The American Union and the problem of neighborhood : the United States and the collapse of the Spanish empire, 1783-1829 / James E. Lewis, Jr.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lewis, James E., 1964-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States--Foreign relations--Spain.

United States.

Spain--Foreign relations--United States.

Spain.

Spain--Colonies--America--History--18th century.

Spain--Colonies--America--History--19th century.

United States--Foreign relations--1783-1865.

United States--Politics and government--1783-1865.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (308 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c1998.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In this book, James Lewis demonstrates the centrality of American ideas about and concern for the union of the states in the policymaking of the early republic. For four decades after the nation's founding in the 1780s, he says, this focus on securing a union operated to blur the line between foreign policies and domestic concerns. Such leading policymakers as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay worried about the challenges to the goals of the Revolution that would arise from a hostile neighborhood--whether composed of new nations outside the union or the existing states following a division of the union. At the center of Lewis's story is the American response to the dissolution of Spain's empire in the New World, from the transfer of Louisiana to France in 1800 to the independence of Spain's mainland colonies in the 1820s. The breakup of the Spanish empire, he argues, presented a series of crises for the unionist logic of American policymakers, leading them, finally, to abandon a crucial element of the distinctly American approach to international relations embodied in their own federal union.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [267]-294) and index.

ISBN:

9798890869890

9780807866894

080786689X

OCLC:

45843942