America on the World Stage, 1800-1848

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how the Barbary Wars of 1801 to 1805 and 1815 represented the first overseas projection of American naval power and the country's first break with the European tribute system.
• Situate the War of 1812 inside the broader Atlantic context of the Napoleonic Wars, and explain why the Treaty of Ghent settled the conflict on a status quo ante bellum basis.
• Trace the territorial expansion produced by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, including the continental and Canadian boundaries those agreements drew.
• Explain the origins, claims, and limits of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, including the role of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and the doctrine's response to the Holy Alliance.
• Account for the federal treatment of Native nations as foreign powers in policy and as domestic dependents in law, with attention to the Treaty of New Echota of 1835 and the diplomacy of Indian removal.
• Use Skill 2.B (Source Analysis) to evaluate primary sources for point of view, purpose, situation, and audience, and apply the Causation reasoning process to early-republic foreign policy.

American foreign policy from 1800 to 1848 is the story of a young republic learning to act on its own behalf in an Atlantic world dominated by European empires. The arc moves through five phases: the Barbary projection of 1801 to 1815; the War of 1812 and the Treaty of Ghent; the continental treaties of 1819 and 1842; the Monroe Doctrine of 1823; and the rising rhetoric of manifest destiny in the 1840s, paired with the diplomacy of Indian removal that treated Native nations as foreign powers when convenient and as domestic dependents when not (KC-4.3.I, KC-4.3.I.A.ii).

The republic's first overseas war was fought on the far side of the Atlantic. For decades, the four Barbary states of North Africa (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli) had financed their treasuries by seizing Mediterranean merchant ships and ransoming their crews. European powers paid annual tribute to keep their commerce moving; the United States, under Washington and Adams, did the same. Thomas Jefferson, philosophically opposed to a standing navy and to the tribute system alike, found himself at the head of the country in 1801 just as the Pasha of Tripoli demanded a higher annual payment. Jefferson refused, and the First Barbary War followed (1801 to 1805). It was the first time American naval vessels operated in force outside coastal waters; the burning of the captured frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur in 1804 became a founding episode of United States Navy lore. A short Second Barbary War in 1815 closed the matter for good. Tribute ended; American merchants entered the Mediterranean as a sovereign commercial power; the navy proved itself capable of long-range projection (Theme WOR).

The republic's central foreign-policy event of the first quarter-century was the War of 1812. The proximate causes were British: the Royal Navy's practice of impressment, in which British vessels boarded American merchant ships and forced sailors suspected of being British deserters into the Royal Navy; British Orders in Council that interfered with neutral American trade with Napoleonic France; and British support for Native resistance led by Tecumseh in the Old Northwest. The deeper context, however, was the Napoleonic Wars. Britain and France had been at war almost continuously since 1803, and the United States was caught between them. Both belligerents seized neutral American ships; both insisted that trading with the enemy was an unfriendly act. President James Madison's war message of June 1812 framed the conflict as a defense of maritime rights, but the War Hawks in Congress (Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina) also wanted Canada and the elimination of British support for Native peoples. The war went badly at first: the British burned Washington, D.C., in August 1814. It ended ambiguously: the Treaty of Ghent, signed on December 24, 1814, restored the prewar boundaries on a status quo ante bellum basis, leaving impressment unresolved on paper. The problem dissolved on its own once Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo six months later. Andrew Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 (fought after the treaty was signed but before news reached Louisiana) gave Americans an emotional sense of victory that the diplomatic outcome did not fully justify, and produced a wave of nationalist feeling that historians later labeled the Era of Good Feelings (KC-4.3.I, KC-4.3.I.A.ii).

The next two decades produced the diplomacy that drew the continental United States. The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, negotiated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams with Spanish minister Luis de Onis, transferred Florida to the United States, settled an outstanding five-million-dollar claim, and (most consequentially) drew a continental boundary between American and Spanish territory that ran along the Sabine, Red, and Arkansas rivers and then west along the forty-second parallel to the Pacific. The treaty made the United States a transcontinental claimant for the first time. Twenty-three years later, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, negotiated by Secretary of State Daniel Webster and the British envoy Alexander Baring (Lord Ashburton), settled a long-running dispute over the Maine boundary with British North America, opened the Great Lakes to limited demilitarization under the earlier Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817, and clarified the boundary west to the Lake of the Woods. Together the two treaties drew most of the country's modern outline outside the southwestern arc that the war with Mexico would settle in Period 5.

The most ambitious foreign-policy claim of the period came in 1823. After Spain's American empire collapsed during the Latin American wars of independence, European observers wondered whether the Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria, and Prussia would assist Madrid in restoring its lost colonies. The British foreign secretary, George Canning, suggested a joint Anglo-American statement opposing recolonization. President James Monroe, advised by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, chose instead to issue a unilateral American declaration. The result was the Monroe Doctrine, embedded in Monroe's annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. The doctrine made three claims: that the Western Hemisphere was no longer open to further European colonization; that European political systems were essentially incompatible with American republican principles; and that the United States would treat any European attempt to reimpose colonial control on the newly independent Latin American republics as a hostile act. The United States in 1823 lacked the naval power to enforce the policy on its own; British command of the Atlantic did most of the work for the next half-century. But the doctrine became the foundation of an American sphere-of-influence claim across the hemisphere that would still be invoked, in revised form, by Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy (Theme WOR).

Beyond formal diplomacy, American commercial interests reached deeper into Asia and Latin America after 1815. The China trade, opened in 1784 by the Empress of China voyage from New York, expanded sharply once peace with Britain returned. American clippers reached Canton with ginseng, fur, and (illegally) opium, returning with tea, silk, and porcelain that knit New England merchants into the Pacific economy. American whalers worked the Pacific from New Bedford to the Sea of Japan. Merchant houses in Valparaiso, Buenos Aires, and Veracruz extended American commerce into the new Latin American republics. The economic geography of the early republic was already global; the foreign-policy framework was struggling to keep up.

The hardest moral question of Topic 4.4 is whether Indian removal belongs to foreign policy or to domestic policy. The federal government negotiated treaties with Native nations through the Senate's treaty-ratification process, the same process used for treaties with foreign powers. The Treaty of New Echota of 1835, signed by an unauthorized minority faction of the Cherokee Nation, used the form and language of international diplomacy to extinguish Cherokee land claims east of the Mississippi and produced the forced migration that the Cherokee called the Nunna daul Tsuny, the Trail of Tears. Yet the same Supreme Court, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), had ruled that the Cherokee were not a foreign nation entitled to sue Georgia in federal court but a "domestic dependent nation," a category Chief Justice John Marshall invented for the case. The contradiction was not accidental. Federal policy treated Native nations as foreign powers when treaty form was useful and as domestic dependents when it was not, and the gap between the two framings did most of the legal work that made forced removal possible (KC-4.3.I.A.ii, KC-4.3.I.B).

The 1840s closed Period 4 with a new ideological frame for the foreign policy that the previous decades had built. In 1845, the journalist John L. O'Sullivan coined the phrase manifest destiny to describe what he called the country's God-given mission to spread its democratic institutions across the continent. The phrase tied together territorial expansion, commercial growth, and the expansion of slavery into a single justification, and it produced the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Oregon settlement of 1846, and the war with Mexico from 1846 to 1848. Lesson 5.2 takes up manifest destiny formally; Topic 4.4 introduces it as the ideological closer to a half-century in which the United States moved from peripheral commercial republic to continental hemispheric power.

The five sources below mark the major foreign-policy moments of Topic 4.4 in chronological order: a war message that opens the conflict with Britain, the treaty that closes it, the treaty that draws a continental boundary, the doctrine that asserts a hemispheric sphere of influence, and a visual artifact that fixed postwar American nationalism.

1. (Causation) Trace the causal chain from the Napoleonic Wars in Europe to the American declaration of war on Britain in June 1812. At which step in the chain do you think a different European outcome would have produced a different American war, and why?
2. (Comparison) Compare the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 with the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. What does the comparison reveal about how the United States negotiated boundaries with declining empires (Spain) and with established peers (Great Britain)?
3. (Causation) Account for the role of John Quincy Adams in shaping early-republic foreign policy. He served as a peace commissioner at Ghent, negotiated Adams-Onis, drafted most of the Monroe Doctrine, and presided over the latter as president. What through-line connects his work?
4. (Continuity and Change) The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was issued by a country with no naval power to enforce it. How did the doctrine still shape American policy and rhetoric for the next century? What does that gap between claim and capability illustrate about the role of foreign-policy doctrine?
5. (Comparison) Compare the Treaty of New Echota of 1835 with the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819. Both used the form of international diplomacy to transfer territory. What was different about each negotiation, and what does the comparison reveal about how the United States treated Native nations between domestic and foreign categories?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.