Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861

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Waldo, S. Putnam. The Tour of James Monroe, President of the United States, in the Year 1817.... Hartford: Printed by F.D. Bolles and Co., 1818.

S. Putnam Waldo. The Tour of James Monroe, President of the United States, in the Year 1817.... Hartford: Printed by F.D. Bolles and Co., 1818. Title page.

In recording the second tour of the United States by a President, Waldo deemed nationalism to be innate to people, and cosmopolitanism to be impossible.

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He [James Monroe] resumed the exercise of the high functions of his Presidential office, with a knowledge of an extensive and important section of his native country, which he could not have acquired so perfectly as he had done in any mode but by personal observation. It can hardly be expected of any man, in any station, that he will wholly divest himself of local prepossessions, and personal attachments. It ought not to be hoped. It would be doing violence to our nature, to accomplish it, if it were possible. The visionary notion of the cosmopolite, which embraces the whole family of man as equally dear to him — which places the same estimation upon the Arab of Africa, the Hindoo of Asia, and the Cossack of Europe, as he does upon his own countrymen, is so pregnant with absurdity, that it would disgrace the intellect of the lunatic. But that the whole family of the American Republic should love each other as brethren, is not only desirable, but it is practicable. It was the great desideratum of the sainted Washington &mdash it was the ardent wish of the great Jefferson. The repeated declarations of James Monroe, as well as his whole official conduct, from his minority to this period of his life, shows his wishes upon this subject. “Knowing,” (he says,) “no difference between the just claims of one portion of our country and another, I consider it my duty to attend equally to the rights and interests of the whole. Incapable of discriminating between the rights and interests of the Eastern and Western sections of the Union; and having no friendships to serve, or resentments to gratify, at the expence of the public welfare, I shall steadily pursue the objects most likely to secure them.”