America 747
tocracy had been displaced, and an ideal of equality as well as of liberty had been
affirmed. The great question in the 1790’s was how the American Revolution
would turn out. After 1789, when the new federal constitution went into effect, it
was also a question of whether the constitution would become implanted and, if
so, to what kinds of people and classes of the population the government of the
new republic should mainly look for support. The United States was unique also in
the grand reckoning with which the century ended. In 1801, after a generation of
democratic agitation and counter- agitation throughout the area of Western Civili-
zation, the American republic was the only country in which a peaceable transfer
of power took place in a democratic direction, when, without use of a coup d’état,
and without armed rebellion against him, a man denounced hysterically in some
quarters as a Jacobin calmly assumed the highest executive office.
In a book of this kind, it may be illuminating first to glance briefly at the “other”
Americas.
The “Other” Americas, Latin and British
For Latin America, where revolution against Spain broke out somewhat later, the
years before 1800 were a time of precursors and preparations.^1 Contact with Eu-
rope north of the Pyrenees was infrequent, and with the United States even more
so. Jefferson, when in Paris in 1787, was approached by both a Mexican and a
Brazilian interested in “revolution,” but he gave them no reason to expect his aid;
and in fact, for a long time thereafter, Latin Americans with new ideas looked
more to France than to the United States. Ironically enough, in the light of world
revolution, it was from very different sources that aid for Latin American indepen-
dence was most forthcoming. Miranda, after seeking support in vain in the United
States and in France, found it in England. The break- up of the Spanish empire,
opening its possessions to world trade, was one “revolution” for which Pitt’s gov-
ernment could feel a positive sympathy; and Alexander Hamilton in 1799 talked
more of liberating Latin America than Thomas Jefferson ever did.
Latin America then began at the Mississippi. At St. Louis, where Frenchmen
lived under Spanish rule, a society calling itself the Sans culottes serenaded the
priest on 1 Vendémaire of the Year V, to wish him a republican New Year. At New
Orleans the Moniteur de la Louisiane, set up in 1794, was one of the first newspa-
pers in Spanish America; there was also some kind of political club, and six per-
sons were deported to Havana for expressing republican sentiments.^2
1 See H. D. Barbagelata, La Révolution française et l ’Amérique latine (Paris, 1936); R. R. Caillet-
Bois, Ensayo sobre el Rio de la Plata y la Revolucion francesa (Buenos Aires, 1929); A. Ruy, A primeira
revoluçao social brasileira, 1798 (Rio, 1942); E. Clavery, Trots précurseurs de l ’ independance des démocra-
ties sud- américaines: Miranda, 1756–1816; Nariño, 1765–1823; Espejo, 1747–1795 (Paris, 1932); A.
Montalvo, Francisco Javier Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo (Quito, 1947). I am indebted to both Profes-
sor and Mrs. Stanley J. Stein for assistance with the languages and for findings they have made in
Brazilian and Mexican archives.
2 A. P. Whitaker, The Mississippi Question, 1795–1803 (New York, 1934), 39, 155; A. Fortier, His-
tory of Louisiana, 4 vols. (New York, 1904), I, 152–56.