In a section discussing early nineteenth-century American expansion, Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Vintage) , from which I drew the last several posts, includes several quotations from JQ Adams in which he makes an appeal to “nature” to justify American expansion across the Continent.

He considered Spain’s holdings in the Americas to be contrary to nature. Other great powers of the world should become accustomed to America’s expanding “dominion” across the continent since “from the time when we became an independent people it was as much a law of nature that this should become our pretension as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea.” America’s right to control the Pacific Northwest was absolute, “pointed out by the finger of Nature.” Cuba and Puerto Rico were “natural appendages to the North American continent,” and this could only mean that they would be drawn into the orbit of the US: “laws of political as well as of physical gravitation” were working: An apple cut from a tree “cannot choose but fall to the ground,” so “Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.”

Others saw something else working in the expansion. Kagan quotes a Mexican official’s summary of the “determined opportunism” that guided the steady progress to the West and South.

“As one Mexican official observed, the process would begin with private Americans ‘introducing themselves into the territory they covet, upon pretense of commercial negotiations, or of the establishment of colonies, with or without the assent of the Government to which it belongs.’ The American-born population would grow until it outnumbered everyone else. Then the Americans would begin demanding their democratic ‘rights’ from local authorities. When the authorities refused, as they had to, the Americans would start stirring up trouble, often with local Indian tribes. If was only a matter of time before the United States government stepped in, insisting its interests were affected by the trouble on its borders. Then began the diplomatic negotiations, which invariably resulted in new territorial agreements favorable to the United States. Of course, sometimes [as in Florida] the United States skipped all these steps and simply invaded the territory.” Though the pattern recurred many times, Kagan doesn’t think this was conspiratorial, or part of a detailed grand plan. It was part of the grand strategy, widely shared across the political spectrum, of pursuing American greatness.

Nature works in mysterious ways.