The Path of Empire, A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power | Page 8

the ends which the United States set out to attain have remained the same. Independence, absolute and complete, including the absence of all entanglements which might draw the country into other peoples' quarrels; the recognition of a similar independence in all other peoples, which involves both keeping its own hands off and also strongly disapproving of interference by one nation with another--these have been the guiding principles of the United States. These principles the Government has maintained by such means as seemed appropriate to the time. In colonial days the people of America fought in courts for their charter rights; at the time of the Revolution, by arms for their independence from England; during the Napoleonic wars, for their independence from the whole system of Europe. The Monroe Doctrine declared that to maintain American independence from the European system it was necessary that the European system be excluded from the Americas. In entering the Great War in the twentieth century the United States has recognized that the system of autocracy against which Monroe fulminated must disappear from the entire world if, under modern industrial conditions, real independence is to exist anywhere.
It is the purpose of the following chapters to trace the expansion of American interests in the light of the Monroe Doctrine and to explain those controversies which accompanied this growth and taxed the diplomatic resources of American Secretaries of State from the times of Adams and Webster and Seward to those of Blaine and Hay and Elihu Root. The diplomacy of the Great War is reserved for another volume in this Series.

CHAPTER II.
Controversies With Great Britain
No two nations have ever had more intimate relationships than the United States and Great Britain. Speaking the same language and owning a common racial origin in large part, they have traded with each other and in the same regions, and geographically their territories touch for three thousand miles. During the nineteenth century the coastwise shipping of the United States was often forced to seek the shelter of the British West Indies. The fisherfolk of England and America mingled on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland and on the barren shores of that island and of Labrador, where they dried their fish. Indians, criminals, and game crossed the Canadian boundary at will, streams flowed across it, and the coast cities vied for the trade of the interior, indifferent to the claims of national allegiance. One cannot but believe that this intimacy has in the long run made for friendship and peace; but it has also meant constant controversy, often pressed to the verge of war by the pertinacious insistence of both nations on their full rights as they saw them.
The fifteen years following Adams's encounter with Canning saw the gradual accumulation of a number of such disputes, which made the situation in 1840 exceptionally critical. Great Britain was angered at the failure of the United States to grant her the right to police the seas for the suppression of the slave trade, while the United States, with memories of the vicious English practice of impressment before the War of 1812, distrusted the motives of Great Britain in asking for this right. Nearly every mile of the joint boundary in North America was in dispute, owing to the vagueness of treaty descriptions or to the errors of surveyors. Twelve thousand square miles and a costly American fort were involved; arbitration had failed; rival camps of lumberjacks daily imperiled peace; and both the Maine Legislature and the National Congress had voted money for defense. In a New York jail Alexander McLeod was awaiting trial in a state court for the murder of an American on the steamer Caroline, which a party of Canadian militia had cut out from the American shore near Buffalo and had sent to destruction over Niagara Falls. The British Government, holding that the Caroline was at the time illegally employed to assist Canadian insurgents, and that the Canadian militia were under government orders justifiable by international law, assumed the responsibility for McLeod's act and his safety. Ten thousand Americans along the border, members of "Hunters' Lodges," were anxious for a war which would unleash them for the conquest of Canada. Delay was causing all these disputes to fester, and the public mind of the two countries was infected with hostility.
Fortunately in 1841 new administrations came into power in both England and the United States. Neither the English Tories nor the American Whigs felt bound to maintain all the contentions of their predecessors, and both desired to come to an agreement. The responsibility on the American side fell upon Daniel Webster, the new Secretary of State. With less foreign experience than John Quincy Adams, he was more a man of the world and a man among men. His conversation was decidedly less ponderous than