Britain and the Monroe Doctrine

The effect of this British attitude the position of the United States Government, defined by President Monroe in his message of December, 1823, constituted a powerful support, and the news of it evoked general satisfaction in England.

Continuing The Monroe Doctrine,
our selection from his article by Alfred Thayer Mahan in Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 16 published in 1905. The selection is presented in five easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in The Monroe Doctrine.

Time: 1823
Place: Washington, D.C.

But whether the movement of the Holy Alliance, as it was self-styled, issued merely in the suppression of popular liberties or introduced further a European balance of power with its rivalries and conflicts, its wars and rumors of wars, both results were politically abhorrent to American feelings and disturbing to American peace. They gave rise to distinctly political objections by the people and statesmen of the United States. From these sentiments the exigency evoked the first reasoned official expression of the national conviction and purpose, which we now know as the Monroe Doctrine. Subsidiary to this political motive, but clearly recognized and avowed, was the legitimate inducement of commercial interest, benefited by the rejection of European rule, and to be injured by its restoration.

It will not be expected that a British Tory administration, before the Reform Bill of 1832 and with the protective system and Navigation Act in full force, should have shared the particular political prepossessions of the American States, geographically closely concerned, lately themselves colonies, and but very recently emerged from a prolonged conflict with British commercial regulations based upon the ancient conception of colonial administration. But Great Britain, in addition to commercial ambitions and interests greater then than those of the United States, and the outcome of a century of effort against Spanish monopoly, did have also a distinct political leaning in the matter. There ran through both political parties a real and deep sympathy with communities struggling for freedom. The iniquity of suppressing such efforts by external force of third parties, not immediately concerned, was strongly felt. There was accepted also among British statesmen a clearly defined rule of conduct, which had been conspicuously illustrated in the early days of the French Revolution, still a matter of recent memory in 1820, that interference in the intestine struggles of a foreign country, such as those then afflicting both the Spanish kingdom and colonies, was neither right in principle nor expedient in policy.

Basing its action firmly on these convictions, the British Ministry, under the influence of Canning, intimated clearly that, while neutral toward the intervention of the Holy Alliance in Spain itself, to restore there the old order of things, it would not permit the transport of armies to South America for a like purpose. The course of the Alliance in Spain was viewed with disapproval, but it did not immediately concern Great Britain to an extent demanding armed resistance. The case of the colonies was different. Intervention there would be prejudicial to British mercantile enterprise, already heavily engaged in their trade and economic development; while, politically, the occupation of the Peninsula by French armies would be offset by the detachment of the colonies from their previous dependence.

To the effect of this British attitude the position of the United States Government, defined by President Monroe in his message of December, 1823, constituted a powerful support, and the news of it evoked general satisfaction in England. However motived, without formal concert, still less in alliance, the two English speaking countries occupied the same ground and announced the same purpose. Spain might conquer her colonies unaided, if she could; neither would interfere but the attempt of other powers to give her armed assistance would be regarded by each as unfriendly to itself.

From this momentary community of position exaggerated inferences have been drawn as to the identity of impulses which had brought either state to it. It was a case of two paths converging; not thenceforth to unite, but to cross, and continue each in its former general direction, diverging rather than approximating. Though crumbling before the rising stream of progress, the ideas appropriate to the eighteenth century had not yet wholly disappeared from British conceptions; still less had the practice and policy of the state conformed themselves to the changed point of view which, in the middle of the nineteenth century, began to characterize British statesmanship with reference to colonies. The battles of reformed political representation and of free trade were yet to fight and win; old opinions continued as to the commercial relationship of colonies to the mother-country, although modification in details was being introduced. The West Indies were still the most important group in the British colonial system, and one of the latest acts of Canning, who died in 1827, was to renew their commercial discrimination against the United States; a measure which, however prompted, could scarcely be said to reflect the image of the Monroe Doctrine.

For a generation then to come, British statesmen remained under the domination of habits of thought which had governed the course of the two Pitts and they failed, as men usually fail, to discern betimes changes of condition which modify, if not the essentials, at least the application even of a policy sound in general principle. In 1823, not ten years had elapsed since the British Government had contemplated exacting from the United States, as the result of our prostration at the close of the War of 1812, territorial cessions which might make an American of today, ignorant of the extremes to which his country was then reduced, gasp with amazement. How then could it be that Great Britain, which for centuries had been acquiring territory, and to whom the Americas were still the most immediate commercial interest, should heartily accept the full scope of the Monroe Doctrine as applicable to the extension of her own dominion by conquest or otherwise, to any part of the American continents where she did not at that moment have clear title?

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