In recognition of the July 4th holiday, we invited Eliga Gould, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire and author of Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire, to explain the global context in which the fledgling United States of America sought to assert itself. You can also watch Gould describe that global political moment in a video on our website, or read his Foreign Policy article on how the British press covered the American Revolution.
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During the summer of 1776, while Congress took the final, momentous steps toward declaring independence, John Adams began work on a Model Treaty to guide the new union in its relations with foreign nations. Working with Benjamin Franklin, soon to embark for the court of Louis XVI, Adams directed Congress’s emissaries to offer foreign nations, starting with France, a commercial treaty while avoiding a military alliance. In return, Americans promised to be good international citizens, treating other nations with the same dignity and respect that they sought for themselves.
For European rulers who were inclined to recognize the upstart republic, these terms would have seemed like a reasonable starting point, even if Americans were unlikely to get everything that they asked for. In one place, though, the Model Treaty contained a provision that, to modern ears, sounds jarring. Mindful that other nations might view Britain’s American troubles as a chance to make territorial gains of their own, Adams demanded that future treaty partners recognize the United States as the rightful successor to all of Britain’s North American empire. This included Canada, which Continental soldiers had invaded the previous fall, as well as Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, East and West Florida, and Bermuda. In the United States’ opening bid for foreign recognition, Adams imagined a nation that has never existed—and presumably never will.
In the two hundred and thirty six years since our nation’s birth, historians have often seen these two impulses—Americans’ desire to follow the rule of law with other nations and their equally strong desire for imperial greatness — as being in conflict with each other. As the Model Treaty reminds us, the founders did not share this view. During the first fifty years of its existence, the United States expanded its boundaries twice, doubling the Union’s size with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and adding Florida and Oregon in 1821. On each occasion, Americans pursued a vision of continental empire not by seizing land unilaterally—though there were always people who would have been happy to do so—but through what President James Monroe, in his first inaugural address, called “fair and honorable treaty.” In so doing, Americans affirmed that every nation had an obligation to respect the rights of every other nation, even when those nations’ interests clashed with their own.
But there were also places where the founders overreached. As the Model Treaty makes clear, one of these was the question of what the boundaries of their new nation would be. In the half century between the Declaration of Independence and Adams’s death on July 4, 1826, Americans tried repeatedly to add Canada to the Union. There were also attempts, some more serious than others, to acquire Texas, Cuba, and the Bahamas. More than once, Franklin cast an eye toward the British West Indies, and Thomas Jefferson went even farther, envisioning an “empire of liberty” that would someday span the Western Hemisphere.
It is not hard to see why most of these projects failed. In both North and South America, Indians, African Americans, and other European settlers admired the founders’ example. When Haitians declared independence from France in 1804, they did so with a document that drew heavily on Jefferson’s original. But usually what the Union’s neighbors wanted was liberty and independence for themselves, not membership in a greater United States. “Holy Mary,” wrote the Mexican diplomat Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara after hearing an American plan for federation in 1811, “please help me and free me of these people.” Had Britain agreed to the territorial demands reflected in Adams’s Model Treaty, it is by no means clear that the people who inhabited the territories in question would have followed suit.
Today, no matter where within the United States we happen to live, Americans mark the Fourth of July as the day when our history as an independent nation began. What we sometimes forget—though people at the time knew it—is that the history that Americans made was the history that other nations and people were prepared to let us make. In their willingness to seek international approval for the territorial aspirations in the Model Treaty, the founders showed that they recognized this fact. As their example reminds us, the American union has been strongest not when it acted unilaterally, but when it pursued measures that enjoyed the support of its own citizens and the freely given consent of its neighbors. If this was true in 1776, it remains no less so today.
