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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