Bolívar Hats Were All the Rage European powers lost their hold on the New World during the Napoleonic wars. As colonies suddenly broke away, Americans were thrilled. By Fergus M. Bordewich
The presidency of James Monroe is often recalled as a period of political quiescence between the heroic age of the Founders and the era of muscular national expansion that followed him. Of course, his presidency is mostly remembered for the Monroe Doctrine. Proclaimed in 1823, it declared that the United States would consider any European action against the newly independent states of the Americas as an affront to itself.
Beneath the surface, the Monroe years and the decade that preceded them—roughly, 1810 to 1825—were anything but placid, at least with respect to Americans’ political discovery of Latin America. The turbulent visions and new ideological affinities of this period are the focus of Caitlin Fitz’s superb “Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions.” Ms. Fitz, a history professor at Northwestern University, argues that the Monroe era not only laid the foundation for U.S. policy toward Latin America but shaped North Americans’ ideas about the place of the United States in the world. It is a fascinating and often surprising story.
“Our Sister Republics” is not a history of Latin America’s revolutions, although Ms. Fitz tells us enough to enable us to distinguish the fleeting Republic of Pernambuco from the new regimes in Buenos Aires or Caracas. Rather, she focuses on North Americans’ passionate, if short-lived, identification with the aspirations of their South American neighbors.
ENLARGE Our Sister Republics
By Caitlin Fitz
Liveright, 354 pages, $29.95
As instructive as Ms. Fitz’s narrative is, it is also a pleasure to read. She has a gift for the sparkling phrase that both enchants and illuminates. North American newspapers were “foreign agents’ strongest weapons, their pages scraping away at Portuguese authority with the accumulated force of a thousand paper cuts.” News of revolutions was carried by “merchants, sea captains, and other international men of motion.” Monroe, in the weeks before proclaiming his doctrine, sat “in Washington’s crisp autumn, holding foreign policy in his thoughts like a jeweler appraising a diamond, turning it around, inspecting it from all sides.” It is a rare historian who can bring politics alive with such verve.
Beginning around 1810, as Spanish and Portuguese power in the Americas disintegrated during the Napoleonic wars, virtually all the peoples of Latin America broke away from their colonial overlords and formed independent republics (though Mexico and Brazil, at first, declared themselves empires). By the end of the decade, much of the Spanish-American mainland was in open revolt.
North Americans were thrilled. Until then, Ms. Fitz writes, citizens of the U.S. had “felt like passengers aboard a political Noah’s Ark, a lonely republic bobbing alone in a churning sea of monarchy and responsible for the fate of republicanism itself.” But the rise of Latin American independence added a sense of universality to American ideals, making the American people “feel that they stood at the forefront of a worldwide movement for liberty.”
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