The Panama Canal: An Informal History of Its Concept, Building, and Present Status. Donald Barr Chidsey
issued a declaration telling the world that they meant “to take for their sole guide the precepts of that Holy Religion, namely, the precepts of Justice, Christian Charity and Peace . . .” This seemed harmless enough, even meritorious; but statesmen are in the nature of their calling shot with suspicion, and it was some time before other nations, though asked, agreed to subscribe to the Holy Alliance. When they did come in, though, they came fast. Soon the only princes in Europe who had not expressed a willingness to take for their sole guide the precepts of that Holy Religion—Justice, Christian Charity, and Peace—were the pope, the sultan of Turkey, and the king of England. George IV had been asked to join, but had politely declined. He, or at least his government, remained suspicious.
So did the United States of America, which was never asked. To those highly placed in Washington there was always something fishy about the Holy Alliance, which they sometimes called, as it was sometimes called in Whitehall, the Unholy Alliance.
Interest in the building of an interoceanic canal had sagged. Spain woefully neglected her opportunities, for she was busy trying to keep the American colonies in the royal fold. In 1735, Charles Maire de la Condamine, after a visit to Central America, had recommended to the French Academy of Sciences that a canal be built through Nicaragua; but the report was simply filed away and forgotten. The German poet Goethe expressed interest in the possibilities of such a waterway, which he predicted would be built by the United States government; but this turned over no earth. The prestigious Alexander von Humboldt, after spending several years of travel in South America, Central America, and North America, caused a considerable stir with his thirty-volume Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, published between 1805 and 1834, in which he listed nine separate possible routes for interoceanic travel, all the way from Saskatchewan to Patagonia, asserting that the Nicaraguan one was clearly the best. But once again, nothing was done.
One by one the Spanish colonies in America rose in revolt against a despotic mother country. In 1814 the cortes (parliament) at Madrid ordered a thorough survey to be made of the Nicaraguan route with a canal in mind; but by that time it was too late.
The breakaway came in large chunks at first, but the new states showed little power of cohesion, and soon they too were splitting up, a process that further delayed any serious talk about a canal. The original Central American republic, which embraced all that area except Panama, a province of Colombia, and the Mosquito coast of Honduras, which was held by Great Britain, very early broke up into the separate and sometimes warring states of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica, with still another, the future San Salvador, in the offing. In 1829-1830 the Dutch for the first time tried to get into the canal-planning act when they applied for a charter; but Simón Bolívar’s Granadan Federation was crumbling even at that time, and the next year it split up, loudly, into Venezuela, Ecuador, and New Granada, which later became Colombia. In that very same year, too, the Dutch were given something to think about at home when Belgium broke away from Holland.
Revolutions, indeed, were by no means confined to America. There was a good deal of antimonarchical feeling in Europe as well; and at the time that James Monroe sat down at his desk in the White House8 to frame his seventh message to Congress, there were or recently had been uprisings in Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain itself.
President Monroe was inclined to blame the Holy Alliance for much of this. The newly established Latin-American states, too strong to be taken back by a tottering Spain, yet too weak, it would seem, to govern themselves with any degree of success, made up a mighty temptation to the original professors of Justice, Christian Charity, and Peace. That these new states would be spared much longer seemed unlikely, and indeed already there were rumors that France had in mind a Bourbon dynasty in Mexico, or in Central or South America, or perhaps all three. Mr. Monroe decided to do something about this.
The idea was not his alone. It had been suggested to him by the British foreign minister, the redoubtable and witty George Canning, who in September of that same year of 1823 had proposed to the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Richard Rush, that the two nations issue a joint declaration warning against any attempt on the part of any European nation to occupy any part of America. This proposal Mr. Rush had of course passed on to the secretary of state, who placed it before the President.
British interests also coincided with the interests of the United States in the northwest coast of North America. Rusisa recently had forgotten her love of the sacred precepts of Christianity long enough to lay claim to that coast as far south as the 51st parallel of latitude.9 Great Britain did not like this any more than did the United States; and surely Russia should be spoken to.
President James Monroe
Mr. Monroe was thinking of this as he sat down to make a last, final draft of his message to Congress. He was a cautious man. When he was younger he had often been thought rash and impetuous, but elevation to the highest office in the land had sobered him, and now he did nothing without considerable advance thought. He had pondered the Canning proposal, which just at first he was inclined to favor. He had discussed it at more than one meeting of his five-man cabinet, and he had informally asked for the opinions of the two past presidents who happened to be also personal friends—Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—both of whom favored the Canning plan. But the secretary of state—short, bald, pale, watery-eyed, and with bad manners, John Quincy Adams by name—did not agree.
Mr. Adams was anything but a likable man, but his intellectual capacity was unquestioned, as was his patriotism, and as the son of the second President of the United States he had been brought up since boyhood in the ways of international diplomacy. The secretary of state approved of the Canning suggestion, but he did not favor a joint declaration. He thought that the United States should issue such a warning alone rather than tag along “as a cock-boat bobbing in the wake of the British man-of-war.”10 This idea, when he got to thinking it over, appealed to Mr. Monroe too. Mr. Adams would have done the deed through normal diplomatic channels, a quiet word here, a quiet word there, nothing that could not be retracted or, if necessary, denied. Mr. Monroe did not agree. He thought that the whole world should be told, as would be the case if the warning were incorporated into a public document such as his annual message to Congress. Mr. Monroe, being the President, got his way.
He wrote:
The occasion has been judged proper for asserting as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subject for future colonization by any European powers . . .
And later, in the same message, he wrote:
With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered, and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence, and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States . . .
He had done a great thing, but he was not aware of it. He knew only that he had acted in an emergency and acted in the best way he knew. He did not have the consent of the Senate, and so he could not be thought in any way to be setting down an immutable determination on the part of the United States government.11 If his bet was called he could not declare war; only Congress could do that. He was not conscious of giving to the world a ringing doctrine, and indeed these two parts of his annual message were not at first called or thought of as a “doctrine” but rather as the Monroe “principles” or the Monroe “declaration.” 12
The President’s warning was dismissed in most European capitals as bluster, but London, after thinking it over, decided that it did not like it. Neither was there any applause from the Latin-American nations, who thought it somewhat condescending and, in any event, without any force behind it. In the days when Madrid still ruled that part of the world there had been stem insistence upon a trade confined to the mother country; but, though the