In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how the United States …
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.”