In the nineteenth century London defined the order the world. Home to the bankers and capitalists that lubricated the gears of global trade and commerce, London had become the focal point of international exchange and finance. The world's outstanding international traders sailed from here to the far reaches of the globe to peddle British wares, and to return with goods that made up the primary commodities of the world. At the main British ports, and especially London, stood the great warehouses that fed international trade and the immense traffic that came and went, buying and selling everything from precious stones to basic foodstuffs. This was the source of business and international short-term credits on which London thrived.14 Around the world, from Latin American ports in the Atlantic, to Asian harbors, all trade, transport, and communications flowed through England or were carried on British ships. United States Senator Thomas Rusk articulated this monopoly in a frustrated report before his colleagues in 1850: ''There was not a letter sent by ocean steam conveyance, in these quaners, which did not pay its tribute to the British crown, and not a passenger nor parcel of merchandize transported, by the agency of steam, upon the ocean, which did not furnish profit to the British capitalist. Great Britain asserted her right to be the 'queen of the ocean,' and, as such, she levied her imports upon the industry and intelligence of all of the nations that frequented that highway of the world."16 Through their grip on the transport of goods and intelligence, the British controlled the flow of wealth and how it was dispersed. By doing such the British could set the terms by which the non-Western world could interact with the Western world, or, as Rusk said, how the Western world could interact with the rest of the world. Here Britain had created a spatial order of the earth with itself at the center.

The young American republic began to challenge this order, however. By promoting itself as the long sought passage to India, the thoroughfare of world commerce, Americans here attempted to reposition the spatial order with the US at the center. Emerging from their newly won independence into a world devoid of the advantages of British colonial marketplaces, the now free American merchants were forced to find new markets. The profitable markets in the Atlantic and the East Indies remained restricted to subjects of the British Empire, which forced American merchants to go anywhere and everywhere else. As J.N. Reynolds, the diarist of the four year voyage of the U.S.S. Potomac into the Pacific Ocean in the early 1830s, put it, "When the war of our revolution had been so gloriously terminated in establishment of our independence, that the maritime spirit and intelligence of our own merchants, no longer shackled by oppressive colonial restrictions, looked abroad to all parts of the globe.“16 As Americans explored the waters of the world in search of avenues of commerce in the antebellum era they, along with their young government, concluded commercial agreements with over forty countries. By 1860 the growing nation, led by righteous and ambitious men, had established an extensive global commercial network:, built a steam marine with the dual function of civilian and military use, made sufficient steps for controlling the Pacific, and was well on the way to reconstructing the global order with the US at the center of the earth.

The necessity of overseas expansion was compounded by another problem the US faced at home, that of economic growth. The economic reality was a bit less sanguine than Reynolds' idealism, for the US economy was severely restricted in the late eighteenth century by the size of the domestic market and the inability to expand into foreign markets due to the British mercantile system and the stagnation of foreign markets. At the turn of the century, when the merchants of Reynolds optimistic descriptions did begin to find new markets and penetrate old ones, the US export economy grew fivefold. This led subsequently to growth in the domestic economy and further investment. Between 1820 and 1860 industrialization was already well underway, with the manufacturing industry driving economic growth. With investment increasing at a dizzying pace, and the economy growing faster, the 1830s saw prices rise on uninhabited expansion and productive capacity. Panic struck in 1837 producing what is called the worst economic crisis in American history and prices collapsed This collapse resulted from a production glut that flooded the market with more goods than it could consume.17 The crisis awakened Americans from the illusion that they could forever remain self-sufficient and they realized the necessity of overseas markets for American products and raw materials. Time and again politicians and merchants of the day raised the urgent issue of markets for US raw materials-mainly cotton-and manufacturing goods.

Such circumstances created aspirations among Americans to tap the wealth of the China market. In the imagination of its citizens, America was the long sought passage to the Far East that their forefathers had pursued centuries before; it stood as the land that would link the old markets of Europe with the fabulous wealth of the East, complete with ivory and apes and peacocks and gold. President John Tyler in his 1842 address to Congress talked of China's "three hundred millions of subjects, fertile in various rich products of the earth, not without the knowledge of letters and of many arts, and with large and expansive accommodations for internal intercourse and traffiC."18 As merchants took to the seas to discover the wealth of the China trade in the late eighteenth century, editorials assuaged the fantasies of a young America, and politicians waxed on the glory it would bring. Thomas Hart Benton, the Senator and Congressman from Missouri, concluded some years after meeting with Thomas Jefferson in 1824 that Jefferson "was the first to propose the North American road to India, and the introduction of Asiatic trade on that road, as well as the strength of growth that it would infuse in the US.“19

Indeed, American politicians and merchants saw Asia as the foundation of commerce from the earliest times, responsible for the rise and fall of nations, and the basis of Britain's strength and greatness in the nineteenth century. Americans fancied how the seizure of the Far East trade would bring the US to its rightful seat of permanent grandeur. A speech Benton delivered in the Senate in 1849 captured this mood: ''The trade of the Pacific Ocean, of the western coast of North American, and of Eastern Asia, will all take its track; and not only for ourselves, but for posterity. That trade of India which has been shifting its channels from the time of the Phoenicians to the present, is destined to shift once more, and to realize the grand idea of Columbus. The American road to India will also become the European track to that region. The European merchant, as well as the American, will fly across our continent on a straight line to China. The rich commerce of Asia will flow through our center. And where has that commerce ever flowed without carrying wealth and dominion with it?“20

Or, as the New York merchant Asa Whitney put it in an address before the Pennsylvania Legislature in 1848: "Here we stand forever. We reach out one hand to all Asia, and the other to all Europe, willing for all to enjoy the great blessings we posses, claiming free intercourse and exchange of commodities with all, seeking not to subjugate any, but all... tributary, and at our will subject to us.“21

Out of this conviction of the US as the land straddling the old markets of Europe and Asian wealth, the US, from very early on, formulated a policy of penetration into the Pacific and active commercial engagement with China. Although policy makers did not articulate a China policy per se, the US government did plan the enactment of a more expedient and efficient means to tap the wealth of the Asian market. Or, as Congressman Benton put it in a speech before the Boston Mercantile Library Association: "The channel of Asiatic commerce which has been shifting in its bed from the time of Solomon, and raising up cities and kingdoms wherever it went-to perish when it left them changing its channel for the last time-to become fixed upon its shortest, safest, best, and quickest route, through the heart of our America.“22

Prominent historians of American history have made the case that westward expansion in the nineteenth century took place at the impetus of accessing Asian markets. Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth calls Thomas Jefferson "the intellectual father of the American advance to the Pacific.“23 In the 1820s and 1830s, when American and British trappers struggled for economic domination of the northwest, Jefferson began to entertain the idea of an overland route to the Pacific. He sent Lewis and Clark into the West to navigate the waterways to the Pacific. Although Jefferson did not mention China or Asia markets, Smith says that "Jefferson could hardly have discussed the possibility of a transcontinental route without having the China trade in mind.“24 Indeed, an examination of the correspondence between Jefferson and Lewis, as undertaken by Joseph Schafer in "The Western Ocean and Oregon History," reveals the orientation of the mission to Asian commerce. Upon returning from their journey Lewis wrote to Jefferson that "In obedience to your orders we have penetrated the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean and sufficiently explored the interior of the country to affirm that we have discovered the most practicable communication which does exist across the continent by means of the navigable branches of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers:' Lewis went on to discuss the "immense advantages" to trade the route would have for commerce to China.25

When the route was discovered, the task of occupation began. Norman Graebner, in Empire on the Pacific: A Study in AmericanContinental Expansion, argues that the American government and people had a clear calculated policy to undertake the possession of the West coast (as opposed to the innate calling of manifest destiny). The motivation for this policy came by way of mercantile interests seeking deep-water harbors at the edge of the Pacific, which would allow easy penetration into Asia and determine the course of American empire. Key to Graebner's argument is that the US had a unified plan for westward expansion that moved it across the North American continent and into the Pacific Ocean for the sake of acquiring ports as launching points into Asia. Congressional debates in the early 1820s clearly reflect thiS.26 In December of 1822 and January of 1823, the House took up a bill to make provisions for the occupation of the mouth of the Columbia River, which empties "into the Pacific" which meant merchants' "trade will naturally be China, Japan and the Philippine Islands."27 This trade, Congressman Colden noted on January 13, 1823, has yielded "profits so large, that they formed the capitals of several mercantile houses, which were considered among the opulent of the city.“28 Or as Caleb Atwater stated in 1829: "That this will be the route to China within fifty years from this time, scarcely admits of a doubt.“29

This is not hard to fathom as the entire Western world viewed East Asia as the greatest market on earth. As British diplomat Sir Henry Pottinger put it, "all the mills in Lancaster could not make stocking stuff sufficient for one of [China's] provinces.“30 China not only boasted half a billion people, whom, under ideal conditions, ought to all be consumers, but was also one of the last markets on earth to remain untapped. Everywhere else European powers had made their inroads and either closed the market to all trade save their selves (e.g. India) or, in the case of Europe, the market had already reached its full potential. East Asia had long presented opportunity and riches for whomever could reach those shores and establish trade with those people.

These East Asian markets came to be synonymous with the Pacific, which promised brighter horizons and rejected the order on the other side of the world. As The Barre Patriot put it in 1852, "What the Mediterranean Sea was in the early ages of the world, the Pacific Ocean promises to become in the future.“31 While Europe riled in upheaval and stagnation and pauperism, and the Atlantic had exhausted its potential to squeeze greater growth forthwith, the Pacific beckoned with new markets and opportunity. The Liverpool Journal wrote in 1851 that, "The Pacific become the high way of nations, and enterprises unheard of approach maturity, while the mind of the ancient world is absorbed on the miserable subjects of divine right and sectarian controversy. The majesty of civilization and commerce brightens regions rich and vast, while Europe passes to parley with idiot legitimists and ancient nonentities.“32

Senator Seward drove this point home in tront of his colleagues on the Senate floor in the summer of 1852: "Who does not see, then, that every year hereafter, European commerce, European politics, European thoughts, and European activity, although actually gaining greater force, and European connections, although actually becoming more intimate, will, nevertheless, ultimately sink in importance; while the Pacific ocean, its shores, its islands, and the vast regions beyond, will become the chief theater of events in the world's great Hereafter?"

Here a new order was taking shape on the other side of the world, commanded by the markets at home and the merchants who sailed the globe searching for raw materials and consumers. Where the old world had at one time led to its great prosperity and the enriching of nations, it had passed its maturity and a new wealth was being tapped.While some drew parallels to what had come before with the discovery of the Mediterranean or South American, others rejected any comparison outright and maintained the formation of a whole new order. The Farmers' Cabinet detailed this in January 1853 in a front-page article entitled ''The Pacific Civilization;"

''What is certain in the new colonization of the Pacific is, that the infant establishments there are not to be mere 'factories' of distant powers, trading ports, bearing the same relation to home ports and mother countries which the South American States have borne to Europe. The whole order of Providence since Balboa looked upon the glittering waters of the 'South Sea,' shows that the great sea which he called 'the Pacific' is yet to be the basin of an order of commerce and civilization of its own. So vast are its resources, so countless the people on its shores, that, as this commerce devealps [sic], it must become the largest commercial system of the world. As the civilization takes form which follows commerce, it will be on a scale which will not readily submit to the fashions borrowed from the little Atlantic, or the still more remote Mediterranean." The Farmers' Cabinet here posited a precedence for the rising new order that it called "The Pacific Civilization." For the ''nations which are to form it are more varied and of greater power than have ever dealt together easily before."33

And America, it claimed, was poised to command it. Americans' conception of difference, it was held in the logic of those like the editors of The Farmers' Cabinet, positioned the country to become the next great power and recreate the order of the earth. It was out of this conception of difference from which grew ideas of racial superiority and subjugation. We must remember that at this time the first half of the nineteenth century, and especially the 1830s and 1840s-the US wrought military aggression on peoples of different colors, dispossessed them of their land, or enslaved them. The wars against the Native Americans to drive them from their land was in full bloom in the early part of the nineteenth century; the Mexican-American War of the late 1840s was fought not without a bit of hubris and racial superiority; slavery on American plantations prospered on the grounds of the inferiority of black Americans. These events at home seeped into the American psyche and manifest themselves in American foreign policy as Americans took themselves and their ideological justification overseas.34 The new order of the earth, the Pacific Civilization the American nomos-would all contain hints of difference based on racial superiority in the very same manner as US domestic policy.

As US networks and influence expanded, Americans began to think not only in terms of individual markets and trade, but to reconceive of the structural order of the world and the flow of trade and finance. They began to see a new spatial order of the earth with the US at the center conducting global trade from East to West. As the antebellum periodical The Farmers' Cabinet wrote in an article in January 1851 under the header "A Shorter Route to India:" "Our now wild and unbroken wilderness will become the thoroughfare of the world, as over it would inevitably pass not only our own trade with Asia but also that of all Western Europe.“35 Here the US was redrawing the spatial order of the earth by placing the Western hemisphere at the center and legal codes extenuating from it. For the US it was a struggle to manufacture a new order in which all trade and communications would pass from the Far East through America and to the old world. Poised to capture the wealth of the markets of East Asia, the US sought to assert itself and its interests. In real terms this meant signing treaties and creating the conditions of trade and interaction on its own terms, not on Britain's or Europe's. It meant building the means to exert its control through treaties and agreements and creating the force to uphold them. The Farmers' Cabinet put it in exactly these terms in an 1849 article entitled "A Short Cut to Asia," which discussed how the US would become the "commercial center of the globe.“36 Americans envisioned themselves and their young country at the center of the earth, fighting to remain free from the influence and pollution of the old world, and to extend their commerce and influence overseas. The Southern Literary Messenger took up this theme in a six-page article published in January 1850, just one year before instructions for the Perry mission, entitled "Our Foreign Policy." It is important to note that this article was penned in the style of a response to a pamphlet by a Mr. Trescot, who had laid out a program for American expansion overseas. The Southern Literary Messenger took up the debate, not to criticize Mr. Trescot and his call for an expansive foreign policy, for this was a given, but rather to extend the debate and discuss the means of carrying this goal forward. The Southern Literary Messenger article opened by recounting the recent extensions of American territory and the possession of a Pacific coastline, and preached, "We must become a great naval power as well as a great commercial people: we cannot long maintain our position as the latter without assuming our proper position as the former. To ascertain with precision what that position is, to count the cost thereof, we must look to the position of other powers similarly situated. We must look to the Balance of power between the great naval powers. Our interest being involved in the preservation of that Balance of Power, we have a diplomatic right to concert measures for its preservation, or for effecting such changes shall secure it, to the protection of our own interests.“37

This passage, hinting at a new spatial order and the means by which the US could achieve it, reflected a staple view held by Americans of the US and its new position in the world. The domestic debate, as exhibited in this article's dialogue with Mr. Tescot, centered on the means of practice, not motivation. The US government did not fail to act to facilitate the realization of this spatial order through the penetration and control of the Pacific. In 1842 President Tyler announced the Tyler Doctrine, which effectively gave the US legal jurisdiction of the Pacific Ocean, and placed within its own legal capacity the right to exclude other Western powers from the Pacific. Speaking of Hawaii and the seas surrounding the Pacific islands, Tyler said, "It cannot but be in the conformity with the interest and wishes of the Government and the people of the United States, that this community, thus existing in the midst of a vast expanse of ocean, should be respected, and all its rights strictly and conscientiously regarded. Far remote from the dominions of European Powers, its growth and prosperity as an independent State may yet be in a high degree useful to all whose trade is extended to those regions." Tyler continued to say that European states and vessels attempting to take control of outposts in the Pacific or monopolize the Pacific trade "could not but create dissatisfaction on the part of the United States."38 Here the first steps were taken to assert US interest and control in the Pacific theater, and to give the US legal precedence to take action against other states that might oppose American interests. Two years later (1844) the US had signed its treaty with China, and ten years later one with Japan, solidifying its control over the Pacific.

It was no accident that President Tyler announced the doctrine that bears his name in the same speech in which he called for a mission to China. The entire operation then was one of US penetration into the Pacific. And here we must view the missions to China and Japan within this context of a new spatial order of the earth. The public speeches as well as the private correspondence of the Cushing mission, and the instructions of the Perry mission, betray the true sentiments of the Americans that initiated and undertook them. These missions to open the major markets and ports of East Asia were not undertaken ipso facto in and of themselves, but part of a much larger overreaching vision of nineteenth century Americans. This vision was not held by one man but had become a general discourse on America's place in the world and how to effectuate and strengthen that position. As The Farmers' Cabinet put it in an article entitled "A Short Cut to Asia," the attempt was nothing less than to "transfer the commercial centre of the globe from England to the United States."39 Senator William Seward, the future Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln, articulated this view at length in a speech before his Senate colleagues in 1852: "This movement is not a sudden, or accidental, or irregular, or convulsive one; but it is one for which men and nature have been preparing through near four hundred years. During all that time merchants and princes have been seeking how they could reach cheaply and expeditiously, 'Cathay,' 'China,' 'the East,' that intercourse and commerce might be established between its ancient nations and newer ones of the West. To these objects Da Gama, Columbus, Americus, Cabot, Hudson, and other navigators, devoted their talents, their labors, and their lives. Even the discovery of this continent and its islands, and the organization of society and government upon them, grand and important as those events have been, were but conditional, preliminary, and ancillary to the more sublime result, now in the act of consummation-the reunion of the two civilizations, which, having parted on the plains of Asia four thousand years ago, and having traveled ever afterwards in opposite directions around the world, now meet again on the coasts and islands of the Pacific ocean. Certainly no mere human event of equal dignity and importance has ever occurred upon the earth.“40

Indeed, politicians and policy makers and the press often articulated the reconstitution of a new spatial order in such terms. When Cushing talked of establishing a belt of fortresses around the Pacific in his correspondence with President Tyler, and Webster wrote of securing the last link in the Great Chain of Being in the Far East in the Japan instructions, they were articulating the American vision of a new spatial order, by which the Pacific would replace the Atlantic and Mediterranean as the bosom of trade and civilization, and America would become positioned at the center of the earth. Their task at hand was to make policy that would increase American influence and trade throughout the world, and their true desires, found within the unconscious ideology of the American psyche, was to create a whole new system of interaction through a new spatial order of the earth.

Americans' idea of a new spatial order of the earth grew out of an understanding of difference. From very early on Americans saw themselves as distinct and morally superior to Britain, Europe and the old world. Since the dawn of the revolution, Americans thought of themselves as creating a new order free of monarchy, corruption, and oppression. It was an order of political, economic and social institutions, which recognized the inherent rights of every human being-the freedom to make their own choices without the oversight or control of a higher human authority. Americans came to conceive of themselves and their nation as different, pure, and deserving. In this separation from the old world, a reconception of the spatial order of the earth began, with America coming to occupy the spatial center in the minds of her citizens. With themselves at the center, Americans redrew the mental map of the earth, and worked to realize a new reality in institutions and market order that would carry the wealth of China through America and to the markets of Europe. As the republic matured, its economic and political interests came into conflict with those of the old world, namely Britain, and a full fledged competition ensued with the globe at stake, which came to define how the US would interact with China and Japan.

The American break with the British Empire was a bitter one and it redefined their consciousness.41 Americans came to see England and Europe as corrupt and morally degenerate. Not only did the early Americans reject all things European ideologically but they also redefined the physical boundaries, drawing a line in the Atlantic. Thomas Jefferson spoke of it as "a meridian of partition through the ocean which separates the two hemispheres.“42 Americans conceptualized a new spatial order of the earth, in which the United States stood at the center, replacing Europe. This idea of themselves, once born, defined Americans' interaction with the world. No plans were drawn up in the State Department to overthrow Britain, or to militarily challenge Europe; rather an idea of greatness and a discourse of superiority governed the thoughts and actions of Americans. They went forth into the world, not to merely interact with it, but to conquer and mold it. As the Liverpool Journal wrote in early 1851, ''The republic of America bids fair for the mastery of the world, and will achieve it.“43

This conception of a new spatial order of the earth must be understood against Americans' identity of themselves in relation to Europe. T.H. Breen, in his article "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution," shows how British exclusion of Americans from the rights enjoyed by the English created a deep sense of humiliation and resentment in the American colonists. By denying Americans full equality within the British Empire, it was the English, Breen argues, who pushed the Americans to adopt a universalist vocabulary of natural rights (as opposed to rights granted by a monarch) and eventually forced them to revolt.44 Americans here drew on the tradition of the English moral and political philosophers to create an identity and legal justification of individual rights inherent in human beings.4s They came to see themselves as the purveyors of liberty and justice, fighting against monarchy and tyranny, conservativism, corruption and conspiracy. By the end of the eighteenth century even the European thinkers of the Enlightenment began to talk of the US as free and independent, unspoiled by the corruption and over-civilization plaguing Europe. Indeed, the natural condition of America was viewed as normal and pacific, while that of Europe as abnormal and combative. The US was considered to be the refuge of justice and efficiency; a state where conditions existed by which laws and freedom were possible in a normal situation, not needed to be imposed by monarchal figures.

In this idea of themselves, Americans first conceptualized and then formalized a separate sphere of peace and freedom, distinct from a sphere of despotism and corruption. This distinction led, by necessity, to the formulation of a new order, which would redraw the spatial map of the earth. All European claims to the soil were canceled and American soil acquired a new formal status in the minds of its citizens, distinct from the former territorial claims of the old world. This was enacted in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, and then in Tyler's extension of the doctrine into the Pacific with the Tyler Doctrine in 1842.

It was thus that the line was drawn; a global line that served ideologically as a quarantine, or pest control. As Senator Thomas Rusk put it in a report before his colleagues: "We are aspiring to the first place among the nations of the earth...a place which belongs to us a as a matter of right-and are we to suffer ourselves. to be overcome by British commercial capitalists under the auspices of the British crown?',46 The answer to his rhetorical question was no, of course, ftom which the birth of a new spatial order of the earth would be born.

In this context of building itself up and asserting itself and interests in the world the US needed to keep the other Western powers in check; failing to do so would compromise the global position of the US and keep the spatial order of the earth focused on Europe. The Southern Literary Messenger argued in a front page 1850 article that, "We cannot consent to connect this dominion with the local system of Europe. That system must keep out of the ftay of ours, and confine itself to the corner of the earth where it originated; for we must follow the counsel of our Washington, and have no entangling connections with European powers. Our god Terminus, like the Roman, may advance, but he never recedes.'.47

The article further discussed the designs of European powers in the Western hemisphere and attempted to use Texas and Mexico to extend their influence into the new world. It was by calculation that the US thwarted these designs and kept Europe at bay: ''the European system was driven back within its natural limits, and the United States again left free to follow the maxims of Washington.“48 The journal concluded by confirming diplomatic aggression against Europe and calling for the extension of US interests in other parts of the world "when occasion offers, and by proper means." Indeed, for The Southern Literary Messenger. the US had arrived to play the predominate role in the future relations of the world through the construction of "a school of American diplomacy, sound in its attainments, sagacious in its means, and governed as to its ends by a strong sense of national power, and a solemn conviction of national responsibility.“49

In this quest for markets, influence and a new order of the earth, Americans viewed Britain as their enemy. Bradford Perkins, who devoted a distinguished career to the study of Anglo-American relations, argued in The Great Rapprochement that the antagonism between the two countries did not subside until the First World War. "Generation after generation [of Americans] had leamed to look upon England as the enemy," he wrote. He noted that John Adams and his contemporaries developed the attitude from events surrounding the American Revolution. John Quincy Adams and his generation, including the merchants who would come to carry out trade with China, learned it from the War of 1812. John Quincy's grandson, Henry Adams, continued the Anglophobic sentiment when recalling his experiences in London during the Civil War, "It was the hostility of the middle-class which broke our hearts, and turned me into a lifelong enemy of everything British. "so Indeed, from the time of Thomas Paine, Americans saw their republic as a challenge to the European forms of monarchy and repression; a land of freedom and virtues that would herald a better future for the human race. Britain was the target of the American Revolution and later the foreign antagonist at which abuse would continuously be hurled for its aristocratic and unjust form of government and world domination. As historian Cushing Strout writes, "The role of England in American demonology has been a special one. As America's most ancient enemy she has been the prime villain of the Old World.“51

Yet more than just ideological differences divided the two peoples; very concrete conflicts of interest often put the two countries at odds, and at times very near war. Between 1815 and 1860, for example, the US concluded commercial agreements with forty-three countries. In each case, and especially in Latin America, the US came into conflict with British diplomats as they struggled to gain similar advantages as those already granted to British merchants. 52 In his article "'The United States and British Imperial Expansion, 1815-60", Kinley Brauer has shown the threat that British expansion in North America and throughout the world presented to the US. American merchants saw the British acquisition of colonies as an obstacle to trade and their ability to compete with British merchants; Southern planters viewed British acquisition of African, South American and Latin American colonies as a strategy to break the South's monopoly in cotton production; and manufacturers worried that Britain would gain control over world markets, saturating them with goods cheaper than they could produce. In the early nineteenth century many believed that the US was in grave economic danger as Britain used its industrial, financial and commercial resources to build an empire of economic domination. As Massachusetts Representative Francis Baylies put it in 1826, Britain pursued a conscious policy "to check, to influence, and to control all nations, by means of her navy and her commerce-she has pursued this grand design, with an energy and perseverance, which does infinite credit to her political sagacity and foresight." Or the New York Herald noted in 1841: "The progress of British aggrandizement in every part of the world, savage and civilized, ought to alarm all independent nations.“53

The US furthermore faced the threat of British territorial encroachment at home over what Congressman Caleb Cushing called "rival interests.“54 From very early on Britain had designs on California and its deep-water ports. The Royal Navy had surveyed the California coast in 1827 and reported that San Francisco "possesses all the requisites for a great naval establishment, and is so advantageously situated with regard to North America and China and the Pacific in general." By the late 1830s Britain had a program to acquire California, Mexico and much of what is today the Southwestern United States.55 In the 1840s Britain actively discouraged Texas from becoming part of the US, instead recommending that it continue as an independent state and come under the protection of the British Empire. And in the Pacific Ocean it moved on Hawaii. These acts led president Tyler to force the annexation of Texas and to extend the Monroe Doctrine into the Pacific Ocean to keep Britain from anchoring its naval ships there and turning Hawaii into a colony. The United States' northeastern boundary with British Canada remained unresolved for nearly half a century, and continued to inspire criticism of "our greatest enemy" who has "endeavored to deprive us of this (codfishery in the northern seas],"as Congressman Cushing wrote in a letter to the Massachusetts governor over the border problem. "She sought to cripple our growing strength on the Ocean. She claimed to be allowed military possession of the Lakes. She demanded the use of the Mississippi, though it is wholly within the United States.“56 In the late 1830s the "Aroostook War" exploded over the Maine boundary, the New Hampshire boundary had isolated private and public conflicts, and the New York-Niagara border saw inflammatory incidents such as a British Canadian force destroying an American steamboat moored on the US side of the river. 57 As these problems festered, American politicians began supporting an expulsion of Britain from Canada and a Canadian revolutionary movement. 58 Some even began talking of war with Britain. "If the pretensions of Great Britain should unhappily force the United States into war," Cushing told his Congressional colleagues in 1839, "I shall not stop to dispute which of the two, my native land or its foreign enemy, is in the right; but 1 will be the forced in the tented field, where death is to be met, or honor won, at the cannon's mouth."59

As contentious as the Maine boundary appeared, the Oregon Territory probably stood as the most potentially explosive confrontation between Britain and the US, and which nearly did lead them to war. Territorial claims and crises rose and fell for nearly half a century until Polk averted war and negotiated a compromise in 1846. The crisis in the mid 1820s ratcheted up tensions when the British seized Astoria; war averted only by declaration of joint occupation in 1827. The British fur trading company, the Hudson Bay Company, was established on the north Pacific coast in 1825, and even as the fur trade declined, the growing importance of the China trade increased the desirability of the Pacific coast ports. "The commerce of the whole world in the Pacific Ocean," commented the French minister in Washington in 1843, "is going to acquire a development that will give to all places on its shores, susceptible of being used for ports of repair or of commerce, a considerable importance.“60 As American migration into Oregon increased, and trade grew, the rivalry with Britain flared again. "I think it is our duty to speak freely and candidly, and let England know she can never have an inch of Oregon." said Congressmen John Wentworth of Illinois over the controversy. Missouri Congressman Thomas Hart Benton, proposed, "Thirty thousand rifles on Oregon will annihilate the Hudson's Bay Company.“61 The 1844 elections sent several hawkish and Anglophobic Democrats to the twenty-ninth Congress who called to retain every inch of Oregon. The cry became "fifty-four forty or fight," in reference to not giving up any land south of the parallel at 54°40'. Elected on the Democratic platform of holding all of Oregon, President Polk felt he had to hold the line, though as tensions rose he privately questioned "whether the judgment of the civilized world would be in our favor in a war waged for a comparatively worthless territory north of forty-nine degrees, which [my] predecessors had over and over again offered to surrender to Great Britain, provided she would yield her pretensions to the country south of that latitude." Publicly he held fast and the British press grew more antagonistic, with the London Times writing that the British people are "prepared to defend the claims of this country to the utmost, wherever they are seriously challenged." Even the US minister in London, Louis McLane, wrote home to say that Britain would rather fight than concede more than the territory south of the forty-ninth parallel. 62

This Anglo-American rivalry went to the heart of US foreign policy. From Canada to Latin America, the respective governments and diplomats constantly attempted to outdo one another. At stake were the markets of the world and economic hegemony. As The Southern Quarterly Review wrote of the competition in 1848: 'The books of the treasury department show that if our tonnage shall continue to increase for the next four years at its average rate for the last three, that the shipping of the United States will then exceed that of Great Britain. After that time America, not England, is to be the great maritime and commercial power of the world.“63

For Britain, with its empire spanning the globe, the aim was to maintain its trade advantage and access to markets and ports. For the US, the young nation of incipient merchants with a growing economy, the objective was to break into as many markets as possible. These two goals ultimately came into conflict with each other in East Asia.

Many saw East Asia as the grounds where the contest for influence and order would be waged. It was here in the Pacific that the emerging markets lay, and here, as we have seen, that the US sought control in order to shift the balance of power from the old world to the new. As Americans penetrated East Asia, however, they constantly ran up against the presence of Britain, which threatened at times to monopolize the entire market. This necessitated a strong role by the US to keep Britain in check and extend American influence and commercial reach. The government needed to play a positive role, and this became critical in the extension of American rights in China and the opening of Japan to foreign trade. The Southern Literary Messenger alerted its readers in early 1850 of the presence and threat of Britain, which had recently "placed herself on Hong Kong and Labuan, and is menacing Japan and Borneo.“64 Quoting another source, the journal chimed that the US has too great an interest in China and Japan to allow Britain to form a relationship with either of those countries in the mold of India.65 Indeed, Commodore Peny suggested seizing islands as bases in order to thwart British designs in the region, as well as to serve as US launching points in the ensuing conflict with Britain that he saw exploding in the future.

Where the idea of difference and spatial order set the tone for American construction of a new order, conflict with Britain forced the US government to play a positive role in pursing this new order. These two developments cannot be seen as mutually exclusive of each other, but rather linked in a dance of act and react. The mission to China was dispatched to establish diplomatic relations with China only after the British had already done so creating fear among Americans of British monopolization, or worse, colonization. The China mission would thus not only counter British encroachment but also work to secure American influence in the region. Likewise, the Japan mission occurred over increased competition to throw open that country, long closed to the outside world, to trade and commerce. The actual market was questionable, but the rewards of regional power were immense. For the US, Japan presented an opportunity to encircle the Pacific. Standing at the edge of what they considered their Far West, Japan could act as a base for penetration to the China market and control of the Pacific trade. Peny also made it painfully clear that such bases were necessary in order counter the British presence. Or, as The Farmers' Cabinet put it in an article about the American expedition to Japan: "The project seems to have arrested the attention of European observers everywhere, as a new manifestation of the growing power and resources of the United States. Our commercial enterprises are securing for us due consideration in the world which is now beginning to reckon us in the first rank. of nations.“66

Pinned upon a rivalry with Britain and a quest for a new world order, US China policy, coupled with its East Asia policy, and inseparable from its global foreign policy, had taken a clear form in the first half of the nineteenth century.

 

Anglo-American Ascendance P.1.

Anglo-American Ascendance P.2.

Anglo-American Ascendance P.4: The China Blockade.

Anglo-American Ascendance P.5: The Japan Blockade

Anglo-American Ascendance P.6: Opium War

14 See P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism. 1688-2000, 2nd ed. (Harlow, England; New York: Longmim, 2002), 159.

15 Senate Report 267:32-1, serial 631, p. 2.

16 Jeremiah N. Reynolds, Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac. under the Command of Commodore John Downes. During the Circumnavigation of the Globe. in the Years 1831,1832,1833. and 1834 (New York,: Harper & brothers, 1835),373.

17 Douglass Cecil North, The Economic Growth of the United States. 1790-1860 (Englewood Cliffs. N.J.,: Prentice-Hall, 1961).

18 Journal of the House of Representatives. Dee 31, 1842, p. 123; Tyler to House, Dee 30, 1842, House Document35:27-3,p.4.

19 Quoted in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge,: Harvard University Press, 1950), 24. Benton made this claim after a meeting with Jefferson in 1824. 20 Feb. 7, 1849 Congressional Globe, Senate 30th Cong., 2"" sess., 473.

21 Quoted in Smith, Virgin Land, 35-36.

22 Quoted in Ibid. 23 Ibid., 15.

24 Ibid., 20.

25 Joseph Schafer, "The Western Ocean and Oregon History," in The Pacific Ocean in History: Papers and Addresses Presented at the Panama-Pacific Historical Congress, Held at San Francisco, Berkeley and Palo Alto. California, July 19-23.1915, ed. H. Morse Stephens, Herbert Eugene Bolton, (New York: The Macmillan company, 1917),289-290.

26 See Annals of Congress. 17th C0D,!" 2nd sess., 389, 4 I 8, 423-4, 583-4

27 Annals of Congress 17th Cong., 2 sess. (Dec. 18, 1822),423.

28 Annals of Congress 17th Cong., 211II sess. (Jan. 13,1823),584.

29 Quoted in Smith, Virgin Land, 23.

30 Quoted in Nathan A. Pelcovits, Old China Hands and the Foreign Office (New York,: Pub. under the auspices of American Institute of Pacific Relations by the King's Crown Press, 1948), 16.

31 "A Highway to the Pacific," The Barre Patriot, Nov 26, 1852, v. 9, no. 20, p. 1.

32 Quoted in The Farmers' Cabinet. Jan 30, 1852, p. 2.

33 "The Pacific Civilization," The Farmers' Cabinet. Jan 13, 1853, v. 51, no. 23, p. 1.

34 Some important works on racial influences in US foreign policy are Michael 1. Krenn, Race and U.S. Foreign Policy from Colonial Times through the Age of Jackson (New York: Garland Pub., 1998), Michael 1. Krenn, The Color of Empire: Race and American Foreign Relations (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006), Krenn, The Impact of Race on U.S. Foreign Policy, Shepherd, Racial Influences on American Foreign Policy.

35 The Farmers' Cabinet, Ian 23, 1851, v. 49, n. 24, p. 2.

36 "A Short Cut to Asia," The Farmers' Cabinet, Dee 6,1849, v. 48, no. 17, p. 2.

37 "Our Foreign Policy," The Southern Literary Messenger, Jan 1850, p.I:!.

38 Journal o/the House o/Representatives. Dee 31,1842, p. 122; Tyler to House, Dee 30,1842, House Document 35: 27.3, p. 1.

39 "A Short Cut to Asia," The Farmers' Cabinet, Dee 6, 1849, v. 48, no. 17, p. 2.

40 The Congressional Globe, 32-1, July 29,1852, p. 1975:3.

41 T.H. Breen, "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising," Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (1997), Ohmori Yuhtaro, "The Artillery of Mr. Locke: The Use of Locke's Second Treatise in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1764-1776" (ph.D. diss., John Hopkins University, 1988).

42 Quoted in Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 288.

43 Quoted in The Farmers' Cabinet, Ian 30, 1851, v. 49, no. 25, p. 2.

44 Breen, "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution."

45 Yuhtaro, "The Artillery of Mr. Locke".

46 Senate Report 267:32-1, seria1631, p. 7.

47 "Our Foreign Policy," The Southern Literary Messenger, Ian 1850, p. 2: 1. 48 "Our Foreign Policy," The Southern Literary Messenger, Ian 1850, p.l :2.

49 ''Our Foreign Policy," The Southern Literary Messenger, Jan 1850, p.6: 1-2.

50 Quoted in Bmdford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement; England and the United States, 1895-1914
NewYork,: Atheneum, 1968),4-5.

51 Cushing Strout, The American Image a/the Old World (New York,: Harper & Row, 1963), 134.

52 Kinley J. Bmuer, "The United States and British Imperial Expansion 1815-60," Diplomatic History 12 (winter 1988): 29.

53 Quoted in Ibid.: 23-34.

54 Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot, July 11-14, 1837, Cushing on the Northeast Boundary, Cushing Papers box 204, p. 8.

55 See Norman A. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion (New York,: Ronald Press Co., 1955),68,76-77.

56 Cushing Papers "Claims of Citizens of the United States on Denmark" (1826), box 200, p. 16; Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot, July 11-14,1837, p. 3, Cushing on the Northeast Boundary, Cushing Papers box 204.

57 See Frederick Merk, "The Oregon Question in the Webster-Ashburton Negotiations," The Mississippi Valley Historical Reveiw 43, no. 3 (1956).

58 See Cushing Papers. Articles in the New York Daily Express, Dec. 1837, box 204.

59 Cushing Papers, ''On the Main Boundary Question" p. 7-8 box 204; March 3, 1839 Congressional Globe, 25th Cong., 3111 sess., app. p. 269.

60 Quoted in Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, 31.

61 Quoted in Ibid., 36-37.

62 Ibid., 104-105.

63 "A New Route to China," The Southern Quarterly Review, Apr 1848, v. 13, no. 26, p. 362.

64 "Our Foreign Policy," The Southern Literary Messenger, Jan 1850, p. 4:2.

65 "Our Foreign Policy," The Southern Literary Messenger, Jan 1850, p. 2:2.

66 "Japan Expedition," The Farmers' Cabinet, Feb 24, 1853, v. 51, no. 29, p. 3.

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