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In 1836, Texas settlers broke from Mexico. In 1845, the territory was annexed by the United States to become the twenty-eighth state, a slave state. Then, the following year, President James Polk manufactured a crisis at the Mexican border as pretext to launch a war on Mexico. Fighting lasted two long years, with Mexicans putting up more effective resistance than anticipated. The United States eventually won, taking 55 percent of Mexico’s territory—from Arizona’s desert sands to California’s Pacific beaches to Utah’s winter snows—and turning some hundred thousand Mexican citizens, of all races, into United States subjects.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Moreover, Everett was also bothered by Mexico’s official name, Estados Unidos Mexicanos. He felt that Estados Unidos, or, in English, the United States, was proprietary to his country, the United States of America. Mexicans were both plagiarists and thieves, “borrowing one half our name” only “to rob us of the other.” This, as far as I know, was the first time that the name America was politicized in such a pointed way.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

In a public speech, Victoria lamented Washington’s betrayal of the anticolonial principles laid out in the Monroe Doctrine, in doing nothing to defend Mexico against European intrigues. The speech earned Victoria a rebuke from John Quincy Adams’s ambassador to Spain, Alexander Hill Everett—not for its content, but for the way the Mexican president addressed the United States. Until now, it was common enough for Spanish American statesmen to use the phrase United States of the North, in the friendliest of exchanges, a kind of New World comradery: We are all Americans. But Everett, Boston born, Harvard educated, and a member of Adams’s law office, found it offensive. The proper name of his country, Everett said, was the United States of America. “The chief magistrate of a great republic ought to know that it is usual,” Everett wrote, “to designate friendly powers under the names they assume, unless it is intended to contest them, which I hope is not the case here.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

In May 1818, General Jackson, then in residence at the Hermitage, his Tennessee plantation, received an order from President Monroe and Secretary of War John Calhoun to defend the United States against Indian raids originating in Spanish Florida. Jackson took the directive not as a command to secure the border but a warrant to rage through Florida, burning towns, destroying villages, and murdering Indians and their British allies. Jackson’s campaign is known as the First Seminole War.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Compare, for example, Venezuela’s independence manifesto, written by Juan Germán Roscio and Francisco Isnardi, to Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. History barely gets a tug from Jefferson. All is nature, freed from the burdens of society. All the New World’s evils are placed at the feet of King George. The original settlers and their heirs who claimed the land and drove off its original inhabitants did no wrong. They only suffered wrongs. For John Adams, North America was “not a conquered, but a discovered country.” Nature for the taking, not granted by the king’s grace, but explored, cultivated, surveyed by English-speaking settlers. In contrast, for Roscio, a Venezuelan pardo with a doctorate in canon and civil law, and Isnardi, a physician born in Spain, the New World wasn’t discovered but “conquered.” They knew that America was a stolen continent. The Conquest hovers over their independence manifesto, an event so vile it set the course of centuries of human events. The Spanish arrived like “wild animals,” carrying with them Europe’s entire “history of bloodshed and perversity.” The existence of the New World affirmed the oneness of humanity, bringing about wondrous advances in “human consciousness” and human knowledge. But Spanish bloodlust allowed only for domination and exploitation. A free Venezuela, a free Spanish America, would give the world a second chance: to “accelerate, consolidate, and perfect the happiness of both Worlds.” America was a redeemer continent.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Venezuela’s constitution makes mention of the word social nine times, and sociedad, or society, fifteen more. Neither word appears in the United States Constitution. “Society fortifies the individuals who comprise it,” Venezuela’s constitution stated, and makes possible the “enjoyment of life, liberty, property and other natural rights.” The constitution provided a series of checks and balances not just to moderate the government, but individualism as well. “The establishment of society presupposes the renunciation of the dangerous right to unlimited freedom,” the text read, in exchange for the acquisition of “other, sweeter and more peaceful rights” that come from living in harmony with others. Venezuelans even previewed what later would be called social rights, mandating that the government not just stand down to protect freedoms inherent in individuals but stand up to take action that nurtures the commonweal: “Because governments are constituted for the common good and happiness of men, society must provide aid to the destitute and unfortunate and education to all citizens.” True freedom, the constitution argued, “means the renunciation of unlimited and licentious freedom,” which easily leads to anarchy, where everyone pursues their “private passions in a savage state.” The echo is clear of Las Casas’s and Mendieta’s belief that New World freedom turned Spanish colonists into beasts, ferocious animals despoiling all.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

The precedent set by the United States helped Spanish Americans justify their claims to republican sovereignty. In response, royalists brazenly cited Vitoria. They said that if the claims of independence leaders were to be taken to their conclusion, then Venezuela should be returned to its true sovereigns, to the “Caribes, Motilones, Guagiros, Quiripiripas, Guaranos, and other indigenous Indian nations” who ruled Venezuela before Spain’s arrival. This wasn’t an easy-to-dismiss criticism, and the best independence leaders could do was say that over time history created new obligations. There was no going back to the past. If Spanish Americans were required to return America to its original peoples, then Spain, republicans said, should give Iberia back to the Phoenicians or Carthaginians, “wherever they may be found.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Madrid eventually decided that the territory west of the Mississippi River was more trouble than it could handle. It was costly to guard such a long border with the United States, too expensive to maintain a river fleet of galliots and bombardiers. British traders, still a powerful presence in the Mississippi Valley, meddled in local politics. French colonists resisted Spanish authority.fn1 The radicalism of the French and Haitian revolutions was spilling into Louisiana. In 1795, in Natchitoches, a local priest had organized a group called the Revenants, which ran rough over the settlement, chanting revolutionary slogans and singing revolutionary songs—apparently in opposition to the Spanish policy of encouraging Anglo settlement. Revenant comes from an old French word that means “the returned,” referring, in myth, to reanimated corpses, an echo of the terrors then unfolding in Haiti. New Orleans likewise was feared to be a hotbed of Black Jacobinism, confirmed by the discovery, also in 1795, of a slave conspiracy to set fire to plantations. And so Spain, in 1802, gave it up, turning New Orleans and greater Louisiana over to France. In compensation, the Spanish monarchy received Etruria, an Italian kingdom of about a million people. Tuscan hills were much preferable to Mississippi mosquitos.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

The paradox is notable. Spain was as constant in support of slavery as it was in support of sanctuary. Madrid held a position not unlike Adam Smith’s: Slavery was an evil, a violation of natural law and reason. But as an established historical institution, it would be difficult if not impossible to extirpate. The demands of imperial security reconciled opposites. Starting in the last decades of the 1700s and continuing through 1816, Spanish troops in Northern Mexico captured thousands of “indios enemigos”—mostly Apache and Comanche warriors—and exiled them to Cuba as slaves. At the same time, the Crown repeatedly affirmed the humanity of slaves in terms that echoed Las Casas. Any enslaved person from another polity who entered the Spanish realm was made free, protected from being handed back to his or her master. Asylum seekers would be considered “vassals” of the monarchy and eligible for whatever employment they could find, as affirmed by a 1789 royal edict. When word spread of this order, enslaved people began fleeing the United States, crossing the Mississippi into Spanish Mexico. United States slavers complained that Spanish officials were using “every means to reduce, weaken and ruin the adjoining Country belonging to the Americans,’’ including encouraging “the desertion of slaves.’’

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Marrero also stressed the importance of the Americas to greater Europe’s sense of identity. By this point in the late 1770s, there was no shortage of imperial propagandists arguing that the New World was the source of English and Spanish wealth and power. Marrero agreed. But he went beyond declaring that any single nation wouldn’t have prospered were it not for their American colonies. He said Europe as Europe would cease to exist if it gave up colonial exploitation. “Europe cannot maintain its current power unless it has the whole of America entirely in its dependence,” he wrote. “Since its discovery, the riches provided by that part of the world has sparked a prodigious expansion of Europe’s agriculture, arts, industry, commerce, and navigation.” Marrero went on to say, “The wealth that circulates from these activities adds value to all of Europe’s products and services.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Sewall had become convinced that Mexico would be the site of Christ’s Second Coming. He forcefully countered Mede’s opinion that the New World was damned, instead insisting that America would be the scene of Christ’s great victory. In his schema, Indians were the descendants of Jews (because according to one reading of the Song of Solomon, Jews during end-times would be gathered in a garden of nuts, and Mexicans, according to Sewall, ate a lot of nuts). America, he said, still with Mede on his mind, “was not a place of damnation.” Europe’s Jews would migrate to the Americas and join with their lost brethren, and Mexico’s New Jerusalem, he wrote, will “wonderfully dilate, and invigorate Christianity in the several Quarters of the World; in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, and in America.” Like the imprisoned Father de la Cruz in Peru a few decades earlier, Sewall was declaring that America would be the future seat of the returned savior, and in the process he put forth a generous, sweeping vision of the New World as humanity’s redeemer. “Shout, Sing triumphantly,” Sewall ecstatically wrote, “O America! America! America!” “Christ shall come to this Mexican Valley.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin