The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, 1775–1825

The Latin American independence movements of the 1810s and 1820s unleashed a wave of popular enthusiasm throughout the United States. Drawing from my book (which will appear in July), my paper will show why thousands of U.S. observers named their towns, their sons, and sometimes themselves after Spanish-speaking statesmen, while tens of thousands toasted hemispheric independence on every passing July 4th. Analyzing these grassroots indicators alongside newspapers and government records, my project will suggest that ordinary people in the early United States were far more globally aware—and more open to the idea of racial equality—than we have thought. For even in the Deep South, white people knowingly and emotionally embraced Latin America's multiracial, antislavery rebels. By recasting the early United States in the hemispheric dimensions of its time, my project thus shows how the Declaration of Independence’s egalitarian and universalist ideals persisted for the nation’s first 50 years, even as slavery spread and racial inequality deepened.

Like those of the other panelists, my paper will offer a new geographic lens through which to view the nineteenth-century Americas.  While recent scholarship on the early United States’ international connections has emphasized the North Atlantic, I will look south, following the gazes of people who concluded that the United States had more in common with republican Latin America than with monarchical Europe.  I will also depart from the few works that have examined early U.S. ties to Latin America.  Emphasizing U.S. relations with nearby Mexico, Florida, and Cuba, these books tell tales of conflict—and of conquest—that are important, pressing, and very real.  But hemispheric enthusiasts were much more likely to think about far-off South America.  And when they did, the language of brotherhood predominated over the language of conflict that so often defined the nation’s ever-shifting borders.