For more than years, as Europeans sought to control newly settled American land, wars raged between Native Americans and the frontiersmen who encroached on their territory, resources and trade.
Known as the American Indian Wars, the conflicts involved Indigenous people, the From the moment English colonists arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in , they shared an uneasy relationship with the Native Americans or Indians who had thrived on the land for thousands of years.
At the time, millions of indigenous people were scattered across North America In January , as tensions flared between Cuban revolutionaries and Spanish troops, the battleship USS Maine was sent to Havana to protect American interests and civilians there. On February 15 a massive explosion sank the The United States went on to win the war, which ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas Some , women served in the U. Meanwhile, widespread male enlistment left gaping holes Live TV. This Day In History.
History Vault. Causes: Remember the Maine! War Is Declared Spain announced an armistice on April 9 and speeded up its new program to grant Cuba limited powers of self-government. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland.
What else is new? In late the Spanish government showed a very considerable willingness to compromise, whereby all sensible reasons for an American intervention in Cuba could be eliminated. But passion is not governed by reason, and there were many groups of people with reasons of their own. On February 15, , the U. There was a large loss of American lives and an immediate clamor for war. Fidel Castro was not anti-Spanish but anti-American. His ancestors were Spanish-Cubans in ; he maintained cordial relations with Generalissimo Franco, the anti-Communist dictator of Spain, upon whose death Castro declared three days of national mourning in Cuba.
Such is the irony of history—or, rather, of human nature. After the catastrophe, the Spanish government was willing to settle almost everything to the satisfaction of the United States, but it was too late—too late because of the inflamed state of American public opinion.
President McKinley did not have the will to oppose anything like that. On April 11, , he sent a message to Congress; the formal declaration of war came two weeks afterward. One week later Commodore soon to become Admiral George Dewey destroyed a Spanish squadron on the other side of the world, in Manila Bay. Some of his warships now raced across the southern Pacific and around the Horn to help blast another Spanish squadron out of the warm waters of Santiago Bay.
Meanwhile, American troops had landed, unopposed, in Cuba and then won battles in reality, successful skirmishes at El Caney and San Juan Hill. Later in July Americans, again unopposed, invaded Puerto Rico. The war was over. Spain asked for peace. An armistice was signed on August 12, and the final terms were nailed down in Paris in December.
American losses were minimal: a few hundred men. And also Hawaii, whose annexation had been—unsuccessfully—urged on two Presidents by American intriguers and filibusterers. President Cleveland, and for a while McKinley, refused the annexation.
It was thus that one hundred years ago the United States—which, during the first century of its existence, thought of itself as the prime power in the Americas, a hemispheric power—became a world power imperiously, geographically, a world power of the first rank, with incalculable consequences. In there were no Gallup Polls; there was no such thing as public-opinion research. Still, it is possible to reconstruct the main elements of what the people of the United States thought and perhaps felt about these events.
That tremendous surge of national self-confidence, debouching into super-nationalism in reality, imperialism, though most Americans would shy away from such a word , must not obscure the fact that as in every war in the history of this country, Americans were divided.
On one side, which turned out to be the dominant one, were the expansionists of Of their many and increasingly vocal declarations let me cite but one or two. There was Sen. I am in favor of the annexation of Cuba. I am in favor of the annexation of the great country lying north of us. The language of Sen. And when the war was over, Sen. Orville H. Upon us rested the duty of extending Christian civilization, of crushing despotism, of uplifting humanity and making the rights of man prevail. Providence has put it upon us.
George F. It is at this point instructive to look at the character and the development of these divisions of American opinion. What clashed were two different visions of American destiny. These were already visible well before , to which I shall soon turn.
More germane to the national debate of were the differing tendencies of political parties, national regions, and portions of society. With few exceptions Republicans were expansionists; Democrats were not.
Gresham, were not. These divisions were not absolute; there were a few anti-imperialist Republicans. Yet it ought to be observed that the Republicans were the more nationalist party of the two, something that, by and large, remained true for most of the following century and is discernible even now. Many, certainly the most vocal, expansionists were Protestant churchmen; the hierarchy of American Catholics was, for the most part, not.
Hill, J. Morgan, and most of Wall Street opposed the war—at least for some time. But much of this was soon swept away. In the hot skillet of nationalist emotions, the opposition of most Catholics melted away fast. Fifteen Democrats and Populists voted for the ratification of the peace treaty with Spain; only two Republicans voted against it. The vote was 57 to 27 in the Senate, one above the needed two-thirds majority. William Jennings Bryan, once an anti-expansionist, urged a speedy ratification.
It did not do much for him; in McKinley beat him by a landslide. In the Spanish-American War was the culmination of a great wave of national sentiment that had begun to rise many years before. There was a change, less in the temperature of patriotism than in the national vision of the destiny of the United States, after the end of the first century of its existence.
In sum, the time had come for the United States to expand not only its light and its example but its power and its institutions all around the globe. Depew gave the speech of dedication.
We celebrate the emancipation of man. It is wrong to think that this rise of a national sentiment was nothing but emotional, fueled by war fever and declamatory rhetoric.
What had begun to change the course of the mighty American ship of state was a change of mentality, including a powerful intellectual impulse. House of Representatives About this object When the United States annexed Hawaii, Congress considered the racial demographics of the islands. Representative James Beauchamp Champ Clark of Missouri denounced the idea of eventual Hawaiian statehood, arguing that Congress would be unable to incorporate such a large foreign population into the country.
When Congress approved the annexation of Hawaii in July , for instance, a substantial part of the debate focused on the racial characteristics of the inhabitants of the islands. But after years of transpacific immigration, Hawaii had substantial Japanese and Chinese populations. The question became whether the U. Some in Congress saw this as a problem the United States could easily overcome. Clark deplored the idea that Hawaii might one day become a state—that Japanese and Chinese immigrants might one day become U.
For Clark and Members of Congress who shared his beliefs, expansionism gambled with the future of the nation by overestimating the capacity of American society to assimilate new, nonwhite immigrants.
It was the very reason America needed to expand; it was the justification for American superiority. It is racial. Ultimately, the construction of an American empire contained an inseparable and volatile mix of race and nationhood. Americans for and against expansion used common racial theories and popular stereotypes to support their arguments.
For some, the United States stood as a civilizing force in the Pacific territories. Next Section. Elsea and Matthew C. Washington, D.
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