Sea to Shining Sea 119The US invasion of Mexico has also been characterized as the
first US "foreign" war, but it was not. By 1846, the United States
had invaded, occupied, and ethnically cleansed dozens of foreign
nations east of the Mississippi. Then there were the Barbary Wars.
The opening lyric of the official hymn of the US Marine Corps,
composed and adopted soon after the invasion of Mexico, "From
the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli," refers in part to
1801-5, when the marines were dispatched by President Thomas
Jefferson to invade the Berber Nation of North Africa. This was the
"First Barbary War," the ostensible goal of which was to persuade
Tripoli to release US sailors it held hostage and to end "pirate" attacks
on US merchant ships.5 The "Second Barbary War," in 1815-16,
ended when pasha Yusuf Karamanli, ruler of Tripoli, agreed not to
exact fees from US ships entering their territorial waters.
By this time, throughout Spain's American colonies, wars of in
dependence flamed, the leaders of these revolutions inspired by the
French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. A successful inde
pendence movement arose in France's Caribbean plantation slave
colony of Haiti in 1801, when the majority enslaved African popu
lation overthrew the French planters and declared an independent
nation-state. This was the first permanently successful national lib
eration movement against European colonialism in the world. The
prevailing myth claims that the colonized peoples fighting for inde
pendence from Spain were inspired by successful US secession from
Britain but this is a dubious claim.
Simon Bolivar was a major leader of the independence move
ments in South America. He visited liberated Haiti in 1815, a trip
that sharpened his hatred for slavery and led to its abolishment in
the independent nations that formed in South America. Bolivar and
liberator Jose de San Martin were founders of the unitary republic
they named Gran Colombia, which survived from 181 9 to 1830 with
Bolivar as president. Subsequently, Gran Colombia splintered into
the nation-states of Venezuela, Colombia (which then included Pan
ama), Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. A similar unitary nation formed
in Central America called the United Provinces of Central America,
with its capital in Guatemala City, which existed from l82I to 1841,