Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861

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Walsh, Robert, Jr. An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America. Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames, and White; William Brown, Printer, 1819.

Robert Walsh, Jr. An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America. Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames, and White; William Brown, Printer, 1819. Title page.

Voicing a defensive nationalism in the face of British criticism of American culture, Walsh lambasted perceived British imperial aggression throughout the world.

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It may be doubted whether any measures which could have been taken at the Congress of Vienna to guard against the severance of Florida from Spain, would have proved effectual: but the idea of a concurrence of the members of that Congress in precautions against the aggrandizement of the United States for the security of Great Britain! has something of the marvellous, besides implying an extraordinary sort of equity. We had not been called on to explain how our security might be affected by her aggrandizement in the West Indies; or how the balance on which we might have relied, was destroyed by “the positions” she had “taken up,” all over the world; positions commanding every sea of commercial importance; — Heliogoland; Malta, in addition to Gibraltar; the Isle of France; the Island of Ceylon; the Prince of Wales’ Island; New South Wales; the Cape of Good Hope. “Our noble station at the Cape of Good Hope,” says a late London paper, “commands the commerce of the globe; it is the natural key to India; the bridle of America; the surface which we might people with hardy Englishmen is upwards of 100,000 square miles. Make the Cape a free port for the nations of Europe, and we banish North America from the Indian seas.” The powers of the Continent may smile when they find Great Britain, while herself adding constantly new kingdoms to her dominions in the East, and grasping at every maritime station of consequence in the four quarters of the globe, exclaiming against American ambition and aggrandizement, because the United States had acquired a contiguous province, from which, if in foreign hands, they must be subject to the severest annoyance, — by fair negotiation, and with the relinquishment of large pecuniary claims, and well-founded pretensions to territory of much greater extent and intrinsic value.

The American government and people are as little likely “to demand the Island of Cuba,” as they are “to connect themselves with the black governments of the West Indies.” They want no slave islands; and to instigate the blacks of Hayti to foment and protect insurrection in the British islands (for this must be meant by the Marquis of Lansdowne) is an atrocity of which they must ever be incapable, though Great Britain, in her next war with us, should repeat the example which she has heretofore given, of exciting the negroes of the southern states to supplant and butcher their masters. The case which the British Peer selected to illustrate the justness of his sentence upon general Jackson, is every way an unfortunate one for the purpose. His lordship and all his colleagues of the Opposition had denounced the attack upon Copenhagen as a heinous aggression; to be paralleled in treachery and outrage, only by Bonaparte’s invasion of Spain. What parity of reason, then, in the supposed case of lord Cathcart putting to death the strangers whom he might have found assisting in the defence of the capital of a civilized power, a member of the European christian commonwealth, so unexpectedly and iniquitously attacked; and that of the American general pursuing a savage horde into an adjacent territory, from which it had issued to desolate the American frontier, and there executing two European adventurers, proved to be its instigators and accomplices? As the Danes did not follow the practice of massacreing their prisoners, the strangers who might have identified themselves with them, would not, when seized, have been subject to the punishment of death by retaliation, as were the allies of the Seminoles, even under the European law of nations. If the custom of Europe be determinative of that law in any particular, it may be confidently invoked in favour of the execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, on the supposition that they were actually leagued with the Indians, as the British ministry have admitted; for, during the great wars of the Germans and Poles against the Turks, death was the immediate lot of the European christian found acting on the side of the infidels. So, there has never been the least hesitation in the Mediterranean waters and territories, about despatching at once the renegade, no matter of what christian country, taken in arms on board a Barbary corsair, or in a predatory descent upon the coast.