minds of the men of Philadelphia themselves. The two competing tendencies clashed and meshed in the breast of the American body politic, creating a powerful but unstable hybrid of liberal republicanism. The attempt of American politicians to appeal to these self-contradictory impulses simultaneously--to pursue both "virtue" and "commerce," as it were--defines much of the ideological instability that has characterized American behavior in the world. In foreign policy, the most popular solution would be to apply the rhetoric of the defense of virtue to support a policy driven by the need for expanded commerce, coupled with some decidedly nondemocratic means to help obscure the inherent contradiction.

One significant result of the American Revolution was the repudiation of a key ideological foundation of British parliamentary democracy, that of "virtual representation." In the period leading up to the colonial revolt, the British replied to the colonial slogan "no taxation without representation" with the argument that while the colonies might not send their own representatives to Parliament, they were nevertheless "virtually" represented there. The moral responsibility of each member of the Lords and Commons was not merely the parochial self-interest of his district but the welfare of the entire empire. The leaders of the revolt did not buy this argument when the British made it in 1775 and neither did the merchants, farmers, and mechanics when propertied colonial classes made it following the Revolution. Representation, argued Madison, became "the pivot" on which the whole American system of government turned.

    Virtual representation would ultimately achieve a comeback in foreign policy, however, as international affairs reasserted itself as an arena of politics that would become divorced from the rough-and-tumble of local political concerns. This gradual reassertion of privilege was an indirect result of three concurrent trends: the accumulation of the accoutrements of empire by the once tiny colonies, the accretion of de facto executive power by the presidency, and the eclipse of participatory notions of citizenship that accompanied the physical expansion of the nation and its simultaneous population explosion. Between the Revolution and the War of 1812, however, the battles the young nation fought over the character of its external relations were its fiercest. The very survival of the Revolution appeared to rest on the republic's self-definition as an ally of either Britain or France. On the admittedly unscientific means we have for discovering to what degree the battles between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian factions represented the larger masses, history offers us little evidence to doubt that the two sides represented deep divisions in the larger populace.

    The elements of liberal republican foreign policy derived in part from the exigencies of the Americans' strategic dilemma and in part from the precepts of their contradictory political philosophy. A crucial component of the Founders' republicanism was the fear of the corruptive power of luxury. "Commerce produces money, money Luxury, and all three are incompatible with Republicans," wrote John Adams. The foundation of a virtuous government was men who were "sober, industrious and frugal." This view was endorsed across the ideological spectrum by Thomas Paine, who wrote in Common Sense that "commerce diminishes the spirit both of patriotism and military defense and would eventually destroy America's soul." In a pattern destined to repeat itself for the next two centuries, the Founders' liberal desires overwhelmed their republican beliefs. Alexander Hamilton, rather than Paine or Adams, became the truest prophet of capitalist America. He believed commerce to be "the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth." A commitment to free trade, a philosophical bedrock of classical liberalism, overpowered the Founders' republican fear of moral corruption. The very same John Adams who thought commerce incompatible with republicanism pronounced himself "against all shackles on human trade," insisting "that all the world would gain by setting commerce at perfect liberty." Demonstrating what would become a time-honored practice of knitting a (liberal) economic necessity into a philosophic virtue, Paine too came to believe that commerce could "temper the human mind," help peoples to "know and understand each other," and have a "civilizing effect on all who participated in it." Despondent in 1787, Madison complained to Jefferson of "symptoms, truly alarming, which have tainted the faith of the most orthodox republicans." Americans lacked "industry, economy, temperance and other republican virtues." They had become "a Luxurious, Voluptuous, indolent, expensive people without Economy or Industry." Nothing could have been more warming to Hamilton's Lockean heart, nor have provided more fertile soil for what has become today a two-century-long commitment to the ideology (if not the practice) of free trade.

Americans believed their Revolution was a new "chapter in the history of man," in Jefferson's words. The two great oceans that divided them from the rest of the world's great powers, along with the magnificent physical bounty provided by their lands, constituted, in their eyes, a sign of divine providence. As a consequence, Americans considered themselves to be outside of, and unbounded by, the system of great-power politics that had historically guided relations between nations. "We have it in our power," cried Paine, in a phrase frequently borrowed by Ronald Reagan, "to begin the world all over again." Even the profoundly unsentimental Hamilton can be seen to be imbued with this intoxicating vision. "It seems to have been reserved," he wrote in "Federalist 1," "to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force ... a wrong election of the part we shall act, may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind." In his choice of words, Hamilton was echoing the no less intoxicated Benjamin Franklin, who wrote from Paris to a friend in 1777, "It is a common observation here that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own. It is a glorious task assigned to us by Providence, which has, I trust, given us spirit and virtue equal to it."

    The Founders blamed the European system of politics between nation states for the breeding of war and poverty. Their natural inclination was to attempt to withdraw themselves entirely from the world of diplomats and armies. Albert Gallatin, then a Republican leader in Congress, attempted to limit the number of American ministers accredited to European capitals. He argued that as the primary purpose of American foreign policy was commercial, mere consuls could handle all the necessary diplomacy. Americans even refused to appoint diplomats with the rank of ambassador until 1893, arguing that the rank smacked of royalism. Gallatin and his Jeffersonian allies also sharply opposed Federalist plans to expand the navy, which they insisted would threaten the survival of republican institutions at home. Americans sought to enjoy the material benefits of liberal trade while simultaneously protecting their fragile republican institutions from the degenerative moral viruses running rampant in the Old World. No matter how just the cause of a foreign power might be, the Founders counseled abstention.

    In what would become the Magna Carta of early American foreign policy, President Washington in his farewell address counseled his countrymen to keep their society pure by remaining above the petty animosities of European politics and to value peace above almost any other goal. While he recommended "harmony" and "liberal intercourse" with all nations, Americans were never to "seek nor grant exclusive favors or preferences." "There can be no greater error," Washington insisted, "than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation." Washington's almost visceral loathing of war was born of his experience of command. His hope that the United States "never unsheathe the sword except in self-defense" and his "devout" prayer "that we remain at peace to the end of time" provided the central themes of the farewell address.

    The Founders enshrined in the Constitution their abhorrence of war by explicitly vesting in Congress, rather than the president, war-making powers. As Madison wrote to Jefferson, "The Constitution supposes what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature." Jefferson called this decision an "effectual check to the dog of war." The Federalists did not dispute this argument. Even Hamilton, who consistently argued for a strong executive with a large standing army and war-making capability at his disposal, nevertheless agreed that "it is the peculiar and exclusive province of Congress, when the nation is at peace, to change that state into a state of war." Indeed, only one delegate to either the Philadelphia convention or any of the state ratifying conventions, Pierce Butler, even suggested that presidents be constitutionally vested with the power to begin a war. When Elbridge Gerry responded that he "never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war," Butler disowned the idea. "The point," John Hart Ely contends, was "to `clog the road to combat' by requiring the concurrence of a number of people of various points of view."

The final peace treaty of 1783 left Canada in English hands. Any number of American politicians predicted renewed war, owing perhaps to Hamilton's analysis in "Federalist Six" that "it has ... become a sort of axiom in politics, that vicinity, or nearness of situation, constitutes a nation's natural enemies." Nevertheless, these same Americans favored a policy of tilting toward England, in part for balance-of-power reasons and in part because they saw themselves in some important fashion as "modified Englishmen" and viewed French revolutionary fervor with fear and apprehension. To the Jeffersonians, however, whose most profound emotional attachments remained with France for its (perceived) crusade on behalf of liberty, England represented the embodiment of monarchist tyranny. Economic self-interest reinforced the ideological proclivities of both sides. To Hamilton, who hoped to midwife a powerful commercial economy in America, the center of the world lay clearly within the British empire. But France was the prime market for the agricultural goods of the South.

    The two sides fought each other viciously through Washington's two presidential terms, for neither group recognized a division between foreign and domestic affairs. Virtually every local issue, notes Richard Barnet, "was mixed up in some way with foreign affairs: matters of trade; navigation on the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, or rivers further to the West held either by Britain, France, or Spain; dealings with Indian tribes and frontier security...." The degree of popular involvement in the questions of war and peace is astonishing by contemporary standards. When the French emissary "Citizen Genet" arrived in 1793 to seek American support for the French Revolutionary War with England, grocers, bakers, sail makers, and lawyers organized themselves into voluntary brigades should war with England ensue. When John Jay concluded a treaty to resolve Anglo-American tensions by largely placating the British two years later, opponents burned him in effigy and pelted his representatives with rotten vegetables at every opportunity. When Congressman Frederick Muhlenberg changed his mind on the treaty and voted in favor of its implementation, he lost his next election and received a stab wound from his brother-in-law for his troubles. Anti-Federalist political clubs, called "democratic societies" and "republican societies," also sprouted up during this period in Philadelphia, Norfolk, Lexington, and other major cities to support the pro-French Jeffersonians against the pro-British Hamiltonians. The Federalists regularly attacked the societies as "nurseries of sedition" and insisted that the people who created them were lacking in political and constitutional legitimacy. But they also set up some societies of their own. Together, these helped lay the groundwork for the creation of the American two-party political system.

    How to assuage the demands of an extremely unwieldy democratic process while at the same time conducting a patient, effective foreign policy that would secure the blessings of trade without entangling the New World in corrupt Old World political arrangements? Here lies the crux of America's still unresolved "Tocqueville problem." In the opening moments of the new nation's history, this tension submerged itself in the personal prestige of General Washington. On the basis of his understanding of the Constitution's "advise and consent" clause, Washington initially attempted to consult with the Senate in advance of negotiating treaties. During his first visit there, on August 22, 1789, to discuss a potential treaty with southern Indians, Washington found his dignity so profoundly affronted that he immediately retreated and allegedly said he "would be damned if he ever went there again." After this, Washington did not much concern himself with the democratic basis of his foreign policy. He sought to portray himself as somehow above the Jay treaty controversy (while politicking furiously for it), and pretended to ignore the creation of competing political parties as well. Despite the incident just described, the persuasive power of the Revolutionary general's special standing decreased the political necessities of democratic consultation conversely.

    Unfortunately, Washington's suprapolitical pose would set a precedent for future occupants of his office who wished to compromise the democratic accountability of their diplomatic endeavors. Washington observed in his farewell address that "in proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened." At the same time, however, he inaugurated a tradition of presidential secrecy in foreign affairs that would ultimately make such enlightenment impossible. For instance, in 1790 Washington presented the Senate with a secret article for a treaty with the Creek Indians, and later, in 1795, he refused to supply the House with details of the treaty that Jay had negotiated with Great Britain. In the latter case, he demanded that the legislature appropriate funds to carry out its terms, but these he refused to identify despite repeated requests, insisting that his "duty to [his] office forbade it. The great enlightenment philosopher John Stuart Mill has asked how, without publicity, democratic citizens might be expected to "check or encourage what they were not permitted to see?" Virtually every one of Washington's successors has sought to evade this question--an evasion that lies at the epicenter of the failure of the U.S. political system to apply the principle of democratic accountability to the conduct of its foreign policy.

    John Adams enjoyed none of Washington's majestic political advantages. The nascent uprisings that continuously simmered throughout Washington's two terms threatened to explode into organized violence and perhaps even civil war as Washington retired to Mount Vernon. Planning for war with France, Adams helped push through the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 as an unsuccessful means of silencing his most intemperate critics. The curtailment of free speech the acts entailed energized the opposition and threatened the entire basis of the Federalist project when Republicans responded with the Virginia and Kentucky statutes designed to nullify them. With his own party leading the country toward an ill-considered war, Adams unselfishly sacrificed his hopes for reelection for a peaceful compromise. The second president believed his final political act was the "most disinterested and meritorious action of [his] life." He would later write, "I desire no other inscription over my gravestone than: `Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800." By willfully forfeiting the election of 1800 to keep the country at peace, Adams set a standard for statesmanship that few presidents have sought to equal.

Historians tend to treat President Thomas Jefferson's foreign policy--in particular, the Louisiana Purchase--as a paradox, if not a betrayal. Here was the ur-Jeffersonian adopting decidedly heavy-handed Hamiltonian methods to achieve what appeared to be expansionist, aggrandizing Hamiltonian goals. Indeed, while Jefferson had once championed the rights of the House of Representatives in the treaty-making process, as president he expected the same body to authorize enormous sums of money to be used at his discretion while refusing to offer any details to the elected representatives of the people.

    There is an important point here, to be certain. But to focus exclusively on the betrayal is to miss the significance of the philosophy that underlay it. This would be a costly mistake, since Jefferson's willingness to face up to a philosophical contradiction of liberal republicanism, as he understood it, helped determine the contours of the next century of American foreign policy.

    Jefferson shared with Tom Paine a view of human relations that divided society into two groups: the "productive classes," including laborers, farmers, artisans, small merchants, and manufacturers; and "the state," which consisted of the "plundering classes" of government officials, standing armies, blue-water navies, and holders of government monopolies. War, wrote Paine, was a tool of the plundering classes designed to expropriate the value of the labor of the productive classes, and to distract the common man from "looking into the defects and abuses of government." Its practice was encouraged by governments because without it, the plundering classes would "have no excuse for its enormous revenue and taxation, except it can prove that, somewhere or another, it has enemies." Jefferson the politician was forever haunted by the degraded lives and specter of mass poverty he observed among the landless peasants of France. He became convinced that this potential tragedy was the worst that could befall a republican nation. If the American people ever sank to a similar level, he reasoned, American liberties would sink irretrievably with them.

    Jefferson's fear led him on an urgent search for the origins of the Old World's unhappy state. He concluded that the European peasant's wretched condition derived first and foremost from his landlessness. To Jefferson, yeoman farmers were "the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, in whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." Jefferson so profoundly believed that republican citizenship depended on property that he once proposed that his home state of Virginia grant a minimum of fifty acres to any man who owned less. With Madison, he believed that political liberty could survive only under conditions of economic and social equality. The central task of Jeffersonian statecraft was thus to create and maintain an open and roughly equal society where all had access to enough land to support republican virtue. This task was complicated, however, by Jefferson's belief, enunciated by Paine, that as societies grew in wealth and power, liberty and equality simultaneously eroded. Though human nature remained constant, economic and social environments might be constructed to minimize concentrations of wealth, dampen personal ambitions, and thus water the tree of republican liberty. But because even yeoman farmers operated in a capitalist marketplace with highly developed commercial networks--Locke dogged Machiavelli at every step--they needed to continue to grow in order to maintain their prosperity, and hence their virtue.

    Jefferson's solution lay in the great open spaces of the American West. These spaces would draw Americans out of the morally corrupt cities of the East and encourage the social equality that republican liberty required. "By enlarging the empire of liberty," Jefferson believed, "we multiply its auxiliaries, and provide new sources of renovation, should its principles, at any time, degenerate, in those portions of our country which gave them birth." The Republic's growth across the North American continent would prevent, or at least indefinitely delay, the cyclical process of growth, maturity, and decay through which all past societies had traveled. Jefferson's project, however, was fraught with two great ironies. The more obvious one was the necessity that he adopt Hamiltonian methods--and thereby establish Hamiltonian precedents--to free his nation from what he perceived to be its nightmarish Hamiltonian future. By purchasing Louisiana without explicit congressional sanction, Jefferson transgressed what had previously been a sacred political boundary--his own understanding of the Constitution. The second great irony of Jefferson's decision, of no less gravity and importance for the future of both American democracy and its foreign policy, was his equation of the preservation of republican virtue and liberal prosperity with ceaseless physical expansion. Jefferson could conceive of no other path to assure the survival of republican virtue and democratic governance. Though he hated war, and all of the expropriation of local power and prerogatives it involved, Jefferson was willing to threaten war alongside his enemy, Britain, against his beloved France in order to secure the cherished agricultural lebensraum represented by the Louisiana territory. Such calculations by future American presidents in pursuit of further expansion would eventually strangle the very goals and principles in whose pursuit Jefferson made his original Faustian bargain.

    The sale came about when Spain ceded the trans-Mississippi region known as Louisiana (except for New Orleans) to France. In October 1802, the Spanish commander in New Orleans closed the Mississippi River to American commerce, depriving westerners of the major outlet for their agricultural produce. Upon hearing rumors that Spain planned to transfer New Orleans to France, Jefferson was ready to use force, but first, in early 1803, he sent James Monroe to Paris with instructions to try to buy New Orleans and West Florida. Monroe found France's foreign minister, Talleyrand, ready to sell all of Louisiana. A slave rebellion in Haiti made its food production irrelevant, and with war with England on the horizon, Napoleon preferred to have his troops back in Europe. The result was Jefferson's congressionally unsanctioned decision to purchase a land mass as large as all thirteen colonies added together. Claiming the survival of the nation was at stake, President Jefferson asserted a "higher obligation" than "scrupulous adherence to [the] written law" of the United States Constitution.

    Jefferson and his countrymen saw no contradiction between their antipathy toward Old World power politics and their own continual territorial acquisition. Their displacement of the French and the British from the western territories seemed a matter of divine destiny rather than foreign policy. Upon leaving office in 1809, Jefferson told Madison that after Florida, Cuba, and Canada were annexed, the United States would constitute "such an empire for liberty as [the world] has never surveyed since the creation. And I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government." Indeed, it was Madison's own theory of the "extended republic" that had lain the groundwork for Jefferson's sublime confidence. ("This form of government," Madison wrote in 1787, "in order to effect its purposes, must operate not within a small but an extensive sphere.") Like his predecessor, he rested his belief in America's destiny on the premise that the United States would continue to expand almost indefinitely, but without resort to military conquest. Madison, too, condemned war as the root of all evil--the precursor of taxes and armies and all other "instruments for hiring the many under the domination of the few." Indeed, the idea of purchasing Louisiana, argues one Jefferson biographer, "could only have arisen in a nation and with an administration determined to settle international disputes without resort to force." But in the republican political imagination, the wars fought with Native Americans to secure the western territories explicitly did not qualify as such.

    The Native American simply did not figure in the Founders' calculations. In 1780, Virginia's governor, Thomas Jefferson, wrote Revolutionary frontier leader George Rogers Clark in words that would become painfully close to prophecy, "If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians, the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world will scarcely do for them and us." After purchasing the Louisiana territory from France, Jefferson secured legislation to allow him to rule over its population of Shawnee, Pottawatomie, Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Indians as a virtual dictator until the place could be populated by proper Anglo-Saxons capable of self-government.

    In the early decades of the Republic, U.S. foreign policy reflected the conflicts that shaped the character of American life itself: the desire to "do good" in terms of republican virtue while "doing well" in terms of liberal commerce; the desire to stand with the conservative, established power of the British versus the almost hysterical vision of liberty represented by the French Revolution; the desire to stand outside and above the conflicts that characterized the European state system while employing brutal military tactics to create sufficient space to avoid the cycle of war and poverty that the state system allegedly created. With almost every action cloaked in the language of religious predestination, the foreign policy of the Founding Fathers presented a faithful replica of the tensions that tore at the infant American (white male) character. Underlying all of it was a hierarchical system of racial exclusion that viewed Negroes as chattel and Latins and Indians as savages. Republican freedom existed only for those in the imagined community of Revolutionaries. It rested, moreover, on consistent presidential subversion of the fundamental constitutional constraints of the office's democratically enjoined powers.

The War of 1812 was primarily a tribute to President James Madison's political incompetence. The British proved willing to concede on the crucial issues, but the message did not reach the president until after he asked Congress for a declaration of war. Westerners demanded war once they discovered that Native American warriors were being armed by England through Canada, and Madison could not convince them otherwise. The western representatives elected the militant "War Hawk," Henry Clay, Speaker of the House and forced Madison to toe their belligerent line. Because Madison's opponent, New York governor DeWitt Clinton, was unambiguously antiwar, the election provided a clear choice, with the West demanding war, the middle states divided, and New England clearly for peace. (The region's merchants were so infuriated by the war's disastrous impact on their trade with Britain that some threatened to secede.) Madison's desultory war message failed to sway the war's opponents, and a nasty seventeen-day congressional debate resulted. It would be the last time that a President would ask Congress for the formal power to go to war while uncertain of ultimately having his way.

    Following the war's inconclusive conclusion, however, Britain retreated from its former colonies, and the United States found itself freed from the political implications of European conflict. For military purposes, at least, the nation was invulnerable. It marched west. While thirteen colonies had made the Revolution, by 1824 there were twenty-four states. The population doubled every twenty-second year and showed no signs of abatement. That America would continue to expand into the West seemed no less natural than the fact that the sun would continue to set there.

    Nowhere was the political character of the newly confident young nation better revealed than in President Monroe's 1823 enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine, viewed by many historians as the cornerstone of American diplomacy. The doctrine was inspired by reports that Czar Alexander intended to extend Russian territorial claims southward along the Pacific coast, coupled with indications that the French, backed by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, were planning to use military force to reassert control over the newly independent Spanish colonies in Latin America. The president declared any attempt on the part of the European powers to "extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety." Henceforth, the Americas would be ruled exclusively by Americans.

    For all of its subsequent rhetorical power, the Monroe Doctrine was irrelevant to its stated purposes. Its enforcement power rested solely on the power of the British navy, hardly an instrument under the control of Congress or the president. It was (and is) also meaningless as a matter of international law. The alleged success of the Monroe Doctrine was therefore a kind of useful fiction made possible by the world's lack of interest. Masked beneath its rhetoric, however, was a formula that would come to embody U.S. foreign policy for the ensuing 150 years. It combined soaring idealism with a sense of separation from the Old World while at the same time proclaiming the American right to unbridled expansion as if completely ignorant of the civilizations that already occupied those spaces.

    Like Jefferson and Madison, John Quincy Adams, Monroe's secretary of state and the genius behind the doctrine, fully expected the United States to dominate the entire continent one day. He declared, in 1811, that North America was "destined ... to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs." But Adams was simultaneously enthralled by the commercial possibilities of South America. His masterful negotiation with Spain's Don Luis de Onis in 1819 not only secured Florida and created a boundary that extended all the way to the Pacific, but also laid a foundation for the Monroe Doctrine and a claim to the Oregon territory. It therefore helped determine the direction of American expansionism for half a century. Adams's commitment to an American global commercial empire explains the fervor with which the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed American primacy over the entire hemisphere, when previously the mind's eye of U.S. foreign policy had gazed exclusively north and west. William Appleman Williams points to this as the moment when Adams became aware that the infant nation had acquired the financial might and sophistication to pursue its objectives economically rather than militarily, something Washington had foretold in his farewell address. Explaining to the Congress what Washington had meant, Adams pointedly drew the obvious conclusion. "Must we not say," he asked rhetorically, "that the period which he predicted as then not far off has arrived?" Economic predominance, notes Williams, "would mean effective control without limiting America's freedom of action."

    Adams may well be the most successful diplomat in American history. His deeply held beliefs were wholly consistent with the liberal republican philosophy of the Founders and the exceptional principles outlined in Washington's farewell address. Adams achieved even greater heights of eloquence in 1821, when he issued a blistering warning for the ages:

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.... She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.... She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.

But like both Washington and Jefferson, Adams found he could not achieve his ambitious foreign policy without sacrificing his equally ambitious standards of republican virtue and democratic governance. When Adams defended Andrew Jackson's 1818 invasion of Florida, he employed the same lies and evasions to which his predecessors had resorted. To justify his president's policies in Central America, Secretary of State Adams sent Congress purposely incomplete sets of documents to create the illusion of democratic participation in the foreign policy process while actually subverting it. When challenged by opponents to these policies in the West, he published a series of letters under the pseudonym "Phocion" to mislead unsuspecting readers.

    Adams replaced Monroe as president in the three-way contest of 1824, only to be soundly trounced by Andrew Jackson, the war hero, four years later. With the expansion of the franchise to even unpropertied white males (save in Mississippi and Rhode Island), the direct election of senators in most states, and the massive increase in physical distances traveled by voters' representatives, Americans' definition of citizenship underwent a gradual transformation. Past practices had kept election winners close to home and losers ready to take advantage of any perceived distance between elector and electee. After each session, Robert Wiebe notes, "legislators were expected to come home and talk about it: what had they done? Why? What would they do next?" But the rituals of self-governance as practiced in the New England colonies were no longer appropriate in a nation growing so large and so populous.

    The cost of politics rose continuously as ambitious men amassed political empires of local machines and newspaper chains to back their candidacies. Politics became a career rather than an avocation, and its prohibitive entry fee disqualified all but the well-to-do. These new developments also had the effect of divorcing the representatives and the represented, as presidents and senators grew ever more physically remote from the people under whose direction they theoretically acted. Harriet Martineau, a British traveler who spent two years in America during the mid-1830s, arrived expecting to see Americans talking incessantly of politics. Instead, she discovered a pervasive political ennui. A fervent democrat, Martineau lamented the "almost insane dread of responsibility that had taken over the Republic." Alexis de Tocqueville, who also traveled during this period, coined the word "individualism" to describe a "calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends. With this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself."

    The distancing of the people from their representatives might also be seen as the inevitable result of the enormous economic and technological transformations stirring in America in the early part of the nineteenth century. While the great capitalist enterprises of the robber barons were still decades away, the nature of labor was changing. A work force that had been made up of small, largely self-employed and self-reliant tradesmen and farmers was now giving way to an increasing number of factory wage workers. John Dewey notes, paradoxically, that the theory of the freely choosing individual self that undergirded the Jacksonian political revolution "was framed at just the time when the individual was counting for less in the direction of social affairs, at a time when mechanical forces and vast impersonal organizations were determining the frame of things." Modern economic forces liberated the individual from traditional communal ties as they simultaneously disempowered individuals and local communities. The "crisis of self-government and the erosion of [republican] community," Michael Sandel argues, were therefore closely connected.

    The final nail in the coffin of republican political culture in America proved to be the degree to which the inexorable dynamic of expansion and empire came to strangle the sinews of democratic practice. Excluding the tariff battles that regularly divided Congress and occasionally brought the representatives to blows, U.S. foreign policy operated on the principle of virtual representation. Most often, the policy reflected what was either an underlying consensus of the politically active or else a negative consensus that such matters were not worth active politicking. Following the Treaty of Ghent, however, and with it the end of American involvement in the affairs of Great Power politics, citizens had little inspiration to occupy themselves with matters of foreign affairs. Westward expansion was considered a matter of destiny rather than policy.

    Though many Americans understood that the annexation of Texas, and later, half of Mexico, could well bring simmering regional tensions to their boiling point, many nevertheless felt helpless to resist what appeared to be a kind of perpetual motion machine. U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker said nothing controversial in 1847 when he explained, in an official government report, that "a higher than any earthly power" had guided America's expansion and "still guards and directs our destiny, impels us onward and has selected our great and happy country as a model and ultimate center of attraction for all the nations of the world." "Expand or die" became what Walter LaFeber calls the "shadowy underside of American thinking" as populations continued to double each generation. Millions of immigrants from Germany and Ireland flooded the northeastern cities, and soil-depleting farming techniques (and increasing numbers of slaves) impelled southeastern landholders to demand more and more western territory. These tensions, coupled with President James K. Polk's decidedly underhanded political tactics, eventually exploded in the Mexican War. Polk threatened war with both Britain and Mexico during his aggressive 1844 campaign. When the British proved conciliatory, he made war on the Mexicans. As with the organized slaughter and displacement of Native Americans, the injustices suffered by the Mexicans in a war described by Ulysses S. Grant as "one of the most unjust waged by a stronger against a weaker nation" concerned precious few Americans. Combining both the philosophy of Manifest Destiny with the racial hierarchy that underlay the nation's Indian policies, the New York Evening Post (founded by Alexander Hamilton) observed, "Providence has so ordained it.... The Mexicans are aboriginal Indians, and they must share the destiny of their race."

    Polk's conquest of Mexico did more than simply add a million square miles to the union and set the stage for America's bloodiest conflict. His actions in Mexico also set the stage for what would become the "imperial" American presidency of the twentieth century. In the decade of Polk's election, Tocqueville pointed out that it was "chiefly in foreign relations that the executive power of the nation finds occasion to exert its skill and its strength." In foreign policy, he noted, the president "possesses almost royal prerogatives."

    What Polk demonstrated, as John Quincy Adams noted at the time, was that "the President of the United States has but to declare that War exists with any nation and the War is essentially declared." Congress never declared war against Mexico. It simply "recognized" the existence of war, as the president demanded, based on Polk's false claim that the Mexicans had attacked an American army detachment on American soil. (He had, in fact, instructed his generals to take actions designed to provoke the conflict.) Indeed, in January 1848, the House nearly passed a resolution proclaiming that the conflict had been "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States." Polk presented no evidence that war was necessary. No organized political force was pushing for it, and much of the fighting was over before the public knew it had begun.

    To be fair, the war announcement did inspire considerable enthusiasm. Large pro-war demonstrations took place in Baltimore, New York, Indianapolis, and elsewhere. "A military ardor pervades all ranks," Herman Melville wrote his brother. "Nothing is talked of but the `Halls of Montezumas.' Mexico must be thoroughly chastised," Walt Whitman chimed in. Given the degree of public euphoria, it took a brave, one-term-only Illinois congressman to focus on the dangers inherent in Polk's constitutional end run. As young Abe Lincoln stated in 1848:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose--and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose.... You may say to him, "I see no probability of the British invading us," but he will say to you, "be silent; I see it, if you don't."

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 [Constitutional] 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 here invokes the same fears that haunted Washington, Jefferson, and Madison sixty years earlier, as well as those of Monroe and John Quincy Adams. Together these men defined an American foreign policy tradition that sought to avoid war at almost all costs, lest it lead naturally to impoverishment, tyranny, and the destruction of the necessary physical foundations of republican virtue. This fear constituted perhaps the single defining ideal of republican foreign policy, and it was this belief upon which Polk trampled in pursuit of Manifest Destiny.

    Polk, however, was not without his own precedent in the Founders' own compromises between their republican hopes and the liberal expansionist demands that underwrote them. Jefferson's "empire of liberty" was hardly rhetorical. President Jefferson had threatened war and willingly subverted his own understanding of the Constitution in pursuit of Louisiana. Madison, with Monroe as his secretary of state, had gone to war in 1812 for reasons that, while complex, were also not unrelated to the success of his beloved "extended republic." Monroe and Adams had uncritically endorsed the view of their predecessors that the success of the republican experiment was almost wholly dependent on the continued availability of fertile land for America's free men. Representative John Quincy Adams, who denounced Polk's chicanery as "duplicitous diplomacy" and demanded "all of the documents" relating to what he termed Polk's "usurpation" of Congress's power to declare war, was hardly in a position to complain. "Virtue" depended on expansion, however unvirtuously undertaken. The commerce that the cultivation of such land produced tended to undermine virtue over time, but this tension was preferable to its certain destruction by war, inequality, and oppression within the self-defined category of worthy citizenship. That each of these exquisitely morally sensitive and subtle thinkers thought little of subverting the intention of the Constitution even while pursuing a war of unapologetic terrorism against the Native Americans adds further emphasis to our understanding that, for all their fear of Jefferson's war/impoverishment/oppression iron triangle, the material bottom line of republican foreign policy was unbridled expansionism.

Before the Civil War, the executive branch of the U.S. federal government did not really qualify as a "state" in the familiar European sense of the term. The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel could find none of its necessary underpinnings in the American government. The ratio of U.S. federal expenditure to gross domestic product usually equaled 15 to 20 percent of that routinely achieved in European nations. In the case of most citizens, the federal government existed primarily in the abstract. The citizenry paid no federal taxes and drove on no federal roads. The federal government's mandates extended only to six areas of the economy: internal improvements, subsidies (mainly to shipping), tariffs, public lands disposal, patents, and currency. Most of these mandates involved the promotion of commerce. Almost none of them involved what we now call "regulation." In fact, until the war, most Americans probably never had reason to encounter a single federal government agent in their entire lives. The Civil War changed all this, threatening constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, accelerating the accumulation of power in the executive, and further complicating the relationship between U.S. democracy and foreign policy. The United States, as Garry Wills has pointed out, became a singular rather than collective pronoun.

    The centralization of federal power had significant implications for the conduct of a democratic foreign policy, none of them auspicious. With the institution of the draft, the income tax, and the massive logistical and propaganda efforts necessary to defeat the secessionist states, the American government began to acquire the accoutrements of power that would later preclude even the possibility of a democratic foreign policy debate. Barely two weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeus corpus. In August 1862 the War Department authorized U.S. officials to arrest and detain persons engaged in any "disloyal practice." The same orders permitted civilians to be tried before military commissions. The extraordinary changes that resulted from, or took place during, the Civil War--to say nothing of Reconstruction and its ensuing military occupation of the South--are beyond the purview of this discussion. But in many important ways, America in the 1870s was no longer the same country it had been in the 1850s.

    As in antebellum America, foreign policy beyond the western plains remained a minor consideration. The business of Reconstruction and reconciliation took up most of the nation's political energy, and its commercial development continued unimpeded. The explosive energy of the burgeoning capitalist machine that defeated the South expanded into Central and South America, remaking governments and reordering those societies in its wake. The nation ran its first trade surplus in 1874 and would continue to do so for the following ninety-seven years. The 1880s, moreover, saw the creation of America's first genuinely multinational corporations as Singer Sewing Machine, Standard Oil, and Kodak Camera began investing overseas in order to facilitate their foreign sales. Tariff battles, with the Democrats representing free traders and Republicans representing protectionists, helped to define the two parties in an era of little discernible ideological conflict, but plenty of commercial and economic competition.

    For the purposes of constructing the ideology of modern American foreign policy, the 1890s proved to be the pivotal decade. The year 1890 marked the construction of the U.S. Navy's first battleship and the publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan's opus, The Influence of Sea Power on History. Mahan was a great admirer of the British naval empire and had turned a lifetime of study into a strategic argument for the United States to mimic England's path of naval sup