Fighting for America by Jeremy Black

Author:Jeremy Black [Black, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253005618
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2014-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

12

A GREAT POWER IN

THE MAKING? AMERICA

1853–61

The People have learnt, even more than ordinary minds in general do, to attach the idea of national greatness to extensive territory.

Lord Lyons, British ambassador, 1862

Success over Mexico, combined with the settlement of the Oregon Question, led to bold plans for further expansion and activity. The range was dramatic, and notably so in the Pacific. Both the experience of the value of deployment there during the Mexican War, and the new interests and possibilities that followed the annexation of California, led to greater interest in the Pacific, and this interest was not restricted to the eastern Pacific. Indeed, after the war, when the USS Ohio made its final cruise, it visited both Hawaii and Samoa. More significantly, on 8 July 1853, a squadron of four ships under Commodore Matthew Perry anchored at the entrance to Tokyo Bay in order to persuade Japan to inaugurate relations. After presenting a letter from President Millard Fillmore (1850–53), Perry sailed to China, declaring that he would return the following year. Having wintered on the Chinese coast, itself an important display of naval capability, and made naval demonstrations in the Ryuku and Bonin Islands, which secured a coaling concession from the ruler of Okinawa, competing with British interests there,1 Perry returned to Japan with a larger squadron of eight warships and negotiated the Treaty of Kanagawa of 31 March 1854, providing for American diplomatic representation, coaling stations, the right for American ships to call at two ports, and humane treatment for shipwrecked American soldiers.2 This “unequal treaty” left deep grievances, but it reflected the extent to which force underlay America’s advancing merchants’ frontier around the Pacific with the developing Pacific trade system seen as a particular national opportunity.3 Perry then returned to the United States, but, in 1854–55, another American naval expedition, the North Pacific Surveying Expedition, greatly expanded hydrographic knowledge of Japanese waters. In the southwest Pacific, American warships had rarely ventured west of the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands prior to the 1850s, but Commodore William Mervine, who took command of the Pacific Squadron in August 1854, was keen to champion American commercial interests and instructed his captains accordingly.4

Fillmore’s successor, Franklin Pierce (1853–57), was interested in acquiring Alaska, Cuba, and Hawaii, albeit without success. In a context of mounting international competition, the British helped thwart the last.5 Moreover, the protection of American interests led to the landing of forces in East Asia and the Pacific: in Shanghai in 1854, 1855, and 1859; Canton in 1856; and Fiji in 1855 and 1858. In 1856, Andrew Foote destroyed the barrier forts on the Pearl River near Canton,6 although in 1859 the American envoy, John Ward, was willing to travel to Beijing in traditional tribute style, unlike his British and French counterparts.

Economic interest was believed to play a key role in American expansionism, which was called for in speeches and newspapers, not least by senators more prominent later in the 1860s, such as William Seward, who was to be secretary of state from

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