The sources of American conduct in international affairs: From the colonial era to the Civil War

This dissertation is an interpretive synthesis of American foreign policy from the early 17th century through the Civil War. It argues that Americans were never really isolationist and "exemplarist" in their approach to the world. From the colonial era to the mid-19 th century Americans were territorial, commercial, political and "ideological" expansionists. The engine of this multifaceted expansionism was the normal human desire for gain strengthened and legitimized by a modern, liberal set of beliefs about human nature and the conduct of human affairs. The dissertation also demonstrates the continuity of the American expansionist vision from the early republic through the "expansionist 1840s." The territorial goals of the later expansionists in the 1840s and 1850s differed little from those of the founding generation. Nor did American statesmen in the late 18th and early 19th century limit their ambitions to the continent. The Monroe Doctrine was a conscious effort to keep America's extra-continental expansionist options open for the future. In advancing this argument for continuity, the dissertation challenges some of the distinctions historians have tried to draw among alleged competing American traditions with regard to "mission" and expansion. Misjudgments about the character of early American foreign policy have provided the foundation for Americans' most popular self-created myth: it is the myth of America in repose---geopolitically passive, ideologically restrained, inherently isolationist---until provoked by some outside threat or other stimulus. When viewed from a broader perspective that takes into account American Indian policy, territorial expansion against both Indians and Spaniards, and American forays into the Mediterranean and other parts of the world in pursuit of overseas markets, it becomes clear that "isolation" and "nonentanglement" were not guiding principles of early American foreign policy at all. They were merely a set of tactics to be used, selectively, in achieving the broader goals that this first generation of Americans set for their young nation. And those broader goals were not different from the goals that Americans would consistently seek for the next two hundred years.