113 Bit jLa^O OA ."to Qyi/vwsux^ oJ^XjO-ny. ^^^■T Qass. Book_ tni3 "Ps I'-f aJ^I Oi.-Fn;iAi, Da3NrA'rxt»f. H ^J-.2, 55th Congress, ) SENATE. ( Document 2d Session, ) \ No. 102. THE HISTOEIC POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES AS TO ANNEXATION. January 31. 1898.— Ordered to be printed. Mr. iMoRdAN presented the iollowiug: THE HISTORIC POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES AS TO ANNEX- ATION.— BY PROF. SIMEON E. BALDWIN, LL. D.. OF YALE UNI- VERSITY. Tlie United States, according^ to President Lincoln, was '-formed in fact by the Articles of Associatioji in 1774." Bnt the self styled -'Conti- nental Congress," which framed those articles, represented and claimed to represent bnt a small portion of the American Continent. The eleven colonies wlio.se ritish man of war and put in the Tower on a charge of treason, but was now at large on parole, that many of the opposition in England favored the surrender of Canada and Nova Scotia. Mr. Adams replied that lie feared that we could never have real peace with Canachi or Nova Scotia in the hands of the English, and that at least we should stipulate in any treaty of peace that they should keep no troops or fortified places on the frontiers of either.^ A few days later Dr. Franklin submitted to Mr. Oswald, with whom, as the commissioner of Great Britain, the treaty of i)eace was after- ward negotiated, a paper suggesting the dangers of maintaining a long frontier between countries, the roughest of whose people would always inhal)it their borders and outposts, and that Great Britain might well cede Canada to us on condition of a peri)etual guaranty of free trade with that province and a provision for indemnity for the losses, both of Canadian loyalists and of Americans whose property had been burned in British invasions, out of the proceeds of sales of the public lands remaining ungranted.|| The influence of France was from the tirst thrown against the enlarge- ment of the United States by the accession of any more of the British colonies. As most of these had once been hers, she doubtless hoped that thev might some day become again part of their mother country. Our treaty with her, of 1778, stii)ulated that should she capture any of the British West India islands it should be for her own benefit, while if we should occupy the northern colonies or the Bermudas they should " be confederate with or dependent upon the said United States." The adoption of the present Constitution of the United States, in abrogating by the voice of the majority the Articles of Confederation, was a revolutionary proceeding which threw two States out of the Union. North Carolina and Ehode Island, by refusing to ratify the work of the convention of 1787, put themselves for a time certainly very near the position of foreign States. This conseipience of their action was strongly urged in the North Carolina convention. "In my " Life of Saninel Adams, il, 434. t Franklin's Works, i. 143. {Ibid., I, 311. vN See Washington's letter to Landon Carter of May 30. 1778, to tlie same effect. Writings, Sparks' ed., V, 389. II Franklin's Work's, i, 480. POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES AS TO ANNEXATION. 5 opinion," said (ioveriior Jolmston, one of its members, "if we refuse to ratify tlie Constitutiou we shall be entirely out of tlie Union, and can be considered only as a foreign ])ower. It is true the United States may admit us hereafter, but they may admit us on terms uiieijual and disadvantageous to us/' " It is objected," replied the next sjieaker, " we shall be out of the Union. So I wish to be. We are left at liberty to come in at any time."* " In my opinion." said James Iredell, afterwards a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, "when any State has once rejected the Constitution it can not claim to come in after- wards as a matter of right. If it does not in plain terms reject, but refuses to accede for the present, I think the other States may regard this as an absolute rejection and refuse to admit us afterwards, but at their pleasure and on what terms they please." t When, however, in 1780 and 1790 these States reluctantly sent in their ratifications, no question was made about receiving them on equal terms with those by which the new Government had been originally organized; and they came in on a footing of right. The United States of 178!) were in many respects a political combi- nation of foreign communities. The Atlantic was almost the sole means of communication between the Northern and Southern States. The Hudson helped to bind eastern New England to New York. The Ohio and the Mississipi)i might lead from one scattered settlement to another, but of those who lived 20 miles fiom navigable water it was only the favored or the adventurous few who had ever visited any State except their own. To such a people there could be nothing startling in the ac(piisition of foreign territory. It could hardly be more foreign than much that was already within the Union. It could hardly be more distant, for a voyage from Philadelphia to London or Marseilles took less time and money and involved less risk and hardship than a trip to Cincinnati or Natchez. Gouverneur Morris said at the time of the Louisiana purchase that he had known since the day when the Constitution was adopted that all North America must at length be annexed, J At the close of the Revolutionary war both England and America regarded the long frontier on the north of the United States as not unlikely to be soon the scene of renewed hostilities. John Adams, in October, 1785, writes from abroad to the Secretary of State that some of the opposition in Great Britain were saying "that Canada and Nova Scotia must soon be ours; there must be a war for it; they know how it will end, but the sooner the better; this done, we shall be forever at peace; till then, never." § But we had a boundary still more difficult to the southward. The end of the Seven Years' War in Europe had seen France cede to Spain New Orleans, with so much cf her Louisiana territory as lay west of the Mississippi, and the rest to Great Britain. A cession from Spain of her claims on the Floridas had confirmed these as English posses- sions and made the Mississippi their western boundary; but during our Revolutionary war Spain had recaptured them and her title was confirmed by the peace of 1783. In 1800 Spain ceded back her Louisiana territories to France, and the century opened with Spain bounding us below Georgia and France hemming us in at the mouth of the Mississippi, and by an undefined, * 4, Elliot's Debates, 223, 4. t Writings, iil, 185. t Ibid. ,231. ^ Works, VIII, 333. (I POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES AS TO ANNEXATION. aud perhaps indefinable, stretch of territory running from the Gulf up toward the Canadian line. The leaders of the Kevolutiouary period who survived were united in the belief that it was vital to our interests to acquire the French title. Hamilton,* John x\danis,t and Gouverueur Morrist were of this Hiiud, not less than Jefferson, Madison, and Livingston. There was a serious question as to our right to make the purchase, and the Administration represented the party which regarded the Gov- ernment as one of delegated powers to be strictly construed. The great leader of the other school, Daniel Webster, declared, in 1837, during tlie heat of the controversy over the admission of Texas, that he did not believe the framers of the Constitution contemplated the annexation of for.'ign territory, and that, for his part, he believed it to be for the interest of the Union '-to remain as it is, without diminution and without addition."^ We now have, however, more light as to the real intention of the founders from the published letters of Gou verneur jNIorris, whose pen put the Constitution in form. No "decree de crescendo impcrio was inserted in it," he wrote, at the time of the Louisiana purchase, because no boundaries could be wisely or safely assigned to our tuture expansion. "I knew as well then as I do now that all North America must at length be annexed to us— hapuy, indeed, if the lust of possession stop there." || If, on the other hand, it had been intended to keep the Union forever within the limits then existing, we may be sure that an express jn'o- hibition would have been inserted. This was Gallatin's view when Jefferson consulted his Cabinet as to the Louisiana negotiation. The adverse position, he wrote the President, must be that " the United States are precluded from and renounce altogetlier the enlargement of territory— a ])iovision sufliciently imi)ortant and singular to have deserved to be expressly inserted." Jefferson's reply to this letter shows his own opinion more fully than it is elsewhere given in his cor respondence. "There is," he wrote, "no constitutional ditticulty as to the acquisition of territory, and whether, when accjuired, it may be taken into the Union by the Constitntion as it now stands will become a question of expediency."^] It was a time, moreover, tor action rather than for deliberation. Between a question of constitutional construction on the one hand, aud on the other a possiVde French army umler a Napoleon ascending the Mississii)pi to reconipier a New World, the administration was not disposed to hesitate as to the choice. Jetferson made the purchase, and the people ap])roved the act. Never was fifteen millions of xVmeri- can money better spent. The next op])ortunity to add to our possessions came in ISll), when we bought the Floridas of S]>ain, or at least a release of her title and pretensions to them; and the Supreme Court of the United States, being soon afterwards called upon to say what relation we bore to the new ac(pTisition, held, to the surprise of some of the strict construc- tionists among our i)ublic men, tlsat the right of the United States to wage war and to make treaties necessarily imiHied the light to acayment of •$15,(100,000, New Mexico and California, and in 1853 another cession from Mexico — the "Gadsden purchase" — added south- ern Arizona at a cost of 810,000,000 more. These new possessions turned public attention to the necessity of a canal across tlie Isthmus of Pan- ama, and it was in tlie negotiations with reference to the status of such a canal that the covenant just mentioned in the Clayton-Bulwer con- vention was proposed by our Government and accepted by Great Britain. But the prospects of such a canal made the command of the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico doubly important to us, and gave a new color to our diplomacy regarding Cuba. Edward Everett, in one of his com- munications to the British minister, when Secretary of State, in 1852, said that " territorially and commercially it would in our hands be an extremely valuable possession. Under certain contingencies it might be almost essential to our safety." The Ostend manifesto of 1854 emphasized these considerations, kud intimated quite strongly that if a peaceful cession could not be accom- plished, a conquest might be dictated by the law of self preservation. President Buchanan devoted three pages of his second annual message, in 1858, to the Cuban question, referring to the fact that former ad- ministrations had repeatedly endeavored to purchase the island. The increasing trade of the Mississippi Valley, he said, and the position of / 10 POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES AS TO ANNEXATION. Cuba as commaiidino- the mouth of the river rendered its possession "of vast importance to the Ignited States," and, trusting in the efficacy of ready money, he recommended an appropriation by Congress to enable him to make an advance to Spain, should he be able to negotiate a cession immediately on the signature of the treaty, and before its ratitication by the Senate. A bill appro])riating $30,()(K),00() was tliere- upon introduced in the House and favorably reported, but no further progress was made. In his messages of 1859 and 18(K) the President repeated his recommendationsof a purchase, urging that it would secure the immediate abolition of the slave trade: but the forces that were working toward something greater, the abolition of slavery, were such as to render any serious consideration of the Cuban question now impossible. An act i>assed under the Buchanan Administration, which is still on tlie statute books, Kevised Statutes, Title i.xxii, explicitly affirms the power of the Uuited States to acquire foreign territory by right of dis- covery, and is also of importance as one of the few laws by which large powers not belonging strictly to the Executive function, have been ])la('ed by Congress in the hands of the President. This statute i)rovides that whenever any of our citizens discovers and takes possession of any guano deposits on any island, rock, or key, which does not belong to any other government, "such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as apj^ertaining to the United States." All laws as to crimes and offences committed on the high seas are extended over such places. Trade in the guano is to be regulated as is our ordinary coasting trade. The United States shall not be obliged to retain possession of such places after the guano has been removed. The island of Navassa, some li miles hmg, lying between San Domingo and Jamaica, discovered in 1857, is now a part of the Uuited States under this act of 1851!. Not long ago there were 150 persons living on it, all engaged in the renu^val of the guano. One of them killed another and was i)rom])tly punislied by the courts of the United States.* Under President Lincoln's Administration the country had enough to think of in trying to preserve its territory, without endeavoring to enlarge it. He did, however, recommend to Congress, in 18(11, the con- sideration of a colonization scheme, by which the freedmen of the South, and such of our free colored population as should desire it, might be transported to some foreign land, where, in a clin)ate congenial to them, they might build up a new comnninity. To carry out this plan "may," he said, "involve the acquiring of territory and also the a])propriation of money beyond thatto beex])ended in the territorial acquisition. Hav- ing practiced the ac(iuisition of territory for nearly sixty years, the question of constitutional power to do so is no longer an oi)en one with us. * * * Oi, this whole ])r()p()sition, including the appropriation of money with the acquisition of territory, does not the expediency amount to absolute necessity — that without which the Government itself can not be perpetuated t" When, a year later, slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia, $ 5()0,0()(> was appropriated to aid in colonizing such of the freedmen as might wish to emigrate, in Hayti or Liberia. A few Avere aided to leave the country in this way, most of whom were taken by the (Jovernment to lie a Vache, off the coast of New Granada, and the rest to Liberia. Alaska was bought of Kussia, by treaty, in 18(»7, for $7,L>0(),()00. The Houvse of Representatives insisted for a time on the necessity of an act * Jones vs. United States, 137 U. S. Rep. POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES AS TO ANNEXATION. 11 of Congress to legalize the purchase, but the Senate refused to coucur in this view, and the point was finally yielded. By this acquisition we came into possession, not only of a part of the continent remote from our own, but of distant islands, some of them over 2,000 miles froni the nearest point of seacoast previously within our Jurisdiction, The test of contiguity, as determining the right of annexation, was now, therefore, finally and deliberately abandoned. It was abandoned also with ahnost unanimous acquiescence, since there were but two votes in the Senate against the ratitication of tlie treaty. Had President Jackson had his way, a similar position would proba- bly have been taken by our Government thirty years before, for, in_l§o5^ he authorized our minister to Mexico to offer her half a million dollars for a cession of the bay of San Francisco and the adjacent shore.* In the same year which witnessed the purchase of Alaska, Mr. Seward, as Secretary of State, also negotiated a treaty with Denmark for the cession of the West India Islands of St. Thomas and St. John, on our paying her $7,r)00,000 for them. President Johnson, in his annual mes- sage for 18(J7, thus alludes to their proposed annexation: In our Revolutionary war, ports and harbors in the West India Islanurchnse when the (|uestion of the right and ])olicy of annexation, with respect to any foreign territory, was not determined by every public man largely in ac(;ordauce with his views of its bearing on the future of the Southern blacks. Grant, himself, was looking to San Domingo as the site of future States of our Cnion", ])eople(l and governed by colonies of our new class of freedmen. The American people, in the words of Henry Adams, began the cen- tury with the "ambition to use the entire continent for their experi- ments."' t Jefferson was their leader, and of all American ^statesmen he best understood and represented the popular sentiment of his day. What Lincoln was to the North, .Jefferson was to the country. But Jefferson had the larger, though U^ss l)alaiu'ed mind. He was an idealist and an optimist. With equal lights and oi)portunities to every citizen, and to every State, he feared no extension of territory for a Union rest- ing on community of interest and individual liberty. Jefferson never believed tiiat the prosperity of the South was de])endent on the insti- tution of slavery, but, for half a century, among his successors in the conduct of the Government, were many who did. Our policy as to annexation, therefore, soon became a sectional (jnestion, and so con- tinued until the Southern negro was given not only freedom, but the right of suffrage. President Grant's Administration, inl8J2^by an agreement between one of our naval officers and the chief of Tatuila, one of the Samoan Islands, obtained the exclusive pri\ ilegc of establishing a coaling sta- tion at the port of Pango I'ango, and President Hayes took possession of the privilege ceded, in 1870. The arts of civilization were introduced into the Sandwich Islands by * Memoir and Letters, iv, 448. t History of the United States, ii, 301. POLICY OF THE UNITED S^^ATES AS TO ANNEXATION. 13 Auiericau missionaries in tlie first quarter of this century, and their trade has always been largely with tliis country. They lie 300 miles nearer San Francisco than the outermost of the Aleutian Islands, which came to us as a part of the Alaska purchase. In 1843 an English offi- I & n cer, without authority, took possession of Hawaii in behalf of the Queen, ^ but this action was promptly disavowed by his (Government. Our Sec- retary of State, Mr. Legare, wrote ujjon this event to our minister to England that these islands bore sucli peculiar relations to ns tliat we might feel justified in interfering by force to prevent their conipiest by any of the great poweis of Euroj)e.* (Ireat Britain and France, how- ever, allayed any ill-feeling on the i)art of our Government by a con- ^ vention made during this year l)y whicli each covenanted never to take "l a cession of the islands or assume a i)rotectorate over them. ( In 18;");^ Mr. Marcy, as Secretary of State, in instructions to our min- ister to France, wrote of them thus: "Jt seems to be inevitable that they must come undei- the control of this (jov^rnment." Two years later he informed our minister to Hawaii that we would leceive the transfer of the territorial sovereignty of the islands. In 1808 the subject was again brought up, but Secretary Seward, fresh from his disappoint- ments with reference to the Danish \^■est Imlies. wrote our ininister that the time was unfavorable for the consideration of annexation prop- ositions by the Tnited States. By the treaty of reciprocity, in 1875, the two countries were drawn closer together, and the commerce between theimvas soon doubled. Early in the present year a treaty of annexation was laid before the Senate, but withdrawn on the accession of the new Administration. In his message accompanying the treaty President Harrison said that the deposition of the Queen had left but two courses open to the United States, the assumption of a protectorate or annexation. The views of the present Administration maybe inferred from Presi- dent Cleveland's first message, in 1884, in which he said: "I do not || f favor a policy of acquisition of new and distant territory, or the incor- poration of remote interests with our own." The annexation of Canada, so ardently desired by Franklin and all the statesmen of the Revolution, has never since that period been made a subject of formal diplomatic discussion. Its growth in wealth and population and its fedeiation into a great dominion of many provinces are evidently paving the way to independence. When that time comes annexation will follow. . — -^ — -^ — - ^ _- .^ -, I ""Her institutions are every year becoming better fitted to coalesce with ours, as her provinces, .each with a life and history of its own, partici- pate by their representatives in general legislation\at a common capital under an executive who, during his term of olBce, is more secure in his position than the prime minister of Great Britain and little less sub- ject to the pleasure of tlie sovereign. The French Canadians are of a different race and tongue and religion from that of most of the Americans of the Revolutionary era. But if they were not afraid to admit them to citizenship of the United States in the eighteenth century, surely we need not be when the time comes, in the twentieth. The Americans of to-day are a composite race, and universal religious toleration has made us sensible that men's religious beliefs are dangerous to the community only when they are forced to conceal or suppress them. The Roman Church has frankly accepted the right of every ])eople to such form of government as they may choose for themselves, and the million of Catholics in Canada would be no * 1, Wharton : International Law Digest, 418. J 14 POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES AS TO ANNEXATION. more, as such, a factor in American politics than the million of Catho- lics who are today inhabitants of New York, or the more than a mil- lion who are citizens of New England. The (liferent provinces of Canada are so situated with respect to each other and the natural boundaries of separation between most of them arc .such that their trade gravitates southward to the United States in seeking its center of distribution. What it has to sell it can sell best to us. What it needs to buy it finds best here. The immense area which the Dominion of Canada now includes is beyond the powers of any mere colony or group of colonies to bring under the full influences of civilization. As fast as it approaches that end, so fast it also approaches the necessity of independence of Crreat Britain. It is probable that Great Britain would make little objection to the .severance from her possessions of so costly and unremunerative a dependence. Before the negotiation of the treaty of Washington our Secretary of State, Mr. Fish, in conversation with Sir Edward Thorn- ton, the British minister, said that our AlaJxima claims were too large to be settled in money and intimated that a cession of Canada might be accepted as a satisfactory adjustment. The reply was that England did not wish to keep Canada, but could not part with it without the consent of its population.* The original area of the United States, before the Louisiana purchase, was, perhaps, a million of square miles. t That acquisition and the subsequent cession of the Floridas much more than doubled our terri- tory. Texas then came to us with 300,000 square miles, and Mexico, in 1848 and 1.S53, ceded a somewhat greater number. In Alaska we received, in 1807, an addition of over half a ndllion, and thus our total area now is a little more than 3,500,000 square miles. Canada and Newfoundland cover about the same extent of territorj^ or over 3,524,000 sijuare miles, estimating for part of lUitish Columbia not yet accurately surveyed. At the time of the Revolution the latest authority on American geography was the American Gazetteer, published in London in 1770. It gave the total area of the North American Continent, with a pre- cision not aimed at by modern statisticians, at 3, ODD, 087 sijuare miles. The founders of the United States did not dream that the narrow line of States they had drawn together could in a century come to include a territory of .:),500,000 square miles, and still have beyond them another area of eipuil magnitude, aiul much of it of etjual fertility and natural resources, into which to expand in the next century. But that exi)an- sion, I believe, it is our destiny to accomplish, and by no other means than those of peace and mutual good will. The good faith of the nation was pledged by the Clayton- IJulwer treaty against further extension to the southward, though it is doubtful whether this is still binding upon us;i but the North American Continent, with every island on the east and the Hawaiian group upon the west, all bound to it as satellites to their planet, will, if we continue in our historic policy as to annexation, eventually come under the flag of the United States. It has been argued with great force by an eminent authority on Amer- ican constitutional law,§ that our plan of government makes no provi- *M»iiioir and Letters of ("hailcs Suiuiier, iv, l()!t. tThis is the e.'^tiinatt' jjivcn in Morse's American Geography, published in 1792. tSee Report of Senate Committee on Foreign Kelations of December 22, 1892, on Senate bill No. 1218. ^ Judge Cooley in the Forum for June, 1893, Vol. XV, p. 393. POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES AS TO ANNEXATION. 15 siou for a colonial system. But the relatious of an extraterritorial possession to the rnited States can never be tliose of a colony to a European i)ower. Such a colony has generally been treated as an appanage held for the benetit of the comuiercial interests of the mother country. Its trade, conducted by others and for others, has brought little benefit to its own inhabitants, to whom the navigation laws imposed upon them by a distant power have often seemed a kind of spoliation under the name of protection. But any possessions, separated from the continent, which the United States may acquire, can rely on being governed under some system devised for the interest of all concerned, and administered by their own inhabitants, so far as they may show a capacity for self-government. Kor yet need we fear that the United States would not, if the occasion demanded, rule with a strong hand, when we recall the almost despotic system of administration which, under the Administration of Jefferson, was forced upon the unwilling inhabitants of the Louisiana and Orleans territories, and maintained until they had learned the real qualities and conditions of American citizenship. Up to the present time the cost of such of our territory as has come to us by purchase has been, in all, as follows : 1803, Louisiana 1 .$15, 000,000 1819, I'lorida 5, 000, 000 1848, Calilbrnia and New :Mexico 15. 000, 000 1853, Arizona 10, 000, 000 1867, Alaska 7. 200, 000 Total 52, 200, 000 It has been cheajjly bought, even if we add to these sums the espendi- dures in the Seminole war, which followed the Florida purchase, and of the Mexican war, which had so close a connection with those which came next. The greatest lawsuit in the M'orld is now on trial at Paris, brought to define our rights as owner of the remotest of these acquisitions, a little island in the Pacific, farther than is Hawaii from San Francisco. It is a pleasant sign of the times that this controversy arises mainly from a humane sentiment towards the brute creation, and is to be decided precisely as any question between good neighbors might be, by a friendly arbitrament. O Vy LI3Ap;'05