FEDERAL DEMOCRATIC PEACE: DOMESTIC INSTITUTIONS AND INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT IN THE EARLY AMERICAN...

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FEDERAL DEMOCRATIC PEACE:DOMESTIC INSTITUTIONS AND INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT

IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC

SCOTT A. SILVERSTONE

TWO NOTABLE EVENTS in American foreign relations during the firstsixty years of the nineteenth century immediately draw our attention:the War of 1812, initiated by the young republic to compel British

respect for America’s right to trade with continental Europe and sail unham-pered on the high seas; and the Mexican-American War, initiated by the UnitedStates in 1846 against its North American neighbor in a quest for territorialexpansion. Despite the fact that America was separated geographically fromthe highly competitive European state system, these conflicts demonstratethat the United States was not a complete aberration in a system character-ized by recurring interstate warfare. Although these two wars initiated by theUnited States naturally draw our attention, another important observationabout American foreign relations in this period is largely ignored: Americawas involved in a much larger set of “near miss” international crises, disputesin which the use of military force was a serious option, yet which were resolvedshort of their full potential for armed conflict. These include crises in 1807and 1809 with the United Kingdom over maritime restrictions more seriousthan those in 1812, a conflict with Spain from 1811 to 1813 over its colonyof East Florida, the Anglo-American Oregon crisis of 1846, a territorial dis-pute with Mexico in 1853 along the New Mexico border, tensions with Spainover Cuba from 1853 to 1855, and several additional crises that raised theprospects of military intervention in Mexico between 1858 and 1860. Whatmakes this set of international crises particularly noteworthy is the fact that, ineach case, it was the United States that backed down, preventing the disputes

Scott A. Silverstone is an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S.Military Academy at West Point.

Special thanks to Daniel Deudney, Miriam Fendius Elman, G. John Ikenberry, Robert Jervis,Peter Onuf, John M. Owen IV, Douglas Verney, and several anonymous reviewers for valuablecomments on previous versions of this research.

This article is based on Scott A. Silverstone, Divided Union: The Politics of War in the Early AmericanRepublic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Copyright c© 2004 by Cornell University Press.Used by permission of the publisher.

SECURITY STUDIES 13, no. 3 (spring 2004): 1–55Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Inc.DOI: 10.1080/09636410490914040

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2 SECURITY STUDIES 13, no. 3

from escalating to the use of force, or otherwise limiting the degree to whichmilitary force decided the outcome.

In the broadest sense, the purpose of this article is to determine what thispattern in American conflict behavior can teach us about a critical questionin the field of international relations: What constrains the use of militaryforce among states? Paraphrasing Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kenneth Waltz onceobserved that interstate war is possible simply because there is nothing tostop it.1 Waltz was highlighting what has become a truism in the study of1

international relations: the international system is anarchic—that is, there isno formal system of governance among or above individual states to constrainviolence and maintain peace. At a minimum, anarchy creates a permissiveenvironment in which states can use military force against one another for anynumber of reasons, ranging from achieving physical security, accumulatingmaterial wealth, and promoting an ideology or religion, to aggrandizing thestature of state leaders or a ruling party.2 Despite this literal possibility of2

endless war, scholars of various theoretical stripes have also recognized thatstates are not perpetually lunging at one another in a violent quest for security,material interests, or ideological objectives. States rarely rush into war, evenwhen engaged in dangerous, militarized disputes. It has even been observedthat, statistically, war is a relatively rare event in world politics.3 This presents3

students of international relations with an enduring puzzle: What is it thatprevents conflicts of interest in specific cases from escalating into violentclashes? More specifically, under what conditions are states less likely to usemilitary force against one another, even during periods of intense competitionor open disputes?

The most common approach to this question, from the realist tradition,begins with the claim that state violence is held in check most often by theinternational distribution of power between states. Although conflict is thenatural condition of politics within an anarchical system, realists argue thatstates must carefully weigh the potential costs and benefits of using violenceas the means to secure their interests. Simply put, states tend to forgo the use

1. Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959),182–83, 232.

2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin, 1968), chap. 13; and Kenneth Waltz,Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979).

3. Jack S. Levy, War and the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975 (Lexington: UniversityPress of Kentucky, 1983), chap. 6; David E. Spiro, “The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace,”International Security 19, no. 2 (fall 1994): 50–86; James Lee Ray, Democracy and International Conflict:An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,1995), 203; and Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs: Part 1,” Philosophyand Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (summer 1983): 205–35.

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Federal Democratic Peace 3

of military force if the risk of paying unacceptable costs relative to expectedbenefits is considered too high.4 According to this view, “One who knows 4

that pressing too hard may lead to war has strong reason to consider whetherthe possible gains are worth the risk entailed. . . . The possibility that conflictsamong states may lead to long and costly wars has . . . sobering effects.”5 Ac- 5

cording to Geoffrey Blainey, the more pessimistic state leaders are about theprospects of achieving their goals with threats of violence or its actual use, themore likely they are to exercise self-restraint, to avoid crisis escalation, or toseek accommodation.6

Au:RRHok?

6

In recent years the most vigorous challenge to the realist approach in thesetypes of cases has come from scholars who point to constraints operatingwithin states involved in international disputes, rather than simply betweenthem. Specifically, a large and diverse research agenda pursues the basic claimthat the internal characteristics of democracies—such as divided political insti-tutions, electoral accountability, or liberal political norms—may impose stronglimits on whether or how military force is used, against whom, and for whatobjectives. These democratic constraints, so goes the argument, should affectstate behavior regardless of how power is distributed among the states involvedin a particular international conflict.7 In response, contemporary realists argue 7

that restraints on state behavior have little to do with the characteristics ofstates themselves.8 According to this view, state leaders, even in democracies, 8

have little choice but to make decisions about the use of force based mainlyon strategic calculations of relative power and the expected costs versus gainsof resorting to armed conflict in particular cases. This dichotomy between“democratic peace” and realist explanations for constraints on the use of

4. Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 265–84;and Patrick M. Morgan, Deterrence: A Conceptual Analysis (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1977).

5. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 114.6. Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: Free Press, 1988), 35–56.7. For a small representative sample, see Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles

for a Post–Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Stuart Bremer, “Danger-ous Dyads: Conditions Affecting the Likelihood of Interstate War, 1816–1965,” Journal of ConflictResolution 36, no. 2 (June 1992): 309–41; Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdolali, “Regime Type and In-ternational Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 33, no. 1 (March 1989): 3–35; Melvin Small andJ. David Singer, “The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes,” Jerusalem Journal of InternationalRelations 1, no. 4 (summer 1976): 50–69; Erich Weede, “Democracy and War Involvement,”Journal of Conflict Resolution 28, no. 4 (December 1984): 649–64.

8. John Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,” in TheCold War and After: Prospects for Peace, ed. Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1994), 148; Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics,”International Security 18, no. 2 (fall 1993): 44–79; Henry S. Farber and Joanne Gowa, “Politiesand Peace,” International Security 20, no. 2 (autumn 1995): 123–46; Joanne Gowa, Ballots andBullets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Christopher Layne, “Kant or Cant:The Myth of the Democratic Peace,” International Security 19, no. 2 (fall 1994): 5–49.

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force is not only a core debate in the theoretical democratic peace literature,it is the basis for rival explanations for a number of key empirical cases in thisliterature as well.9

9

The question posed in this study about constraints on American conflictbehavior in the early nineteenth century goes to the heart of the debate be-tween advocates of democratic peace theory, who would look for answers inAmerica’s democratic politics, and realists, who would anticipate that America’sbehavior must have been the result of prudent policy choices to avoid the costsof war under unfavorable strategic circumstances. The objective here, how-ever, is not simply limited to comparing international- and domestic-levelexplanations for these specific cases. The core question to be addressed is ex-actly how democracy might have reduced the frequency with which the earlyUnited States engaged in armed conflict. In doing so, this article advancestwo main arguments. First, key leaders’ strategic calculations of the distribu-tion of power and the likely costs and benefits of war did not produce thepattern of constraints we find in American behavior across this diverse set ofinternational crises. This does not mean that power calculations were irrele-vant in America’s conflict decision making. For some political actors withinthe American system, power calculations were clearly a dominant motive foropposing the use of military force in particular situations. Yet in no way didAmerican decision makers converge on a common perception of the interestsat stake in a given conflict, on the distribution of power between the UnitedStates and its adversaries, or on the likely costs and benefits of war. Moreover,American decision makers did not agree that power calculations were the mostimportant variable that should determine whether or not America resorted toforce. As a result, each crisis produced a highly competitive domestic decision-making process as political opponents tried to leverage their positions withinAmerican institutions to either promote or hamper the use of force.

The second, and most important, argument pursued in this article is thatfederal union was the decisive institutional feature of American democracy

9. For examples of debate on key empirical cases, such as the Anglo-American Oregon crisisof 1846, the Fashoda crisis of 1898 between the United Kingdom and France, and the Venezuelaborder crisis of 1898 between the United States and the United Kingdom, see Doyle, “Kant,Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs”; Ray, Democracy and International Conflict, 191–92; Layne,“Kant or Cant,” 27–28, 32–33; Raymond Cohen, “Pacific Unions: A Reappraisal of the TheoryThat ‘Democracies Do Not Go to War with Each Other’,” Review of International Studies 20, no. 3(July 1994): 219; Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, chap. 1; John M. Owen IV, Liberal Peace,Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997),chap. 4; and Stephen R. Rock, “Anglo-U.S. Relations, 1845–1930: Did Shared Liberal Valuesand Democratic Institutions Keep the Peace?” in Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? ed.Miriam Fendius Elman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 106–12. See other contributions tothe theoretical and empirical debate between advocates of democratic constraints and theirrealist critics in Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating theDemocratic Peace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), and Elman, Paths to Peace.

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shaping domestic competition over questions of war and peace in this timeperiod. The founders recognized that federal union was an institutional inno-vation unique to the American republic, and that this institutional arrangementwould impose a check on state power in foreign as well as domestic affairs.James Madison carefully pointed out in Federalist 51 that the U.S. Constitutiondid not simply create a “single republic” with but one level of governmentdivided into separate departments. The Constitution created a “compoundrepublic” that merged multiple geographically defined political units—thestates—into a “republic of republics.”10 In combination with the large geo- 10

graphic scale of the new republic, which introduced social, economic, cultural,and geographic diversity into the politics of foreign policy, federal union wouldprove to be the source of the most robust and consistent constraints on theuse of force by the United States. In fact, it offers the most powerful insightsinto why the U.S. backed down in the series of “near miss” armed conflicts ofthe early nineteenth century.

The federal character of American democracy is crucial for explaining con-flict decision making in this period for two reasons. First, questions of warand peace routinely divided the union on regional lines. Different states orregions often saw the world and America’s interests in it in starkly differentterms. Regional diversity frequently produced political conflict over how todefine threats to the United States, over the proper relationship to have withother nations, and over when and where military force should play a role inAmerican foreign policy. Regional diversity produced conflicting calculationsof the likely costs and benefits of using force to address particular problems,and rival normative views on the legitimacy of using force against particularadversaries or for particular objectives. Second, in a more centralized politicalsystem these regional differences may have had little impact on the decision-making process. Federal union, however, fundamentally shaped how powerwas divided and distributed in this system, through the internal structure ofCongress and the electoral incentives faced by legislators and the president. Itis the convergence of regional rivalries on foreign policy questions and a polit-ical structure that provided direct institutional leverage at the national level forthese distinct regional interests that proves decisive for explaining Americanconflict behavior during this period.11 Despite the fact that the United States 11

is the most studied case in the vast literature on democracy and foreign policy

10. James Madison, “Federalist 51,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York:Mentor Books, 1961), 323.

11. It is important to emphasize that this article employs a broader conception of the federalfeatures of American democracy than the classic conception of federalism, which focuses onthe role of the states as autonomous actors within the American system. The effects of federalunion on conflict decision-making highlighted in this article do not depend on the actions ofstate governments. Of interest here is the federal character of the national government itself,

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and has been the subject of more theoretical and empirical inquiry in thedemocratic peace literature than any other state, not a single previous studyhas systematically examined the logic of federal union and how this institu-tional feature may have actually reduced the frequency or extent to which theUnited States used military force in the history of its foreign relations.12

12

This effort to distinguish the federal form of democracy found in the UnitedStates picks up on an important question raised by several recent studies on thelink between democracy and conflict behavior: To what degree can we actuallytreat democracy as a relatively homogeneous regime type and establish broadgeneralizations about democratic conflict decision making?13 Specifically, this13

question points to the fact that democracies vary substantially in how their po-litical institutions are arranged; all modern democracies divide political powerin some way and hold their political leaders accountable to an electorate, butdifferent types of democratic states do so in very different ways.14 To the de-14

gree that divided power and electoral accountability hold democratic leadersin check, variation in these features could have a decisive effect on the degree

specifically, the fact that the internal structure of the U.S. Congress and the presidential electoralsystem are both organized along federal lines. In other words, the basic components of thenational government directly engaged in foreign affairs, Congress and the president, derivetheir authority and face political accountability in a system structured by federal union.

12. Russett and Maoz have provided the only reference to federalism in the democraticpeace literature, noting that it is an institutional arrangement “distinguishable” from nonfederaldemocracy, and that it further decentralizes democratic decision-making. They failed to explore,however, how federalism actually affects conflict decision-making. Bruce Russett and ZeevMaoz, “Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace: 1946–1986,” American PoliticalScience Review 87, no. 3 (September 1993): 624–38.

13. As Elman noted, “almost all advocates of democratic peace hypotheses treat democ-racy as a single undifferentiated category.” Miriam Fendius Elman, “Unpacking Democracy:Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Theories of Democratic Peace,” Security Studies 9, no. 4(summer 2000): 91–126; David P. Auerswald, “Inward Bound: Domestic Institutions and Mil-itary Conflicts,” International Organization 53, no. 3 (summer 1999): 469–504; Susan Peterson,Crisis Bargaining and the State: The Domestic Politics of International Conflict (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1996); and Norrin Ripsman, “Democracy, Structural Autonomy, and ForeignSecurity Policy: The Curious Case of German Rearmament,” Security Studies 10, no. 2 (winter2000–2001): 1–48.

14. The comparative literature on democracy reflects a long-established interest in howinstitutional variation produces variation in different aspects of the politics of democraticstates. See Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and Arend Lijphart, ed., Parliamentaryversus Presidential Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The international politicaleconomy literature has also treated institutional variation as an important research focus. SeePeter J. Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced IndustrialStates (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); and G. John Ikenberry, David A. Lake,and Michael Mastanduno, eds., The State and American Foreign Economic Policy (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1988).

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to which these states experience domestic constraints on the use of force. Asignificant shortcoming in much of the democratic peace literature is the fail-ure to take this institutional variation seriously, to disaggregate democracy asa general regime type and explore the implications of distinctive institutionalarrangements for the behavior of democracies in conflict situations. Althoughour arguments on democracy and armed conflict become less generalizable ifwe do this, we can develop more precisely articulated causal arguments thatprovide a richer understanding of how democracy actually affects conflictbehavior.15

15

This article is divided into two main sections. The first section presents atheory of “federal democratic peace” that explains in more detail how fed-eralism in the United States might impose constraints on the use of force.It focuses not only on the federal structure of Congress and legislative re-straints, but also on how the political incentives created by the federal struc-ture of the presidential electoral system may inhibit the president’s willing-ness to use military force. It also explains how federal union underminedthe potential centralizing role of political parties in the conflict decision-making process. The second section evaluates whether the logic of federaldemocratic peace provides a convincing explanation of American behaviorin the series of crises noted above. In each of these crises American po-litical leaders faced decisions on whether to use military force to resolvea particular international dispute or attain a particular objective. In nineof the twelve cases examined here there is a clear pattern of constraintson America’s expansionist initiatives and its ability to initiate and prosecutewar.16

16

15. The argument here is not that federal democracy in general is any more peace-pronethan nonfederal democracy, as subregime types. To establish this claim I would need to conducta more direct comparative study of the behavior of the American federal democracy withnonfederal democracies, or compare America’s conflict behavior before the Civil War, whenthe effects of federalism were strongest, to its conflict behavior after the Civil War. Variation onthe independent variable would offer a chance to look for subsequent variation in the propensityto use military force. The argument is simply that to understand American conflict behaviorin its early history, it is essential to acknowledge the distinctive logic of federal union and itseffects on the domestic politics of war and peace. Through process tracing it is possible todemonstrate that federal union did indeed impose institutional constraints across a diverse setof cases and a long time span. Alexander George, “Case Studies and Theory Development: TheMethod of Structured, Focused Comparison,” in Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory,and Policy, ed. Paul Laren (New York: Macmillan, 1979).

16. Steve Chan made the important argument that democratic peace research should not belimited simply to examining the propensity of democratic states to engage in war: “War is justone extreme segment of a long spectrum of organized violent activities.” Democracy may alsohave an important impact on “the scope, severity, and duration of wars.” Steve Chan, “Democracyand War: Some Thoughts on Future Research Agenda,” International Interactions 18, no. 3 (1993):207, emphasis in original.

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Evaluating the theoretical expectations of federal democratic peace withthe empirical record from the first half of the nineteenth century is justi-fied for several reasons. First, this is a period of American foreign relationsthat is unjustifiably neglected in international relations literature,17 in demo-17

cratic peace research,18 and in diplomatic history.19 Although the United States1819

certainly did limit its role in the power politics of the European continentduring the first half of the nineteenth century, any claim that the UnitedStates hid from competitive international relations altogether is false.20 On20

the North American continent the United States engaged in repeated com-petitive interactions with the United Kingdom, Spain, Mexico, and, to a lesserextent, France. This time period provides a much larger database of casesfor evaluating the effects of American democracy on the use of militaryforce than currently accounted for in the democratic peace literature. Sec-ond, in many of the cases from this period the United States backed downfrom the use of force even though the distribution of power favored theUnited States. Because the United States did not face the kind of severe ex-ternal pressure that would narrow the policy options for American leaders inthese crises, they offer more room for explanations rooted in domestic poli-tics.21 Third, with the exception of the Anglo-American Oregon crisis, these21

cases involve mixed democratic/nondemocratic dyads. This time period shedsneeded light on the monadic effects of democratic institutions, without theconfounding effects of democratic norms, on the use of military force againstnondemocracies.22

22

17. According to the prevailing characterization of American foreign policy prior to theend of the nineteenth century, the United States was most concerned with remaining isolatedfrom the corrupting system of power politics dominated by European states. Paul Schroeder,“Historical Reality vs. Neo-realist Theory,” International Security 19, no. 1 (summer 1994): 101–48.

18. The only cases so far examined in the democratic peace literature are the War of 1812,the Anglo-American Oregon crisis, and the Mexican War. See Rock, “Anglo-U.S. Relations,1845–1930”; Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War ; and Elman, “Unpacking Democracy.”

19. William Earl Weeks, “Historiography: New Directions in the Study of Early AmericanForeign Relations,” Diplomatic History 17, no. 1 (winter 1993): 73–96; Kinley Brauer, “The GreatAmerican Desert Revisited: Recent Literature and Prospects for the Study of American ForeignRelations, 1815–61,” Diplomatic History 13, no. 3 (summer 1989): 395–417; and Bradford Perkins,“Early American Foreign Relations: Opportunities and Challenges,” Diplomatic History 22, no. 1(winter 1998): 115–21.

20. Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997),50–51.

21. Legro and Moravcsik contended that the democratic peace claim would be well servedby more case studies in which the distribution of power favored the state that deconflictedbecause of domestic pressure. Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, “Is Anybody Still aRealist?” International Security 24, no. 3 (fall 1999): 50.

22. On the need for additional research on the monadic effects of democracy, see Ray,Democracy and International Conflict, 20; and Miriam Fendius Elman, “Introduction: The Need fora Qualitative Test of the Democratic Peace Theory,” in Elman, Paths to Peace, 40.

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A THEORY OF FEDERAL DEMOCRATIC PEACE

FEDERAL UNION AND LEGISLATIVE RESTRAINTS

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution plainly states that a primary objective ofthe “more perfect union” it created was a reliable organization for the commondefense against external threats.23 The American founders’ institutional vision 23

was also motivated by a desire to create a more peace-prone republic—thatis, to create a political system that would constrain the war-prone tendenciesof other republics they observed in history,24 to reduce the likelihood that the 24

United States itself would use force against those outside its borders. Clearly,the decision to grant Congress authority over raising armies and declaring warwas seen as a crucial institutional mechanism for this purpose.25 In fact, the 25

United States stands out as the classic example of a modern republic in whichthe separation of executive and legislative power is a key organizing principlewith the explicit goal of limiting the use of force.26 The separation of powers 26

provides an opportunity for Congress to impose impediments to the use offorce, but it says nothing about why Congress, as an institution, might actuallydo this. In other words, how might the institutional character of Congressactually “push toward peace”?27 In much of the scholarship on Congress 27

and American foreign policy, rarely does the level of analysis go below thelegislature as a whole (or the respective houses of Congress) to examine howthe composition of the legislature affects its role in the policy process.28 As 28

23. For analysis of other security objectives, see Daniel Deudney, “The Philadelphian System:Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of Power in the American States-Union, ca. 1787–1861,” International Organization 49, no. 2 (spring 1995): 1–55; Gottfried Dietze, The Federalist: AClassic on Federalism and Free Government (Westport: Greenwood, 1960), 177–254; Murray Forsyth,Union of States (New York: Leicester University Press, 1981); and Vincent Ostrom, The PoliticalTheory of a Compound Republic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).

24. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist 6,” in Rossiter, The Federalist Papers, 54, 56, 58.25. Madison, “Federalist 51”; James Madison, Letters and Other Writings, vol. 1 (Philadelphia:

Lippincott, 1865), 611, 643; and Louis Fisher, Presidential War Powers (Lawrence: University ofKansas Press, 1995).

26. In the contemporary democratic peace literature, “divided government” is one basicmechanism through which democratic institutions may increase the difficulty of using mil-itary force against other states. See Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace; T. Clifton Morganand Sally Howard Campbell, “Domestic Structure, Decisional Constraints, and War: So WhyKant Democracies Fight?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 35, no. 2 (June 1991): 187–211; T. CliftonMorgan and Valerie L. Schwebach, “Take Two Democracies and Call Me in the Morning: A Pre-scription for Peace?” International Interactions 17, no. 4 (1992): 305–20; Peterson, Crisis Bargainingand the State; Miriam Fendius Elman, “Conclusion: Testing the Democratic Peace,” in Elman,Paths to Peace, 493; Auerswald, “Inward Bound”; and Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War, chap. 2.

27. Morgan and Campbell, “Domestic Structure, Decisional Constraints, and War,” 189–90.28. For an excellent example, see Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin B. Firmage, To Chain the

Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1989).

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James Lindsay noted, however, Congress is not “a monolithic institution withits own preferences and wants. . . . Congress is a ‘they,’ not an ‘it ’.”29 Political29

competition within Congress, and the bases for this competition, must betreated as an important feature of the decision-making process in order toexplain the role that Congress might play in either sanctioning or restrainingthe use of military force. As the founders recognized explicitly, the federalbasis on which power is distributed within Congress, and the federal structureof electoral accountability for its members, would be the key to understandingconflict decision making in the United States.

The Constitution assigns the states the responsibility to organize congres-sional elections. Until 1913, U.S. senators were elected by state legislatures.Members of the House have always been elected by clearly defined territo-rial constituencies within the individual states.30 The federal organization of30

the congressional electoral system creates and sustains strong ties betweenthe interests and perspectives of discrete territorial constituencies within theUnited States and legislators at the national level. Madison pointed this outin Federalist 44: “The members and officers of the State governments . . . willhave an essential agency in giving effect to the federal Constitution. The elec-tion of . . . the Senate will depend, in all cases, on the legislatures of the severalstates. And the election of the House of Representatives will equally dependon the same authority.”31 He reinforced this point in Federalist 45 by arguing,31

“The Senate will be elected absolutely and exclusively by the State legislatures.Even the House of Representatives, though drawn immediately from the peo-ple, will be chosen very much under the influence of that class of men whoseinfluence over the people obtains for themselves an election into the State leg-islature. Thus, each of the principal branches of the federal government willowe its existence more or less to the favor of the State governments, and mustconsequently feel a dependence, which is much more likely to beget a dispo-sition too obsequious than too overbearing towards them.” In this way, “theState governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of thefederal government.”32 Contemporary students of American politics confirm32

that in practice this is clearly the case. As David Truman explained, “the risks

29. James M. Lindsay, “Cowards, Beliefs, and Structures,” in The Use of Force after the ColdWar, ed. H. W. Brands (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998), 151, emphasis inoriginal.

30. United States Constitution, Article 1, Sections 2, 3, and 4. The Seventeenth Amendmentto the Constitution, ratified in 1913, enacted direct popular election for U.S. senators.

31. Madison, “Federalist 44,” in Rossiter, The Federalist Papers, 287.32. Madison, “Federalist 45,” in ibid., 291. In Federalist 39, Madison noted that, in contrast

to the Senate, which is clearly a federal institution, the House of Representatives is nationalin character because it derives its power from “the people of America.” Madison, “Federalist39,” in ibid., 244. Yet the broader point established in Federalist 45 is that “the people” electing

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and sanctions to which most members of Congress are particularly sensitivehave their focus within the states and localities. The relationships which thelegislator has established and maintained within the constituency are primaryand crucial.”33 According to David Mayhew, “the reelection quest establishes 33

an accountability relationship with an electorate. . . . At voicing opinions heldby significant numbers of voters back in the constituencies, the United StatesCongress is extraordinarily effective.”34 As a result, whereas the role of the 34

states as autonomous political actors in foreign policy is tightly circumscribedby the Constitution,35 the actions of the national government are not truly sep- 35

arate from territorial interests within the states but are bound to them throughrepresentation in the legislature. The diffusion of authority among territorialrepresentatives means that any collective decision by the legislature, includingdecisions that sanction the use of force for certain foreign policy objectives,must attract sufficient political support from a diverse group of autonomouspolitical actors.

So far, this discussion has described how the federal basis of the Americanpolitical system distributes political authority within Congress, yet dividedgovernment alone simply provides the institutional setting that makes domes-tic opposition to the use of force politically meaningful. These institutionalcharacteristics tell us nothing about whether political opposition will actuallyemerge within the formal institutions to block the use of military force.36 In the 36

federal republic, the key feature that converts divided authority and electoralaccountability into political competition and constrained decision making is“federal asymmetry.” This dimension of federalism is defined by the degreeof diversity among the territorial communities of a federal state.37 Charles 37

members of the House are organized into discrete geographic regions, so the House supports thebasic principle of geographic representation that is the essence of federalism. House membersare often said to be even more sensitive to local interests because their constituencies aresmaller and they stand for election more often. V. O. Key, Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1952).

33. David B. Truman, “Federalism and the Party System,” in American Federalism in Perspective,ed. Aaron Wildavsky (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 83–84. See also K. C. Wheare, FederalGovernment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 184.

34. David Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974),6, 106.

35. Madison, “Federalist 51,” 320–25. Aside from their early role in maintaining and directingmilitias, state governments were clearly shut out of foreign relations, which were consideredthe preserve of the national government. U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 10.

36. Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy inLiberal Democracies,” World Politics 43, no. 4 (July 1991): 485.

37. Duchacek defined territorial communities as “aggregates of individuals and groups whoare aware of bonds of identification with each other as well as with the past, the present andhopes for the future of their area.” Ivo D. Duchacek, The Territorial Dimension of Politics: Within,Among, and Across Nations (Boulder: Westview, 1986), 3.

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Tarlton defined an ideal symmetric federal system as one that has “politicalunits comprised of equal territory and population, similar economic features,climate conditions, cultural patterns, social groupings and political institu-tions.”38 The homogeneity across a symmetric federal system would tend to38

limit the salience of a territorial division of authority for the politics of thistechnically federal state.

Conversely, an asymmetric federal state is one that is composed of territorialcommunities that do not share similar social, economic, geographic, or polit-ical features, and that consequently have quite different political concerns ordifferent solutions for the issues facing the whole state. Ivo Duchacek pointedout that “there is no federal system in the world in which all units are even ap-proximately equal in size, population, political power, administrative structure,traditions or relative geographic location (e.g., near to or distant from sourcesof potential external danger).”39 As a result, for many political issues, even39

those concerning war and peace, different territorial communities simply willnot share common conceptions of the issues at stake, the value of pursuingparticular foreign policy objectives, or the costs and benefits of using force inparticular circumstances. Different international challenges and opportunitieswill have different effects on the interests and goals of citizens and politi-cal leaders from different regions. Although some territorial communities orregions may benefit if force is used in response to a particular external prob-lem, other territorial communities or regions may suffer. Federal asymmetry,then, enhances the probability of robust competition over policy choices andthe difficulty of generating the necessary political consensus behind militaryaction.

The Federalists clearly described the logic of institutional constraints onmilitary force in terms of federal asymmetry.40 The key to reining in the ag-40

gressive potential of republican government was the territorially distributeddiversity of political perspectives and interests within the union that could becounted on to oppose one another at the center of decision making in the

38. Charles D. Tarlton, “Symmetry and Asymmetry as Elements of Federalism: A TheoreticalSpeculation,” Journal of Politics 27, no. 4 (November 1965): 865.

39. Ivo D. Duchacek, Comparative Federalism: The Territorial Dimensions of Politics (New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 280.

40. The identities of territorial communities within the United States have typically emergedfrom economic, geographic, and cultural variation among different regions, variables that con-tinue to be important dimensions of American politics. See Frederick Jackson Turner, TheSignificance of Sections in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1932); David C. Hendrickson,Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003);Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1998), xiii–xiv, 4–5, 10–13, 18–20, 238–39, 241; and Peter Onufand Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions,1776–1814 (Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1993).

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federal government. Among the authors of the Federalist Papers, John Jaymost forcefully argued that the contending interests and local jealousies thatemerge from this asymmetry would have a direct effect on how the differentparts of the union relate to the outside world. In turn, this will affect how thesedifferent territorial communities perceive and act on their particular externalinterests and on national policy. In Federalist 5, Jay observed divergent eco-nomic conditions across the union. The expected effect was that “differentcommercial concerns [among the states] must create different interests andof course different degrees of attachment to and connection with differentforeign nations.”41 Because different kinds of economic activity were concen- 41

trated in particular geographic regions, the commercial implications of warwould be felt differently in different places. On a more dangerous level, Jay as-serted, “the temptations to violate treaties and commit international injusticesmay result from circumstances peculiar to the State[s]. . . . [S]uch violences aremore frequently occasioned by the passions and interests of a part than ofthe whole, of one or two States than of the Union.” He cited, for example,conflicts with Native Americans that were provoked by the particular inter-ests of different territorial communities. “Not a single Indian war has yet beenproduced by aggressions of the present federal government . . . but there areseveral instances of Indian hostilities provoked by the improper conduct ofindividual States, who, unable or unwilling to restrain or punish offenses, havegiven occasion to the slaughter of many innocent inhabitants.”42

42

Federal asymmetry also meant that different regions in the union were ex-pected to have different perspectives on the union’s relations with Europeanpowers that held colonial possessions in North America. “The neighborhoodof Spanish and British territories, bordering on some States and not on others,naturally confines the causes of quarrel more immediately to the borderers.The bordering States . . . will be those who, under the impulse of sudden ir-ritation, and a quick sense of apparent interest or injury, will be most likely,by direct violence, to excite war with those nations.”43 Bordering states may 43

become the most ardent advocates of military force if they perceive the threat

41. John Jay, “Federalist 5,” in Rossiter, The Federalist Papers, 53. During the ConstitutionalConvention, Alexander Hamilton noted strong differences in “the local situation of the threelargest states, Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. They were separated from each otherby distance of place, and equally so, by all the peculiarities which distinguish the interests of oneState from those of another.” Elaborating on differences across the union, Hamilton noted thata “considerable distinction of interests lay between the carrying & non-carrying states,” thosethat engaged in maritime commerce and those that did not, “which divides instead of unit[es]the larger states.” James Madison, 29 June 1787, in Notes of Debate in the Federal Convention of 1787,ed. Adrienne Koch (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966), 154, 216.

42. John Jay, “Federalist 3,” in Rossiter, The Federalist Papers, 44.43. Ibid.

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as more acute than do those living in other regions, or if they expect a positiveoutcome from the use of force. Alternatively, they may become the most pas-sionate voices for restraint if their confidence in success at acceptable costsis low. Similarly, a military conflict with a prominent naval component holdsmuch greater risk for coastal regions of the state or for those with maritime in-terests than it does for regions that are geographically insulated. Although theFederalist Papers do not address this issue, the territorial communities withinthis diverse federal state were also distinguished by differences in political cul-ture that shaped how different regions of the United States thought about theuse of military force in particular circumstances. Political-cultural differenceswere particularly acute during the first several decades after ratification of theConstitution, as the United States grappled with the question of whether tosupport Great Britain or France in the European wars that began in the 1790s.Not only did culturally derived domestic conflict on this issue generate the firstpolitical parties in the United States, it produced a strong division betweenthe Northeast and the South and Northwest on a series of foreign policyproblems.

Ultimately, Jay argued, diversity among territorial communities within theAmerican union, made salient within the context of its federal political struc-ture, would tend to constrain regional aggression. Jay contended, “Nothingcan so effectually obviate that danger [of regional aggression] as a national gov-ernment, whose wisdom and prudence will not be diminished by the passionswhich actuate the parties immediately interested.”44 In other words, “the na-44

tional government, not being affected by these local circumstances, will neitherbe induced to commit the wrong themselves, nor want power or inclinationto prevent or punish its commission by others.”45 Although Jay’s argument45

here is important, his reference in this particular passage to the “wisdom andprudence” of the national government gives the misleading impression of thegovernment acting as a unified body. If we want to examine the effects offederalism specifically, it is important to emphasize that because other partsof the union will not share these regional interests, other territorial representa-tives within the legislature will tend to act against this form of aggression. Jayclarified this point in another passage: “The prospect of present loss or advan-tage may often tempt the governing party in one or two States to swerve fromgood faith and justice [in dealing with foreign nations]; but those temptations,not reaching the other States, and consequently having little or no influenceon the national government, the temptation will be fruitless, and good faith

44. Ibid., 45.45. Ibid., 44.

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and justice be preserved.”46 Representatives from other states would thus be 46

“more temperate and cool” when confronted with these potential sources ofmilitary conflict, so the “national government will proceed with moderationand candor to consider and decide on the means most proper to extricatethem from the difficulties which threaten them.”47

47

Madison anticipated this argument on the constraining effects of federalunion and asymmetry several years before the Constitutional Convention.In a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1784, Madison examined the dangerousconflict then brewing between the American states and Spain over Spain’sefforts to restrict use of the Mississippi River. He argued that if Spain wantedto restrict the ability of the American states to threaten its interests in NorthAmerica, it should encourage further westward expansion and an increase inthe number of states in the confederation. The American states were bitterlydivided over whether to press Spain on this issue. As a result, Madison argued,Spain’s “permanent security . . . lies in the Complexity of our foederal Govt.and the diversity of interests among the members of it which render offensivemeasures, improbable in Council, and difficult in execution. If such be the casewhen 13 States compose the System, ought she not to wish to see the numberenlarged to three & twenty?”48 Despite the creation of a more centralized 48

national government in 1787, Madison argued that the same logic wouldhold after ratification of the new constitution. In Federalist 37 he observedasymmetry in the “circumstances” of different territorial communities at alllevels of the compound republic. “As every State may be divided into differentdistricts . . . which give birth to contending interests and local jealousies, sothe different parts of the United States are distinguished from each other bya variety of circumstances, which produce a like effect on a larger scale.”49

49

Territorial representatives were then expected to carry the “local spirit” ofthis federal asymmetry into the national legislature.50 In Federalist 10 Madison 50

noted, “Extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties andinterests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have acommon motive.”51 In Federalist 51 he argued, “In the extended republic of 51

the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects

46. Ibid., 43–44.47. Ibid., 45.48. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 20 August 1784, in The Papers of James Madison,

vol. 8, eds. Robert A. Rutland and William M.E. Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1973), 106.

49. Madison, “Federalist 37,” in Rossiter, The Federalist Papers, 230.50. Madison, “Federalist 46,” in ibid., 296–97.51. Madison, “Federalist 10,” in ibid., 83.

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which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldomtake place on any other principle than those of justice and the general good.”52

52

It is important to emphasize that regional diversity alone does not producepolitical constraints; it is only part of the argument. For a useful contrast thathelps make the point about the importance of institutions as a political outletfor social diversity, consider democratic India. India has one of the most di-verse populations of any state, and it also has a federal system composed ofstates with representation in one chamber of the legislature. India, however,combines these federative characteristics with a Westminster parliamentarystructure used to organize the more powerful lower house, elect the executive,and produce strong cabinet government. These institutional features serveto centralize decision making in the Indian system in a way that would nothave been tolerated in the early United States. Moreover, the Congress party,under the founding leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, worked assiduously toprevent a splintering of the Indian party system along territorial lines, andfor decades the Congress was hegemonic in Indian politics. The combinationof Westminster institutions and a dominant party minimized the role of di-verse, geographically distributed groups in Indian politics.53 The institutional53

structure of the American government, in contrast, offered multiple points ofaccess for competing regional interests to affect policy making directly.

In concrete terms, Congress may play a constraining role in several ways(see Table 1 for a summary). Congress may actively vote down requests forlegislation that would authorize or support crisis escalation or the mobilizationor use of military force. Congressional constraints may also come in the formof the Senate’s rejecting a treaty negotiated by the president that sanctionsthe use of force under certain conditions or that sanctions certain gains thatwere made through the use of force. Congress may also vote to deny thepresident the financial resources necessary to pursue foreign policy initiativesthat might include, or might lead to, military conflict. Congress may actually

52. Madison, “Federalist 51,” 325.53. Nirmal Mukarji and Balveer Arora, eds., Federalism in India: Origins and Development

(New Delhi: Vikas, 1992); Douglas V. Verney and Francine R. Frankel, “India: Has the TrendTowards Federalism Implications for the Management of Foreign Policy? A Comparative Per-spective,” International Journal 41, no. 3 (summer 1986): 572–99; Joyotpaul Chaudhuri, “Feder-alism and the Siamese Twins: Diversity and Entropy in India’s Domestic and Foreign Policy,”International Journal 48, no. 3 (summer 1993): 448–69. For an extreme case, consider the SovietUnion. Regions across that country in the mid-twentieth century were arguably more diverse insocial, geographic, and economic features than those in the early United States. Yet because theinstitutional structure of the Soviet Union produced severe concentration of political authority,primarily through the mechanism of the Communist party, this regional diversity had little tono impact on Soviet foreign policy. Robert V. Daniels, The Stalin Revolution: Foundations of SovietTotalitarianism (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1972).

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Table 1TYPOLOGY OF INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS ON THE USE OF MILITARY FORCE

Imposed by Congress Presidential Self-Restraint

(1) Rejects crisis escalation, mobilizationor deployment of forces, use offorce, declaration of war, orterritorial acquisition through force

(1) Anticipates absence of congressionalapproval

(2) Denies financial appropriation tosupport use of military force

(2) Anticipates electoral penalties:(a) Personal(b) Political party

(3) Ignores/takes no action on requestfor congressional authorization touse military force

(3) Wishes to avoid fracturing orotherwise damaging political partysolidarity

ignore requests from the president, members of the legislature, or individualstates, to authorize certain foreign policy initiatives. Without taking a vote, theabsence of congressional approval for a specific initiative might be sufficientto prevent it.

FEDERAL UNION AND PRESIDENTIAL SELF-RESTRAINT

Although the framers of the Constitution believed that the national legisla-ture would present the most potent source of constraints on political powerin the United States, this does not exhaust the institutional mechanisms thatcan inhibit the use of military force. Much of the literature on democracyand war focuses on a second source of constraints, derived from the fact thatpresidents and prime ministers are accountable to an electorate that mightpunish them politically for pursuing high-risk or costly foreign adventures.54

54

Because electoral penalties can be imposed only after the president initiatesan unpopular foreign conflict, ex ante constraints on executive action dependon the president’s exercising self-restraint out of concern for expected fu-ture political losses. In the Federalist Papers we find a clear appreciation forthe constraining effects of electoral accountability on presidential behavior.

54. David L. Rousseau, Christopher Gelpi, Dan Reiter, and Paul K. Huth, “Assessing theDyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918–88,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 3(September 1996): 513; Kurt Gaubatz, Elections and War: The Electoral Incentive in the DemocraticPolitics of War and Peace (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Owen, Liberal Peace, LiberalWar, chap. 2; and Morgan and Campbell, “Domestic Structure, Decisional Constraints, andWar”: 190–91.

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Hamilton repeatedly referred to the president’s “due dependence on the peo-ple” as a check on his behavior.55 What the Federalists failed to specify is that,55

for purposes of presidential elections, “the people” are organized into state-level constituencies, so the presidential electoral system mirrors the Senate’selectoral system in its basic federal structure. Madison advanced this pointforcefully when he noted, “Without the intervention of the State legislatures,the President of the United States cannot be elected at all. They must in allcases have a great share in his appointment, and will, perhaps, in most cases, ofthemselves determine it.”56 In effect, presidents are elected in a federal process56

that amalgamates the electoral choices of individual state constituencies. As aresult, the policy preferences of particular states or regions remain salient forthe president because they are not diluted within one national electorate thatcould otherwise mute particularistic territorial interests. To compete for votesin individual states the president has an incentive to appeal to or avoid antago-nizing strongly held interests within regions that might ultimately penalize thepresident at the ballot box. The president must not only be concerned withaggregate national opinion on questions of war and peace, but also be mindfulof how that public opinion breaks down along state or regional lines.

In concrete terms, the president may choose to exercise self-restraint underseveral conditions (see Table 1). First, the president may choose to avoid theuse of force if he anticipates that strong federal asymmetry on a particular is-sue makes it unlikely that Congress will approve his preferred policy options.Second, the president may avoid the use of force or the pursuit of certain ob-jectives if he believes that opposition to these policies within certain regionsof the federal republic will produce electoral penalties that undermine hisability to attract a winning coalition from across the national political systemin subsequent elections.57 The president might exercise self-restraint even if57

the expected electoral penalties would undermine his political party, and notnecessarily his own tenure in office. Surprisingly, the effects of political partieson democratic decision making have been virtually ignored in the democratic

55. Hamilton, “Federalist 78,” in Rossiter, The Federalist Papers, 463–64.56. Madison, “Federalist 45,” 291. Wechsler explained that the “strategic role” of the states “in

the selection of the Congress and the President” is “so immutable a feature of the system that [its]importance tends to be ignored.” Herbert Wechsler, “The Political Safeguards of Federalism:The Role of the States in the Composition and Selection of the National Government,” inFederalism: Mature and Emergent, ed. Arthur W. Macmahon (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955),98–99.

57. Much of the “electoral accountability” literature assumes that executives will be punishedfor foreign policy failures, yet in the American system a president may be punished by regionsthat strongly oppose his policy whether he fails or succeeds. Even if the president expects the useof force to be successful in a particular conflict, certain regions may never forgive the president’sactions. As a result, the president has an incentive to avoid antagonizing important regions withhis foreign policy, if the policy itself has the potential to cripple his personal electoral prospects.

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peace literature.58 It is important to recognize that no matter how many insti- 58

tutional divisions are built into a particular democratic system, unified politicalparties may render these divisions nearly meaningless. A unified political partycan span the institutional divide separating the executive from the legislatureif the same party controls both branches of government. The diffusion oflegislative authority among individual members of Congress or between twochambers in a bicameral system may have little impact on policy decisionsif the majority of legislators are held together by consensus on a commonpolitical program or by party loyalty. Party unity is not a given, however; justas unified political parties bridge institutional divisions and enhance the exec-utive’s control of the political agenda, weak and divided political parties oftenlack the internal cohesion to perform this function, which makes institutionaldivisions more salient as a source of constraints on decision making.

In the United States, the federal structure of the electoral system producesa federally organized political party system, which weakens party cohesionat the national level.59 The two parties that typically dominate the national 59

political scene in the United States are most accurately characterized as “fed-erations” or “coalitions” of state-based party organizations. According to V. O.Key, “Parties owe their legal existence to state legislation. . . . The national su-perstructure over the state party organizations . . . derives its power from theirconsent.”60 As a result, although most legislators throughout American history 60

have been elected as members of one of two main parties, the national partyhas not controlled their electoral fortunes as parties would in many unitarydemocratic states. Earl Fry noted, “Without intense party loyalties, regionaland state-based issues can be given priority by members of Congress.”61 It is 61

very difficult in this system for national-level party leaders to discipline theirmembers and enforce party unity on national political issues.62 The experience 62

58. One exception is John C. Matthews III, “Turkish and Hungarian Foreign Policy duringthe Interwar Period: Domestic Institutions and the Democratic Peace,” in Elman, Paths to Peace,439–71.

59. Peter Trubowitz, “Sectionalism and American Foreign Policy: The Political Geographyof Consensus and Conflict,” International Studies Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1992): 176.

60. V. O. Key, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1952), 305–6; Carl J. Friedrich, Trends of Federalism in Theory and Practice (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,1968), 47; Daniel Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987),179; and Truman, “Federalism and the Party System,” 81–109.

61. Earl Fry, “The United States of America,” in Federalism and International Relations: The Roleof Subnational Units, ed. Hans J. Michelmann and Panayotis Soldatos (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990),289.

62. This is in contrast to the experience of many political parties in parliamentary democraciesthat must remain cohesive to sustain a government in power. R. S. Katz, “The United States:Divided Government and Divided Parties,” in Party and Government: An Inquiry into the Relationshipbetween Governments and Supporting Parties in Liberal Democracies, ed. Jean Blondel and Maurizio Cotta(New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 202; Key, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 307–15.

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of political parties in the United States is riven by perpetual tension between thedemands of national-level competition to win elections and to pass legislation,which fosters unity, and internal party pluralism that exerts a centrifugal pullon party cohesiveness. If party unity is weak or breaks down as a result of thepull of regional pluralism, the institutional divisions of the federal state will bemore salient as an outlet for territorial interests in the national policy process.

Because the party’s strength in Congress depends on the electoral successof individual members at the local level, the president’s policy may underminethe party’s support in particular regions. The president might choose to avoidthe kinds of issues or actions that would penalize loyal members of his partyin particular regions and undermine the party’s aggregate national strength.Finally, the president might exercise self-restraint to avoid splitting the partyalong territorial lines. The president has a strong interest in party unity, whichmay have a direct impact on his ability to influence legislative outcomes. Yetthe latent internal party tension caused by federal asymmetry on particularissues may come to the surface if the president initiates policies that partymembers from particular regions find objectionable. To avoid the repercus-sions of dividing the party this way, the president might choose to avoid thetypes of policies that would have this effect.63

63

In sum, the federal features of Congress and the presidential electoral systemprovide the institutional mechanisms that facilitate political competition overpolicy decisions, circumscribe the ability of political leaders to make policy de-cisions unfettered by domestic opposition, and accentuate the political impactof geographically defined constituencies. The likelihood of actual competitionover questions of war and peace will increase as federal asymmetry on par-ticular issues increases.64 In other words, asymmetry in the social, economic,64

63. In the period considered in this study, important socioeconomic and ideological cleavagescut across territorial lines in the United States, which provided a relatively stable basis for thecreation of two rival parties that could legitimately claim a national constituency (except for theFederalist party from 1800 to 1815.) Although each party had its core strength in a particularregion, their political programs found enough adherents across the country to produce partyrepresentation that was distributed across all regions. John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America,1828–1996 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10–12; Key, Politics, Parties, andPressure Groups, 248; and Keith Polakoff, Political Parties in American History (New York: JohnWiley, 1981). Despite the stability of the national two-party system for much of this period,political questions that involved territorial expansion and the use of military force were thekinds of questions that most frequently generated asymmetric perspectives among the variousregions of the United States. Thomas B. Alexander, Sectional Stress and Party Strength: A Study ofRoll-Call Voting Patterns in the Unites States House of Representatives, 1836–1860 (Nashville: VanderbiltUniversity Press, 1967); and Joel H. Silbey, The Shrine of Party: Congressional Voting Behavior, 1841–1852 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967).

64. This is not to imply that territorial interests are not influential in more centralizeddemocracies. Yet we would expect diverse territorial interests to have a greater and more

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geographic, or political characteristics of territorial communities produces di-vergent regional perspectives on how the state’s interests are defined, how therelative distribution of power is calculated in conflict situations, and how thecosts and benefits of using military force are calculated for particular con-flicts, as well as on the normative implications of using force against particularstates. Under these conditions Congress is less likely to generate consensus insupport of the use of force in a particular crisis, and the president is less likelyto advocate the use of force against foreign adversaries.

FEDERAL DEMOCRATIC PEACE AND THE EMPIRICAL RECORD

THE OBJECTIVE now is to evaluate whether the logic of federal democraticpeace convincingly explains American conflict behavior. To do this, this

section examines twelve cases between 1807 and 1860 in which the UnitedStates was either (a) engaged in an international dispute that could have, ordid, end in armed conflict, or (b) facing an external threat or opportunitythat generated concrete political action to determine whether armed forceshould be used in response. This case set, which includes all of the significantdisputes that may have involved the United States in armed conflict between1800 and 1860, presents a clear pattern of constraints on the use of militaryforce by the United States.65 Not only was the United States constrained in 65

nine of the twelve cases, the logic of federal democratic peace provides a moreconvincing explanation for this pattern than the kind of realist argument foundin the democratic peace literature, which focuses on strategic calculations ofthe costs and benefits of war in particular situations. (A list of these cases andthe type of institutional constraint operative in each is provided in Table 2.)To evaluate this type of realist argument it is necessary to determine whetherdecision making was dominated by key political actors who converged on acommon conception of the interests at stake, the relative distribution of power

consistent role in the politics of a federal democracy because the institutional arrangement offederal union provides a direct conduit into national decision-making and executive elections.

65. Two additional cases of federal constraints, involving intrawar limitations on war aims,are not included in this study because of space limitations. Each case provides valuable insightsinto the constraining effects of federal union beyond crisis escalation and war initiation. Duringthe War of 1812, the Madison administration resolved to occupy and possibly annex a large partof British Canada. This effort failed, however, due to the refusal of southern and northeasternmembers of Congress to sanction this war aim and provide a military force capable of carryingit out. In the Mexican War, an effort spearheaded by the Polk administration to annex “AllMexico” or much larger portions than what the United States eventually secured was defeatedby opposition from northwestern and northeastern members of Congress. For a full discussionof these cases see Scott A. Silverstone, Divided Union: The Politics of War in the Early AmericanRepublic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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Table 2CRISIS OUTCOME AND INSTITUTIONAL EXPLANATIONS

Type of InstitutionalCrisis Outcome∗ Constraint†

1807 Chesapeake crisis C Presidential (1, 2b, 3)1809 Anglo-American War crisis C Congressional (1)1812 Anglo-American War crisis NC1811–13 Occupation of East Florida C Congressional (1)1845–46 Anglo-American Oregon

crisisC Congressional (1)

1845–46 Deployment of troops toRio Grande

NC

1846 Mexican War crisis NC1853 Mesilla Valley crisis C Presidential (1, 2a, 2b, 3)1853–55 Cuba crisis C Presidential (1, 3)1859 Mexican protectorate request

by presidentC Congressional (1)

1859 Intervention in MexicanCivil War

C Congressional (3)

1860 Mexican protectorate treaty C Congressional (1)

Total: 12 cases 9 constraints,3 no constraints

∗C = constraint on use of military force or gains from force; NC = no constraint on use ofmilitary force or gains from force.†The numbers in parentheses correspond to the types of institutional constraint listed in Table 1.

between America and its potential adversaries, and the expected costs relativeto benefits of using military force. This argument will be most convincing ifthere is evidence to suggest that American political leaders avoided the use ofmilitary force because of pessimistic strategic calculations of America’s abilityto achieve its objectives at an acceptable cost. As we will see, this explanationdoes not hold up to the empirical evidence for any of the cases. Federaldemocratic peace explanations will be most convincing if the evidence showsthat regional opinion was decisively split on the issues at stake in the crisis,on the assessment of the relative distribution of power between America andits potential adversaries, on the expected costs and benefits of using militaryforce, or on the normative implications of using force in that particular dispute.A federal democratic peace explanation must show one of two things: (1) thatfederal asymmetry on these elements of the crisis is reflected in Congress andacts as an impediment to a winning coalition in favor of using military force;or (2) the president calculates a higher likelihood of future electoral penalties

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imposed in certain regions or dangerous intraparty tensions should the UnitedStates use military force, and he avoids military force because of these politicalcalculations.

EVALUATING THE CASES

The War of 1812 capped a long-running dispute with the United Kingdomover America’s right as a neutral nation to trade with areas of Europe underNapoleon’s influence or control. Although scholars have debated whether thiswar is a fair test of the dyadic democratic peace proposition, for the purposes ofthis study it clearly demonstrates that federal union did not paralyze America’sability to initiate armed conflict. The American founders did not intend forthe structure of the compound republic’s political system to have this effect.Our ability to test the logic of federal democratic peace against the Anglo-American conflict in this period, however, is not limited to the declaration ofwar in 1812. What students of the democratic peace have ignored is the factthat, prior to 1812, American decision makers actively and openly consideredthe use of force against the United Kingdom at two discrete points in time.In each case, however, the United States eventually backed away from armedconflict. According to several historians, it is “easier to show why Americashould have gone to war in 1807 or 1809 rather than in 1812.”66 These two 66

cases, the Chesapeake crisis of 1807 and the war crisis of 1809, should beconsidered not simply as waypoints on the road to war in 1812, but as separatecases in which a specific militarized dispute failed to produce military conflict.

In the summer of 1807, the United States and the United Kingdom wereon the brink of war following an attack on the USS Chesapeake by the Britishwarship Leopard just ten miles off Norfolk, Virginia. This was the most egre-gious case of British interference with American maritime rights throughoutthe Napoleonic wars, and it was a dramatic symbol of the increasing numberof sailors from American ships who were being forcibly impressed into servicewith the Royal Navy.67 President Thomas Jefferson not only prepared for war 67

through the summer and fall, he repeatedly expressed the belief that war waslikely, if not inevitable, as a consequence of the Leopard ’s attack. As British

66. Reginald Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812 (Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 1962), 14. See also Bradford Perkins, ed., The Causes of the War of 1812: National Honor orNational Interest? (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962), 2; and Donald R. Hickey, TheWar of 1812 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 13.

67. When the captain of the Chesapeake refused to allow the Leopard ’s crew to search forBritish deserters, the Leopard fired three point-blank broadsides into the American ship, killingthree and wounding nineteen. The Chesapeake was boarded and the British crew retrieved fourdeserters (three of whom were actually Americans who had enlisted in the Royal Navy). For adetailed account of the incident see Spencer C. Tucker and Frank T. Reuter, Injured Honor: TheChesapeake-Leopard Affair (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996).

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ships blockaded Norfolk, Jefferson notified state governors to be ready tocontribute to a national militia force of 100,000, and he ordered gunboatsdeployed to vulnerable sections of the coast. He sent Secretary of War HenryDearborn to New York to oversee defense preparations and maintained closecontact with Virginia governor William Cabell to coordinate a defense ofNorfolk and the Chesapeake Bay approaches.68 Jefferson explained to John68

Nicholas, “Considering war as one of the alternatives which Congress mayadopt on the failure of proper satisfaction for the outrages committed on usby Great Britain, I have thought it my duty to put into train every preparationfor that which the executive powers . . . will admit of.”69 With adequate defense69

preparations along the coast, a superior American military force for offensiveoperations in Canada, and a large privateer maritime force, Jefferson actu-ally believed America could engage the United Kingdom in armed conflict atrelatively little cost.70 As America waited for the British response to its de-70

mands for a public disavowal of the attack, a recall of their naval commanderin North America, restitution for the ship and its crew, as well as a declara-tion ending the impressment policy, President Jefferson professed to manycorrespondents a belief that war was more likely than peace.71

71

Two characteristics of this case pose a severe challenge to the logic of federalunion as a potential constraint on America’s ability to use military force. First,the attack was such a gross violation of America’s rights and accepted maritimepractice that it produced a rally-around-the-flag effect to an extent rarely seenin U.S. history.72 President Jefferson wrote, “Never since the battle of Lexington72

have I seen this country in such a state of exasperation as at present, and even

68. Thomas Jefferson to William Cabell, 8 July 1807; Jefferson to General John Armstrong,17 July 1807; Jefferson to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, 17 July 1807; and Jefferson toSecretary of State James Madison, 9 August 1807, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington:Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), 262–63, 283–85, 311–12. See also HenryAdams, History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York: LiteraryClassics of the United States, 1986), 947–49.

69. Jefferson to John Nicholas, 18 August 1807, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 332–33. InSeptember the president proposed marching a militia force to northern points in preparationfor an invasion of Canada, and in return Madison acknowledged the “absolute necessity of aradical cure for the evil inflicted by British ships of war.” Jefferson to Madison, 20 September1807; and Madison to Jefferson, 20 September 1807, in The Republic of Letters: The Correspondencebetween Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, vol. 3, ed. James Morton Smith (New York:W.W. Norton, 1995), 1498–1500.

70. Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 3 (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1858),226–27.

71. Jefferson to William Duane, 20 July 1807; Jefferson to Colonel John Taylor, 1 August1807; Jefferson to Madison, 1 September 1807; Jefferson to Attorney General Robert Smith,8 October 1807; and Jefferson to James Maury, 21 November 1807, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson,290–91, 304, 350, 377, 397.

72. Adams, History of the United States, 946–47; and Horsman, Causes of the War of 1812, 103.

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that did not produce such unanimity.”73 “[The United Kingdom has,] often 73

enough, God knows, given us cause for war before; but it has been on pointswhich would not have united the nation. But now they have touched a cordthat vibrates in every heart.”74 At first blush, regional differences over U.S. 74

foreign policy do not seem relevant as a possible source of contention andconstraint on the use of force had the president decided to pursue war.

The second challenge to the logic of federal constraints is the politicalstrength of President Jefferson and the Republican party in this time period.Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800 brought a rapid and radical shiftin the electoral strength of the Republican and Federalist parties. In the firsttwo years of his presidency, Jefferson’s popularity soared with the Americanpublic. He saw this as an opportunity to improve the Republicans’ electoralstrength in the Northeast, the region in which Federalists were traditionallydominant and where the Republicans were weakest. By the summer of 1807the Republican party held 82 percent of the seats in both the Senate and theHouse of Representatives.75 According to one prominent historian, “In the 75

country and in Congress, not only was Jefferson supreme, but his enemieswere prostrate.”76 Had the president’s popularity allowed him to sustain public 76

support for war across regions, and had party unity carried it through Congress,Jefferson’s belief in the inevitability of war in 1807 could have become realityfor the union.

Despite the various political forces that seemed ripe for generating a movetoward war, however, this was not the outcome of the crisis. Instead, Congresspassed the Embargo Act in December, decisively backing away from a militaryresponse to British pressure. The explanation has two components. First,from a short-term military perspective, Jefferson believed it was sensible towait until fall to initiate hostilities. A delay of several months would allowthe United States to recover ships and sailors currently abroad, assets thatwould be essential for outfitting warships and privateers. As he explained toGovernor Cabell of Virginia, a delay would “give us time to get in our ships,our property, and our seamen, now under the grasp of our adversary; probablynot less than 20,000 of the latter are now exposed on the ocean, whose losswould cripple us in the outset more than the loss of several battles.”77 This 77

73. Jefferson to Dupont De Nemours, 14 July 1807; and Jefferson to James Bowdoin, 10 July1807, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 274, 269.

74. Jefferson to William Duane, 20 July 1807, in ibid., 291.75. Polakoff, Political Parties in American History, 34–35, 54, 69–73.76. Adams, History of the United States, 1026–29; for a critique of this view see Dumas Malone,

Jefferson the President (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 472n7.77. Jefferson to William Cabell, 16 July 1807; and Jefferson to John Page, 17 July 1807, in

Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 281, 287.

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was a reason for delay in hostilities, however, not for the foreclosure of thisoption.

The second component, rooted in domestic politics, provides the best ex-planation for the passing of the crisis without war, and the logic of regionaldiversity and federal institutions plays a crucial role. Jefferson was committed tothe principle that Congress alone was authorized to declare war, and he statedfrequently that he would take no action that would undermine Congress’sfreedom of choice in the matter.78 Despite his fealty to the separation of con-78

stitutional war powers, Jefferson could have called Congress into early sessionto deal with the crisis. In fact, several advisers urged him to take this very stepimmediately.79 Jefferson rejected this advice, opting instead to request that79

Congress reconvene at the end of October, just a few weeks earlier than itsplanned session. The reason for this decision is impossible to separate fromthe politics of federal union. In short, the president believed that, despitenational outrage over the Chesapeake attack, regional divisions over how torespond demanded that the president pursue a diplomatic path that wouldtake months to resolve, before war would be politically viable in Congress.

Although Jefferson had successfully marginalized the Federalist party andgathered strong public support since his first election in 1800, by the midpointof his second term the Republican party was increasingly fractured by regionaldisputes and factionalism, which severely undermined his ability to use theParty as a vehicle to exercise national leadership. He sustained the loyalty ofsouthern and western states across issues, yet the mid-Atlantic and northeast-ern states were wracked by internal party disputes and regional pressures thatundermined the loyalty of members of Congress from these areas.80 Southern80

Republicans, for example, would not vote to fortify New York on the theorythat it was better to abandon coastal regions to destruction in case of attackthan to defend them.

With this in mind, Jefferson determined that the only way to generatenational support for confrontation with the United Kingdom was to seekrestitution through diplomacy first. Only if the British refused to make amendspeacefully, he believed, would there be sufficient support in the Northeast fortaking the country to war.81 Opposition to war in the Northeast was dominated81

by commercial concerns. This may seem odd, for it was the American merchant

78. Jefferson to Vice-President George Clinton, 6 July 1807, in ibid., 258.79. Adams, History of the United States, 948–49.80. Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler and Robert L. Ivie, Congress Declares War: Rhetoric, Leadership, and

Partisanship in the Early Republic (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1983), 82–83; and Adams,History of the United States, 844–47.

81. Horsman, Causes of the War of 1812, 105–6, 168.

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fleet, the bulk of which was owned by New Englanders and which carriedAmerican and foreign goods,82 that had been repeatedly plundered by the 82

British over the previous several years. Massachusetts alone accounted formore than one-third of the nation’s shipping tonnage.83 The livelihood of most 83

New Englanders was tied in some way to America’s maritime commerce, soit was truly a regional interest. We might expect, then, that this region wouldbe the most aggressive in response to the United Kingdom’s maritime policy.Yet the Northeast actually thrived economically because of British restrictions.There was ample opportunity for neutral trade during the Napoleonic wars, andship owners were willing to tolerate British inspections and licenses for plyingcertain trade routes. The increased risk that came with British restrictionsactually increased the profits that ship owners enjoyed.84 Many northeasterners 84

also held a strong sense of ideological and cultural affinity with the British,particularly when they considered the United Kingdom’s great struggle withNapoleon. The idea that the United States might implicitly aid Napoleon byitself declaring war on the United Kingdom was repugnant.85

85

The president made this observation about federal asymmetry on the ques-tion of war to the governor of Virginia. Virginia had been most vigorous inits preparations for war since the Chesapeake incident, due to the geographyof the clash and the lingering British threat, and Governor Cabell was anx-ious to know when the United States was actually going to move toward war.Negotiations, Jefferson explained, were “requisite . . . to produce unanimityamong ourselves; for however those nearest the scenes of aggression and irritationmay have been kindled into a desire for war at short hand, the more distantparts of the Union have generally rallied to the point of previous demand ofsatisfaction” first. They would support war only if satisfaction were denied.86

86

A week later he made the point that Congress would declare war only afterAmerica had given the United Kingdom time to make amends peacefully.87

87

To Vice-President George Clinton, Jefferson observed that he would avoidany acts likely to produce war because he anticipated that many in Congresswould support “non-intercourse over war.”88

88

82. Ibid., 175.83. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1989), 230–31.84. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic,

vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 394; and Paul A. Varg, New England andForeign Relations, 1798–1850 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983), 59.

85. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, 256; and Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1812(New York: Macmillan, 1925), 131.

86. Jefferson to William Cabell, 24 July 1807, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 295.87. Jefferson to General Samuel Smith, 30 July 1807, in ibid., 301.88. Jefferson to Dallas, 6 July 1807, in ibid., 258.

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The effect of this delay was decisive, as Senator Joseph Nicholson ofMaryland warned: “A parley will prove fatal” to firm action, “for the merchants[of the Northeast] will begin to calculate. They rule us, and we should take them[for the cause of war] before their resentment is superceded by considerationsof profit and loss.”89 Over time, passion for a violent response cooled not only89

in the Northeast, but in most of rest of the country as well. When Congressreconvened in late October it was clear that a declaration of war would beimpossible to attain, even when news reached the United States that theUnited Kingdom would not meet all its demands.90 As a compromise measure,90

Congress approved Jefferson’s recommended economic coercion instead bypassing the Embargo Act, which prohibited trade with European belligerents.

The immediacy of the Chesapeake crisis faded with time and peace was main-tained, but by 1809 a movement within the Republican party once again raisedthe specter of war with the United Kingdom. This movement occurred at atime when consensus was forming across the country that the Embargo Actof 1807 had failed to alter the British maritime policy on neutral trade andimpressment and could therefore not remain U.S. policy. The question, how-ever, was over which new direction American policy should take. It revealedthat the country was more bitterly divided on a regional basis than it hadbeen in 1807. Republican members of Congress from the Northwest and theSouth pressured President Jefferson to adopt tougher measures against theBritish. In January 1809, the Republican Congress passed the EnforcementAct, which greatly enhanced the president’s authority to enforce compliancewith the embargo against European trade. These Republicans were not theonly ones dismayed by the embargo or calling for its repeal; it was also underfire from northeasterners who were adamantly opposed to any more forcefulmeasures meant to coerce the British. The American embargo was the catalystfor severe economic contraction in the Northeast, a surge in popular protest,and organized regional opposition.91 While the Republicans maintained a ma-91

jority in both the Senate and the House, the loyalty of northeastern members

89. Adams, History of the United States, 949.90. Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812 (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1961), 149; Malone, Jefferson the President, 460–67; and JohnQuincy Adams to John Adams, 27 December 1807, in Writings of John Quincy Adams, vol. 3,ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 167–68.

91. Leonard D. White, “The Embargo,” in Perkins, Causes of the War of 1812, 35; and AlbertZ. Carr, The Coming of War: An Account of the Remarkable Events Leading to the War of 1812 (GardenCity: Doubleday, 1960), 252–53. An important indicator of opposition in the Northeast is thechange in the electoral strength of the Federalist and Republican parties during the elections of1808. Republican identification with the embargo and a war movement dealt an “almost fatalblow” to the Republican parties of New England as the Federalist party reestablished its controlthere and expanded its institutional base in other parts of the Northeast. Roger H. Brown, TheRepublic in Peril: 1812 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 140–45; Hickey, War of

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to the president’s program was questionable; they could not stray too far fromnortheastern sentiment against war without paying an electoral price.92

92

After the Enforcement Act was passed in January 1809, northeastern out-rage became overwhelming. If such opposition was generated by commercialpolicy alone, it was clear that any move toward war would be internally explo-sive. A leader of New England Republicans, Ezekiel Bacon, confronted hisnorthwestern and southern colleagues with the argument that the rights ofcommerce could be resurrected only by dropping the embargo that had doneso much damage to the northern economy. “Our Southern friends . . . now tellus . . . that they are willing to support our commercial rights by the presentSystem [embargo] or by War as we shall think best, but . . . I am satisfied thatNew England will not bear the Embargo . . . [or] War, the other parts of theUnion will support their commercial rights in no other Way, because they saythe Nation can do nothing short of it honorably. The Result, in my opinion,is that the rights of Commerce will be abandoned by the Nation.”93 Jefferson 93

himself declared, “I felt the foundations of the government shaken under myfeet by the New England townships.”94

94

In January 1809, as James Madison prepared to assume the presidency inMarch, he let his intended policy be known to his Republican party support-ers. He wanted to maintain the embargo until June, call a new congressionalsession for 22 May, and declare war unless the United Kingdom made conces-sions in its maritime policies.95 In the face of the rising tide of violent protest 95

in New England and the election results from the previous fall, however, Re-publicans from the Northeast could not support either the administration’sdesire for a continuation of economic coercion or the call for war to force theBritish hand. The Enforcement Act was the catalyst for a split in the Repub-lican party along regional lines and for a solidifying coalition of northeasternRepublicans and Federalists who were demanding relief from the embargo byJune. The initiative to declare war on the United Kingdom produced the sameregional division, and on 5 February 1809, the House rejected a resolutionsupporting war by a vote of 76 to 40. More than half the Republicans, most

1812: A Forgotten Conflict, 101; and J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfarein the Early American Republic, 1783–1830 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 485.

92. Federalist John Quincy Adams actually paid the ultimate political price for supporting theembargo. Adams resigned his Senate seat in June 1808 after both houses of the Massachusettslegislature passed resolutions condemning his role in its passage. Adams to the HonorableSenate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 8 June 1808, inWritings of John Quincy Adams, 237–38.

93. Perkins, Prologue to War, 227–28.94. Carr, Coming of War, 259–60.95. Adams, History of the United States, 1224.

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from New England and Pennsylvania, joined the Federalists in this vote. Anumber of Republicans from outside the Northeast recognized regional di-visions as the ultimate impediment: “Look at the sensation in New Englandand New York,” exclaimed David Williams of South Carolina, “and talk aboutgoing to war when you cannot maintain an embargo!”96 Jefferson, too, made96

this observation: “I thought Congress had taken their ground firmly for con-tinuing their embargo till June, and then war. But a sudden and unaccountablerevolution of opinion took place the last week, chiefly among the New Eng-land and New York members. . . . [T]hey voted . . . for removing the embargo,and by such a majority as gave all reason to believe they would not agree eitherto war or non-intercourse.”97 A desperate Republican caucus failed to come up97

with a new policy that demonstrated real resolve to defend America’s honoragainst British pressure. In March, just three days before the end of Jefferson’sterm, Congress passed the Non-Intercourse Act, a measure acceptable to theNortheast only because it could not be enforced.98

98

In contrast to the crises of 1807 and 1809, in 1812 President Madisonrequested a declaration of war, which the so-called War Hawk Congress ap-proved by votes of 79 to 49 in the House and 19 to 13 in the Senate. Althoughthe political dynamics of federal union did not prevent war in this case, itis important to note that the United States did not march resolutely to war.The same regional and institutional divisions that defeated war moves in 1807and 1809 were part of this crisis, too. In fact, when considering the courseof domestic events leading up to this decision, it is amazing that the vote onwar took place at all. The key difference in 1812 was a dramatic increase inthe intensity with which the proponents of war, all of whom represented theNorthwest and the South, pushed this policy option. Their intensity in fa-vor of war easily matched the determination of northeasterners to prevent it.What really drove them to demand an increasingly forceful response was howBritish pressure affected the economic and security interests of their regionalconstituents.99 In addition, the leaders of this movement—the War Hawks99

96. Ibid., 1217; and Perkins, Prologue to War, 181–82, 228.97. Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, 7 February 1809, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson,

248.98. The Non-Intercourse Act required American ships to avoid calls in British or French-

controlled ports. Ship captains could declare their intentions to comply with the act beforesailing, yet once clear of American ports they could sail unhindered to any destination.

99. Northwesterners and southerners were most concerned for the commercial interests oftheir regions, which depended on maintaining access to European markets. The Northwest hadsuffered through two severe economic depressions in the preceding years that were blamed onBritish restrictions. The South, too, was hit hard by the depression of 1811–12. Additionally,northwesterners were outraged by British support for the confederation of Native Americantribes along America’s northwestern frontier that was seen as a grave threat to settlers in the

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representing the Northwest and the South—managed to assume importantleadership positions, particularly in the House of Representatives, from whichthey were better equipped institutionally to push war legislation forward.

Still, it seems remarkable that the war bill was even introduced and voted onin the first place. For all the arguments made since 1812 that British affrontsto national honor, integrity, sovereignty, or interests demanded war from theUnited States, it is clear that this war was not inevitable. The federally di-vided American political system worked as intended by throwing up repeatedchallenges to consensus on bold action against the United Kingdom.100 The 100

constraining effects of federal union were not absent in this case, but theyposed an immense hurdle to those in the United States who insisted on war,and at several key points these institutional hurdles nearly derailed the WarHawks’ efforts. In fact, it is fair to argue that, at one point in the decision-making process, it was a historically contingent quirk that tipped the balancetoward those favoring war. What worked in the War Hawks’ favor was that,even if every senator and representative from the Northeast had cast a voteagainst the war, this region would not have had enough votes to prevent pas-sage of the war bill over the affirmative votes from the rest of the union. Inother words, a purely regional vote in Congress by representatives concen-trated in the Northeast would not have constrained the use of military forcein this case. This outcome assumed that the members of the Republican party,dominant in the rest of the country, could actually agree on a set of policy mea-sures that would move the country in a more violent direction. In the spring of1812, however, this level of consensus was elusive. In fact, the opportunity tovote on war was nearly lost amid confusion within the Republican party, as thedecentralized federal nature of the Party provided space for a diverse range ofviews on foreign policy to flourish among a diverse group of legislators. This in

region. George R. Taylor, “Depression Stirs Western War Spirit,” in Perkins, The Causes of theWar of 1812, 74; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, 165, 176, 224; Perkins, Prologue to War,283, 287; Margaret K. Latimer, “The South Also Feels the Depression,” in Perkins, The Causesof the War of 1812, 82; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, 181, 189; Morison and Commager, The Growth ofthe American Republic, 404; Carr, The Coming of War, 293, 297; Pratt, Expansionists of 1812, 42; andBrown, The Republic in Peril, 118.

100. The majority of senators and representatives from New York, New Jersey, Delaware,and Maryland voted against the war, while the vast majority of senators and representativesfrom New England joined them. Morison and Commager, The Growth of the American Republic,402. The Republican party was so divided that the Federalists did not actually take the possibilityof war seriously. As a result, the Federalists and northeastern Republican dissidents were slowto organize political resistance to War Hawk efforts. Brown, The Republic in Peril, 106; Perkins,Prologue to War, 396; and Samuel Eliot Morison, “Dissent in the War of 1812,” in Dissent in ThreeAmerican Wars, eds. Samuel Eliot Morison, Frederick Merk, and Frank Freidel (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1970), 5.

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turn promoted factionalism and prevented the Republicans from establishinga consistent policy.101

101

In March 1812 it was apparent that “if the President put the question of warto Congress, the administration would not get a majority,”102 and by April, war102

spirit in the Republican party was seriously flagging.103 According to Bradford103

Perkins, “From early April until the end of May the War Hawks fought a de-fensive battle against fear, second thoughts, weakness, and pressure of publicopinion.”104 On 10 April, the House approved in principle an early congres-104

sional recess by a vote of 72 to 40. Although a recess would allow members ofCongress to escape the confusion of war politics in Washington and feel outtheir constituents on the issue, it would also delay the vote on war. Had the votebeen delayed beyond 20 June, when the USS Hornet arrived with news that theUnited Kingdom had canceled its repressive maritime policies, it is likely thatthe United States would never have declared war on the British.105 Even with-105

out the contingent arrival of the Hornet, an early summer recess may have giventime for the war spirit to dampen, as in 1807. As many members of Congressprepared to return home during the pending recess, northwestern War Hawksstepped into the legislative morass to fight the delay on the war vote. This wasthe key move that kept America on track toward war. One week after the Househad voted overwhelmingly for an early recess, the issue was again brought to avote by the congressional leadership and a recess was defeated by eight votes.This reversal was possible only because a number of antiwar members ofCongress, believing that Congress would adjourn without further action, hadalready left Washington. Without these antiwar votes, Congress remained insession, the possibility of war opened once again, and any check on war was fur-ther weakened by the reduced number of antiwar Republicans. In the end, theintensity of commercial and security interests in the Northwest and the Southprovided the basis for the War Hawks to stir a majority from these regionsand even attract some Party loyalists in the Northeast, to support the war bill.

The next case involves America’s military adventurism in Spanish EastFlorida. Although the history of this episode is nearly forgotten, it is an im-portant case in which America pursued an opportunity to expand through theuse of military force.106 Between 1811 and 1813, the Madison administration106

101. Perkins, Prologue to War, 346.102. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, 100.103. Carr, The Coming of War, 316.104. Perkins, Prologue to War, 399.105. Ibid., 396–97.106. Virginia Peters, The Florida Wars (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1979), 18; and Joseph

Burkholder Smith, The Plot to Steal Florida: James Madison’s Phony War (New York: Arbor House,1983), 14. East Florida was that part of present-day Florida east of the Apalachicola River.

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conducted a covert operation to undermine Spanish authority in East Floridaand then assembled a large military force for an overt invasion to seize theprovince. For nearly a year, U.S. Army, Navy, and militia forces occupied largesections of East Florida while preparing for a final assault on St. Augustine,the capital of the Spanish colony. This was an effort driven by the executivebranch with considerable determination, and it did begin with congressionalauthorization to use force under specific conditions.107 In December 1812, all 107

American forces south of Virginia were ordered to assemble just north of theborder with Spanish territory.108 To the west, Andrew Jackson had assembled 108

a force of 2,070 volunteers from Tennessee and was planning to move eastfrom New Orleans to assist in the conquest of St. Augustine.109 Spain’s pitiful 109

forces were expected to fall easily during the American assault.This bold expansionist effort failed, but not because of skilled Spanish re-

sistance or inadequate American military force. This military initiative failedbecause of domestic politics—specifically, because of a clash of contend-ing regional interests within America’s federal democratic system. PresidentMadison and his southern supporters110 simply could not overcome the com- 110

bined Republican and Federalist party opposition from northerners inCongress who refused to sanction this effort to seize East Florida throughmilitary means. The specific institutional constraint in this case came fromthe Senate, which ultimately forced the administration to withdraw from theregion in 1813 and forgo forcible annexation. Interestingly, the Republicanparty had a Senate majority of 30 to 6 in the Twelfth Congress. Any legislative

107. On 15 January 1811, Congress authorized the president to seize and occupy Floridaeast of the Perdido River if a foreign power was about to take possession of the province orif the government of East Florida or any “local authority” should voluntarily “surrender” theprovince to the United States. Pratt, Expansionists of 1812, 68–80, 133; Rembert W. Patrick, FloridaFiasco: Rampant Rebels on the Georgia-Florida Border, 1810–1815 (Athens: University of GeorgiaPress, 1954), 4; and Smith, The Plot to Steal Florida, 117–18.

108. In his instructions, Secretary of State James Monroe explained that the “force . . . is tobe embodied . . . for offensive operations, preparation to the entire possession of the Provinceof East Florida.” Quoted in Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 223.

109. Ibid., 220–23, 241–47; and Pratt, Expansionists of 1812, 221–26.110. Meinig pointed out that “real pressure against Florida for American annexation was

generated and sustained not so much as a national response to British machinations, the possibledisintegration of the Spanish Empire, or larger geopolitical considerations, as from those whowanted to control, crush, even utterly destroy some specific peoples of Florida who wereconsidered to pose a danger to immediate regional interests. The real pressure . . . came directlyout of the frontiers and plantations of Georgia and Tennessee.” One group that caused greatanxiety among southerners was the large population of free blacks, many of them runawayslaves from America, living in East Florida. The Seminole Indians and other Native Americantribes living in Spanish Florida were also considered a danger to the American population in theborder region. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History,vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 31; Smith, The Plot to Steal Florida, 15–16, 265;and Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 31.

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constraint on the Republican president’s actions depended on the defectionof nearly half of the Republican senators. In two major votes on East Florida,this is exactly what happened.

Madison was shocked when northern Republicans helped defeat a bill on3 July 1812, by a vote of 14 to 16, that would have provided Madison withthe legal grounds for continuing to hold much of East Florida with the forcesthen in the region and for mounting a final assault on St. Augustine. Whilemost northern members of Congress were willing to accept the accession ofEast Florida through peaceful means, or to seize it with military force if Spainattempted to turn it over to the British, a large majority of northerners believedthat the United States had no right simply to seize it absent these conditions.Although southerners decried the dangers of slave insurrection inspired byfree blacks in East Florida and cross-border raids by Native American tribes,they could not convince their northern colleagues that these problems consti-tuted a national interest demanding military action.111 Despite the absence of111

congressional approval, President Madison continued with preparations forthe assault after an explosion of outrage in Georgia in response to the Senatevote. Moving in tandem with these military preparations was another driveby administration supporters to gain congressional approval. Both Madisonand Secretary of State James Monroe were confident that they would receiveSenate approval in a second vote; since the defeat of the previous bill, whichlost by only two votes, Louisiana had become a state, adding two enthusiasticsouthern votes for annexation.112 To capitalize on this shift in the Senate, a112

bill was introduced on 19 January 1813 that authorized the president to takepossession of both West and East Florida. On 26 January, however, Republi-can Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland introduced an amendment to the billthat would eliminate authority for the East Florida portion of the operation.On 2 February 1813, for the second and final time, the Senate voted to denyMadison the authority to seize East Florida from Spain by approving Smith’samendment, 19 to 16. The vote on the amendment reflected a clear regionaldivision between North and South; this vote split the Republican party onregional lines, with most northern Republicans again forging a coalition withnortheastern Federalists. Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, New York,

111. The Republican delegations from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee,and Ohio unanimously supported the administration on occupation. The Republican delega-tions from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland joined theFederalist delegations from Connecticut and Delaware to vote unanimously against the occu-pation. One Republican senator each from the Vermont, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Virginiadelegations voted against the occupation. Pratt, Expansionists of 1812, 150–52; and Patrick, FloridaFiasco, 147–50.

112. Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 248.

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New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland voted solidly to constrain Madison,while North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana votedsolidly to support the adventure. In all, 11 of the 16 Republicans from northof the Potomac and Ohio Rivers voted against aggressive expansion.113 Fol- 113

lowing this second vote, Madison ended this military operation by orderingthe withdrawal of all U.S. forces.

The next case involves another conflict between the United States and theUnited Kingdom, this time over possession of the Oregon Territory in 1845–46. For nearly three decades the United States and the United Kingdom hadmanaged to avoid such a conflict and to accommodate their mutual claimsin the region through a joint occupation agreement.114 Despite the successful 114

record of shared occupation, by the 1840s domestic pressure was buildingfor the United States to establish sovereign control over some portion ofOregon. Extreme expansionists, concentrated in northwestern states, weredemanding “All Oregon,” from 42 degrees north latitude to the border withRussian Alaska, which would have eliminated the British presence on thePacific coast. President James Knox Polk prodded the British governmentthrough diplomatic brinkmanship in an effort to force settlement on Americanterms.115 The United Kingdom, however, was determined not to back down 115

in response to America’s provocative approach to the problem. Neither sidewanted a war to resolve the Oregon problem, yet at the height of the crisisboth parties stood firm on irreconcilable claims that only war or capitulationcould resolve.116 Despite the intensity of the crisis in early 1846 and the serious 116

risk of war, war was not the outcome. Although the United Kingdom tookthe initiative by proposing the treaty terms that the United States eventuallyaccepted, this was made possible only when the United States backtracked fromthe extreme territorial demands that had produced the crisis in the first place.

Why did the United States accept a compromise resolution to the crisis afterpushing the dispute to the brink of war? Previous democratic peace studies

113. Pratt, Expansionists of 1812, 229; and Patrick, Florida Fiasco, 250–54.114. Frederick Merk, The Oregon Question (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 10–

31.115. James K. Polk, “Inaugural Address,” 4 March 1845, in James K. Polk: Chronology-Documents-

Bibliographical Aids, ed. John J. Farrell (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 1970), 33; and James Buchanan,“The Historic American Interest in Oregon,” in Manifest Destiny, ed. Norman A. Graebner(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

116. Norman A. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion(Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1983), 104; David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas,Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 324–26; H. GeorgeClassen, Thrust and Counterthrust: The Genesis of the Canada–United States Boundary (Chicago: RandMcNally, 1965), 190; and Paul Varg, United States Foreign Relations, 1820–1860 (East Lansing:Michigan State University Press, 1979), 160.

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of this case provide starkly different explanations. John Owen argued that theUnited States and the United Kingdom remained at peace because a peacecoalition in Congress, motivated by the perception of the United Kingdom asa fellow liberal state, forced President Polk to accept a compromise.117 Stephen117

Rock, from a realist perspective, argued that Polk made the prudent strate-gic calculation that the benefits of the Oregon territory did not justify thecosts of war, particularly as war with Mexico seemed likely.118 Neither of these118

arguments, however, provides an adequate explanation or accounts for theimportance of the federal dimensions of the domestic politics of this case. Atno time did President Polk himself decide that the external dimensions of thedispute made it prudent for him to back down; Polk never flinched in his AllOregon claim. Polk’s political commitment to the Democratic party platform,which called for All Oregon, and the demands of his benefactors in north-western states kept him faithful to this objective.119 Furthermore, although119

Polk had no desire to precipitate war, his policy throughout was to bring theproblem to the point of true crisis, to generate fears of war that would force theBritish to meet America’s demand for All Oregon.120 When the crisis reached120

its most dangerous point, Polk acknowledged that war was clearly a possibility,

117. Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War.118. Rock, “Anglo-U.S. Relations, 1845–1930.”119. Polk knew that northwestern Democrats had been indispensable in his nomination for

the Democratic ticket and his presidential victory, and they had pledged to support him on keyissues such as tariff reduction and the creation of an independent treasury. He simply couldnot desert this active wing of his party by giving in on Oregon. Early in the crisis Polk actuallybelieved that the greatest threat to his administration and his leadership of the Democratic partywould come from abandoning All Oregon. In his diary Polk recorded Secretary of State JamesBuchanan’s argument that the “greatest danger would be that I would be attacked for holdinga warlike tone” when nothing could justify a war for territory north of 49 degrees latitude.Polk replied that “my greatest danger was that I would be attacked for having . . . agreed tooffer the compromise of 49 degrees.” James K. Polk, 29 November 1845, The Diary of James K.Polk [hereinafter referred to as Polk Diary] (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 107. See also C.N. Paul, Rift in the Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951); Graebner,Empire on the Pacific, 143; Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun: Sectionalist, 1840–1850 (Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), 217; Merk, The Oregon Question, 231; and Varg, United States Foreign Relations,161.

120. In a letter to his brother he explained that the United Kingdom “for the last twocenturies never was known to do justice to any country with which she had a controversy whenthat country assumed a supplicatory attitude, or was on her knees before her. The only way totreat John Bull is to treat him firmly and look him straight in the eye.” Merk, Oregon Question,346. He used this same phrase to defend his policy with a member of Congress. See Polk Diary,4 January 1846, 155. In a meeting with Senator John Calhoun, Polk argued, “Until the questionreached a crisis there would be no prospect of our obtaining justice.” Ibid., 9 January 1846, 159.In another diary entry Polk criticized Secretary of State Buchanan for being “too timid and toofearful of War on the Oregon question,” and for being “most anxious to settle the questionby yielding and making greater concessions than I am willing to make.” In a later passage hecontinued, “I told him that I did not desire war, but that at all hazards we must maintain ourrights.” Ibid., 29 November 1845, 107–8, and 9 December 1845, 120.

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and America needed adequate military preparations in case the dispute did endin war. During what Polk described as a “grave discussion” on 23 December1845, the cabinet discussed the “contingency of War.” Polk concurred that the“country should be put in a state of defence without delay . . . if war came suchpreparation would be indispensable.” The secretaries of war and the navy weredirected to coordinate with the appropriate congressional committees to intro-duce the necessary defense appropriation bills.121 The next day Polk repeated 121

the urgency of increasing America’s readiness for war “without delay” to thechairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs: “For though I did notapprehend immediate war if it came at all, yet as we knew large preparations ofan extraordinary nature were making in England, it was the part of prudencethat we should be prepared for any contingency.”122 According to Secretary of 122

the Navy George Bancroft, whom Polk treated as a confidant, Polk seemedto have a fatalistic attitude about the prospects of war. “Either Great Britaindecides to live with us on friendlier terms or is animated by a disposition whichere long will lead to acts of hostility which would certainly lead to war. If wemust have war with Great Britain we may as well have it now as leave it to oursuccessor.”123 The British foreign minister, Lord Aberdeen, confirmed that the 123

United Kingdom was ready to wage war over Oregon if necessary. Althoughhe had worked throughout the crisis to bring it to a peaceful end, by January1846 he admitted to U.S. minister Louis McLane that the American positionmade his continued opposition in the cabinet to war preparations untenable.Thirty ships of the line were being prepared for possible deployment to NorthAmerica, along with steam ships, other war vessels, and military armaments.124

124

Despite his recognition of the risk of war, Polk simply took no actionwhatsoever to defuse the crisis on his own initiative. He ultimately did relentto a compromise resolution, but not because he was deterred by British poweror the possibility of war. What he was reacting to when he accepted the Britishtreaty terms were the internal dimensions of the crisis.125 The assertion that 125

121. Ibid., 23 December 1845, 133–34.122. Ibid., 24 December 1845, 143. See also his diary entries regarding his conversation with

Senator Cass and Vice-President Dallas on 19 January 1846, 181, and directions to the Secretaryof the Navy on 28 February 1846, 257–58. To give some muscle to this policy, Polk ordered thePacific naval squadron to move north from Mexican waters to Oregon and to provide Americansettlers with weapons. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 311.

123. Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, Jacksonian, 1795–1843 (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1957), 244.

124. Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation, 324–26; Merk, Oregon Question, 345; Classen, Thrustand Counterthrust, 190; Varg, United States Foreign Relations, 160; and Sellers, James K. Polk, 379–80.

125. Owen’s evidence certainly captures the fact that some political actors within theAmerican and British systems opposed war for normative reasons. Prominent liberals andliberal newspapers did speak out against war between these fellow liberal states. There is no

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America should annex a portion of the Oregon Territory was not in disputewithin the United States.126 What did create great political contests, however,126

were the rival claims within the United States about how much of the OregonTerritory the United States should pursue, and at what risk in its relations withthe United Kingdom. What we find in this case are rival calculations of thedistribution of power and the costs and benefits of war that competed forsupremacy within the institutional setting of American federalism. These rivalpower calculations were shaped by the diverse regional perspectives on theissue and the asymmetric geographic relationship of the Old Northwest, theNortheast, and the South to the military action that was expected from a warwith the United Kingdom.

Motivated by lingering suspicion of the United Kingdom and disgust withits imperial global reach, as well as a desire to deny it the benefits of the territory,northwestern Democrats were the most persistent and well-organized sourceof political support for the All Oregon position.127 The Whig party, primarily127

in New England, had strong interests in maintaining American influence inthe Pacific Northwest.128 For most Whigs, however, the potential agricultural128

value of the Oregon Territory was meaningless, while eastern Whigs simplydid not share the northwestern sense of a threat to American security.129 As129

in the Northeast, the commercial interests of the South, tied closely to Britishmanufacturing through cotton exports, led southern Democrats to concludethat a war with the United Kingdom over Oregon would offer nothing butdevastation. Many southern Democrats did not share the Northwest’s security

evidence, however, to suggest that normative affinity was the only motivation for oppositionto war, or even the dominant reason. In fact, opposition to war with the United Kingdom fromdifferent segments of the American political system emerged from a complex combination ofcommercial, political, realist, and normative concerns.

126. Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right(New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in AmericanHistory: A Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963); Thomas R. Hietala,Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1985); and William Earl Weeks, Building the Continental Empire (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,1996).

127. This region now included the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. SeeAlexander, Sectional Stress and Party Strength; Frederick Merk, “British Government Propagandaand the Oregon Treaty,” American Historical Review 40, no. 1 (October 1934): 38–62; and PaulH. Bergeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 113.Democratic member of Congress John McClernand of Illinois summed up the consensus amongnorthwesterners by arguing that All Oregon was nothing less than vital for “border safety” andthe “relative . . . influence, wealth, and power” of the United States. Quoted in Graebner, Empireon the Pacific, 36.

128. New Englanders dominated international trade with Asia and the Pacific whaling indus-try, each of which benefited immensely from port facilities on the West Coast. Varg, New Englandand Foreign Relations, 168.

129. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 214; and Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, 126.

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concerns, nor did they have any interest in Oregon’s agricultural prospects.130130

In calculating the costs of war, northwesterners emphasized what they thoughtto be serious domestic weaknesses within the United Kingdom, challenges itfaced in its empire, and challenges from other states. Northwesterners tendedto argue that these problems seriously undercut the United Kingdom’s abilityto project power against the United States.131 Few outside the Northwest held 131

such a confident view of America’s ability to confront the United Kingdom ina general war, even one confined to North America. The leading opponent ofthe northwestern view in the Democratic party was Senator John Calhoun ofSouth Carolina.132 In a letter to Secretary of State James Buchanan, Calhoun 132

suggested, “It is beyond the power of man to trace the consequences of warbetween the United States and England on the subject of Oregon. All thatis certain is, that she can take it and hold it against us, so long as she hasthe supremacy on the oceans and retains her Eastern dominions. The rest israpt in mystery.”133 Calhoun’s strongest support came from the Whigs of the 133

Northeast and Democrats from the South who had nothing to gain from awar for territory north of 49 degrees and who shared his perspective on thedevastating costs.134 While Cotton Democrats were committed expansionists 134

130. Eugene Irving McCormac, James K. Polk: A Political Biography (New York: Russell andRussell, 1922), 560; John Hope Franklin, “The Southern Expansionists of 1846,” Journal ofSouthern History 25, no. 3 (August 1959): 323–38.

131. Senators Allen of Ohio and Cass of Michigan, leaders in the All Oregon movement,“argued that Britain would not dare fight over Oregon. Surrounded by bitter rivals, threatenedby domestic convulsion, crippled by an unstable parliamentary system, exhausted by efforts tokeep 128 million colonists in subjection, they were helpless.” Merk, The Oregon Question, 380. Cassconcluded that All Oregon was worth the risk of war, because “we can be neither overrun norconquered. England might as well attempt to blow up Gibraltar with a squib [small firecracker],as to attempt to subdue us.” Willard Carl Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation (Kent:Kent State University Press, 1996), 152–53.

132. Calhoun had returned to the Senate mainly to take a leadership role against the threatof war brought on by Polk’s bellicose approach to the Oregon question. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun,217.

133. McCormac, James K. Polk, 574n37. In an “electrifying” speech to the Senate in March1846, Calhoun was more blunt in his opinion that war would be an unmitigated disaster.According to Calhoun’s biographer, he “painted a picture of the horror and cost of conflict overOregon that might well last for years only to end in so altering [America’s] form of governmentthat victory itself would be a defeat. The alternative was a picture of material progress throughincreased trade and current technologies in transportation and communication that wouldeventually put the United States in the dominant commercial position in both oceans.” Wiltse,John C. Calhoun, 260.

134. Merk, The Oregon Question, 224. Northeastern Whigs were outraged that northwesternerscould take the prospects of war so lightly when the coastal cities would suffer bombardmentand severe economic disruption. This view was expressed well by one New York merchantwho complained that war with the United Kingdom “will all do famously for the valley of theMississippi, where they have all to gain by a war and nothing to lose. But we on the seaboardmust fight all, pay all, and suffer all.” Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, 135, 130–34; and Varg,New England and Foreign Relations, 180.

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in their general approach to America’s future in North America, they comfort-ably aligned with the Whigs and Democrats from the Atlantic coast in theirassessment of the costs of war with the British.135

135

For this issue, as for many in America’s federal political system, regionalloyalties within the House and the Senate were the key to the persistent politicaldivisions that prevented unified political action on a bold and risky foreignpolicy. It was Congress that imposed restraints on Polk’s diplomacy and heldthe drift toward war in check. This constraint, however, was not simply aresult of the separation of powers between the executive and the legislature.Polk actually expected his party to rally around his risky diplomatic strategyto force a quick debate in Congress and approve his request to terminate thejoint occupation agreement.136 After all, Polk’s Democratic party controlled the136

Senate with a majority of 30 to 24 and the House with a majority of more than50.137 The legislative clash on the issue, however, consistently pit northwestern137

Democrats against the peace bloc of southern Democrats and eastern Whigs.138138

Polk was incensed that, despite his party’s control of both houses of Congress,the debate on Oregon had lasted for four months, with his partisans on thelosing end of every resolution. The struggle in the Senate finally came to anend on 16 April when the Senate approved a moderate version of a noticeterminating the joint occupation agreement with the United Kingdom by avote of 40 to 14. On 23 April, the House and Senate approved the jointresolution on Oregon that clearly asserted Congress’s conciliatory position.139

139

The Senate debate on the Oregon question had turned popular support awayfrom Polk’s position,140 while revealing a glaring rift in the Democratic party140

that, according to Polk’s diary, was an “irretrievable disaster.”141 It seemed to141

Polk as if the southern and northeastern Democrats were defecting from theParty in droves to join the Whig camp. Surveying his political position in early1846, Polk concluded he could no longer resist a compromise treaty.142

142

135. Merk, The Oregon Question, 372.136. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 318. Before the debate began in earnest, it appeared

that Democratic party loyalty in Congress might sustain the president in his confrontationalpolicy. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, 126.

137. The minority Whig party alone could not constrain Polk if the Democratic party stoodbehind its president. Alexander, Sectional Stress and Party Strength; and Silbey, The Shrine of Party.

138. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, 136–37; Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 320; Wiltse,John C. Calhoun, 251; and Merk, The Oregon Question, 224.

139. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, 261–62; Merk, The Oregon Question, 229, 387; and Pletcher, TheDiplomacy of Annexation, 350.

140. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 394.141. Ibid., 391.142. In an attempt to defend himself against charges of betrayal by his once-ardent supporters

from the Old Northwest, Polk argued in a letter to the governor of Tennessee that “the

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Although the Mexican-American War is typically treated as a single case indemocratic peace literature, this conflict can actually be divided into two sep-arate cases, each of which involved a separate decision on the use of force.143

143

Moreover, each case provides insight into the conditions that might under-mine the constraining effects of federal union. The first case involves PresidentPolk’s initiation of the crisis by deploying 3,700 troops in June 1845 into a dis-puted region between the Nueces River in southern Texas and the Rio Grande.This was a region that Mexico had repeatedly declared to be its sovereign ter-ritory and a vital interest for which it would fight.144 Most historians agree that 144

Polk did not intend to provoke a military conflict with this move, at least atthe outset. Although his objective was to intimidate Mexico into selling thisterritory to the United States, along with New Mexico and upper California,Polk realized that this was a highly provocative act that greatly increased therisk of war.145 The most important point is that the border skirmish between 145

American and Mexican troops that sparked the war would not have occurred ifPolk had not ordered the U.S. Army to advance to the Rio Grande. Yet as Polkincrementally deployed this force between June 1845 and April 1846, there wasno domestic effort to impose ex ante constraints on this confrontational policytoward Mexico. Polk was able to pursue his coercive diplomacy for nearly ayear, to move military forces and bring America to the brink of war, with hardlya stir from potential legislative opponents and with no action in Congress.

The absence of congressional opposition had nothing to do with consensuson Polk’s territorial goals, the means by which to attain them, or his initial con-cerns with the threat posed by Mexico to Texas.146 In fact, this issue produced 146

executive arm was greatly paralyzed on the Oregon question, by the delegates and proceedingsof Congress, especially in the Senate.” Quoted in Hietala, Manifest Design, 82.

143. As argued in Silverstone, Divided Union, this conflict actually offers a third case for exam-ining the constraining effects of federal democracy, namely, intrawar constraints on territorialwar aims.

144. Frederick Merk, The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism, 1843–1849 (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), chap. 6; Varg, United States Foreign Relations, 170; Seymour V. Connor andOdie B. Faulk, North America Divided: The Mexican War 1846–1848 (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1971), 27–28; John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 8; Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, 108;McCormac, James K. Polk, 373; Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 254, 289, 354–55; andMerk, “Dissent in the Mexican War,” 37.

145. McCormac, James K. Polk, 410–14. Polk fully anticipated a military skirmish like thatwhich eventually occurred and actually expressed surprise on several occasions that a collisionhad not occurred earlier while General Taylor’s army sat on the Rio Grande. Polk Diary, 5 May1846, 379, 6 May 1846, 380, 9 May 1846, 384.

146. Instead of fearing Mexico, most Americans in the government, in the press, and amongthe public, from both political parties, in the executive branch and the legislature, had little butdisdain for Mexican power. Varg, United States Foreign Relations, 170–71; Connor and Faulk, NorthAmerica Divided, chap. 1; Sam W. Haynes, James K. Polk and the Expansionist Impulse (New York:Longman, 1997), 144; and Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 257, 440–41.

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vigorous domestic opposition from Democrats and Whigs alike as Polk’s warobjectives became clear.147 At no time did Polk request congressional approval147

for this deployment, as he had before taking action in the Oregon case. Nordid any member of Congress initiate debate or a vote on this high-risk policy.Once war had begun, Polk’s Whig and Democratic opponents lamented theabsence of congressional action and the likelihood that Polk’s initiative wouldhave been defeated.148 The consensus among historians is that members of148

Congress, opinion leaders, newspapers, and the general public were simplydistracted by the concurrent crisis over the Oregon Territory and the possi-bility of war with the United Kingdom.149 Within a month of sending General149

Zachary Taylor across the Nueces, the president did consider calling Congressinto session to discuss the possibility of war with Mexico, but he was advisedby Senator Arthur Bagby of Alabama not to do so.150 When General Taylor’s150

force was on the move to the Rio Grande, Polk’s discussions with key membersof Congress about Mexico only covered his desire to purchase Mexican terri-tory. During the last week of March and the first week of April, the presidentconferred secretly with two members of the House and with Senators WilliamAllen, Thomas Hart Benton, Calhoun, and Lewis Cass about his desire for a$1 million appropriation to support his effort to buy this territory. Each mem-ber of Congress he spoke to agreed with the proposal. He did not, however,reveal his concurrent efforts to intimidate Mexico with the show of militaryforce then underway, nor did he reveal that the United States was entering a

147. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, 171; Varg, United States Foreign Relations, 184–85; andMerk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, 103.

148. The Whig view was that American occupation of the disputed southern territory “isnothing short . . . of an invasion of Mexico. It is offensive war, and not the necessary defense ofTexas.” Quoted in John Edward Weems, To Conquer a Peace: The War between the United States andMexico (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974), 71. See also Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in AmericanHistory, 103; Merk, “Dissent in the Mexican War,” 38, 49; Varg, United States Foreign Relations,185–86, 190; Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War, 32; Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 392, 458–59;Varg, New England and Foreign Relations, 186, 203; Polakoff, Political Parties in American History,chap. 5; and Kinley J. Brauer, Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and SouthwesternExpansion, 1843–1848 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967). Once Whigs gained amajority in the U.S. House after the elections of 1846, they were able to pass a resolution declaringthat Polk had begun the war “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally.” Weems, To Conquer a Peace,441. According to Democrat John Calhoun, “If it had been deliberately put to a vote whetherit was right to order General Taylor to the del Norte [Rio Grande], or for him to take a positionopposite Matamoros and plant his cannon against it . . . there would have been not a tenth ofCongress in the affirmative.” Ernest McPherson Lander, Jr., Reluctant Imperialists: Calhoun, theSouth Carolinians, and the Mexican War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 11;and Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, 279. Senator Thomas Hart Benton was furious when he read thewar message from Polk because Congress had never approved of sending General Taylor tothe Rio Grande. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 386–87.

149. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War, 10; and Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 363.150. Polk Diary, 1 September 1845, 12–13.

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period of dramatically higher risks of war with Mexico.151 Polk never broached 151

the prospects of war with Congress until he raised the subject cautiously withCalhoun and Benton just days before the border skirmish.

When it was too late to turn back events, Calhoun could only lament thatPolk’s failure to seek congressional approval for his policy “divested Congressof its war making powers and transferred that to the president, and evento commanders on the frontier.” Calhoun saw this as a “critical weaknessin the system of checks and balances. The president had demonstrated hisalmost unrestrained power, independent of Congress, to involve the nationin war. American troops had been maneuvered into a position along the RioGrande which virtually guaranteed Mexican reprisal.”152 In this case Congress 152

simply did not have the kind of information necessary to foresee the potentialconsequences of American policy, which made it unlikely that Congress wouldhave taken the initiative to interpose itself in the evolving dispute early enoughto make a difference in the direction the dispute was taking. This providedthe executive with tremendous latitude for engineering a volatile crisis and thearmed clash that resulted.

The second case in this Mexican-American conflict was the actual vote inCongress on Polk’s war bill once an armed clash did occur. This bill, presentedin a war message on 11 May 1846, asked Congress to recognize that a state ofwar existed by an act of Mexico and to authorize money to support Americantroops with reinforcements and supplies. Like the Oregon crisis, the questionof war with Mexico produced strong partisan and regional opposition. Notonly did Whigs oppose war for normative reasons, the majority Democratssplit mainly along regional lines as well. Calhoun Democrats from the states ofSouth Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Florida, strong states-rights advocates,opposed the war on constitutional grounds.153 They also opposed the war on 153

economic grounds, fearing that the expenses of war would require an increasein tariffs, which the Calhoun Democrats saw as devastating for plantationagriculture.154 Van Buren Democrats, concentrated in the northern states of 154

New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, saw the war as Polk’s personal blunder, anexplosive policy that would inevitably raise the thorny problems of territorialexpansion and slavery, a politically deadly mix for Democratic party unity.155

155

Despite such widespread and strongly held opposition to war with Mexico,which clearly provided enough votes to reject Polk’s war bill when it came

151. Polk Diary, 25, 28, 29, 30, and 31 March 1846 and 3 April 1846, 303, 306, 309–17.152. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War, 24.153. It was the result, these Democrats argued, of an abuse of executive power. Wiltse, John

C. Calhoun, 281.154. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, 182.155. Ibid., 180; and Varg, United States Foreign Relations, 191.

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to a vote in Congress, the bill passed by overwhelming margins. With fewexceptions, nearly every Whig and every Democrat voted with the president’ssupporters to approve the war bill.156 How is it possible that with the legislative156

strength to impose an ex ante constraint on the president, the opponentsof war failed to realize this potential? What circumstances undermined theinstitutional incentives of the federal system and led these opponents of warto vote to carry the war forward?

The answer lies in how the president manipulated the policy choice beforeCongress, and thus manipulated the political risk faced by the opponents ofwar. These political risks ultimately trumped the normative, commercial, andconstitutional reasons for opposing the president’s aggressive policy. First,Polk never asked Congress to declare war on Mexico. Polk simply wantedCongress to recognize that the United States and Mexico were already at war“by the act of Mexico herself.”157 Second, the main purpose of the legislation157

was not to give Polk the authority to go to war, but to provide support for Gen-eral Taylor’s beleaguered army.158 A vote against the war bill could be portrayed158

by the president and by administration Democrats in Congress as a vote todeny General Taylor the critical support he needed. Despite strong and unan-imous opposition to war, the vast majority of House and Senate Whigs werepolitically paralyzed by the fear that voting against Polk’s war bill would not beseen by the public as a valiant act of liberal conscience or wisdom to restrain anaggressive president’s foreign policy. It would be seen as an act of disloyalty toAmerican soldiers engaged on a distant battlefield, and in turn, an unpatrioticstand against the United States itself.159 Dissident Democrats faced the same159

fear of electoral retribution if they failed to support American troops.160160

The next case involves another territorial dispute with Mexico, this timein 1853 over what was known as the Mesilla Valley, a strip of land alongthe Mexico–New Mexico border. The origins of this crisis lie in the Treaty

156. The House of Representatives approved the war bill by a vote of 174 to 14; the Senateapproved it by a vote of 40 to 2. The only negative votes in the House and Senate came fromnortheastern abolitionists. In the Senate, Calhoun and two of his supporters refused to vote.Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 386–87; and Merk, “Dissent in the Mexican War,” 39–40.

157. James K. Polk, “Message to Congress on War with Mexico, May 11, 1846,” in Farrell,James K. Polk, 51–52. See also Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, 281; Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War, 11–13; andPletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation, 386–87.

158. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War, 13.159. The Whigs’ dilemma was compounded by the memory of what had happened to the

Federalist party after the War of 1812. Federalists had been tarred by Republicans with chargesof disloyalty and they had quickly faded away as a viable political party. Ibid., 13–15; Merk,Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, 90–91, 94–95; Brauer, Cotton versus Conscience, 171;Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War, 29; Merk, “Dissent in the Mexican War,” 45; and Lander, ReluctantImperialists, 10.

160. The Van Buren Democrats of the Northeast saw their vote as a touchstone for theirfuture relevance in American politics and in the Democratic party. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War,21–22; Merk, “Dissent in the Mexican War,” 45; and Varg, United States Foreign Relations, 191.

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of Guadeloupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848. Anerror in the map used by the treaty negotiators to describe the new borderbetween the United States and Mexico had placed the town of El Paso, a criticallandmark for the boundary line, 34 miles too far north and more than 100 milestoo far east. When the error was discovered, the United States demanded thatthe border reflect the proper location of El Paso, thereby giving the UnitedStates control of 6,000 additional square miles of territory. Many in the UnitedStates considered the Mesilla Valley vital for American security and economicdevelopment.161 The Mexican government argued that, despite the map error, 161

the treaty negotiators meant for the Mesilla Valley to remain Mexican territory.For Mexico, defending this territory against American encroachment was amatter of national honor, particularly after having so recently lost so muchterritory to the United States. The initiative to militarize the dispute camefrom Governor William Lane of New Mexico. Reacting to a petition fromAmericans living in the Mesilla Valley, pressure from New Mexico’s territorialdelegates to Congress to occupy the region with force, congressional sentimentin favor of U.S. possession of the valley, and an ongoing effort by Mexico toexercise authority in the region itself, Governor Lane issued a provocativeproclamation asserting America’s ownership of the region then prepared amilitary force to occupy it.162 This dispute resulted in such a dangerous level 162

of militarization that a second Mexican-American war appeared imminent.163163

Events in the region had progressed to a point at which Democratic presi-dent Franklin Pierce was compelled to decide whether or not he would sanction

161. It was seen as an important southerly route for a transcontinental railroad to link theeastern United States with its new possessions in the Southwest and on the Pacific coast. Arailroad here would allow the rapid movement of troops to defend this territory, it was necessaryto protect the emigrant trails, and it would provide rapid and reliable mail delivery and facilitatecommerce. Many argued that without a rail link to bind California to the rest of the union,this great state would drift in its political loyalties and eventually seek independence. Paul NeffGarber, The Gadsden Treaty (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1959), 23; and Robert R. Russel, “ThePacific Railway Issue in Politics Prior to the Civil War,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 12,no. 2 (September 1925): 189–90.

162. On orders from Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Governor DonAngel Trias of Chihuahua assembled troops and supplies and marched nearly a thousandmen to the disputed region by the end of April 1853. The Mexican government instructed itsdiplomats abroad to secure aid from England, France, and Spain for the effort to “restrainthe ambitious designs of the United States.” On the American side, the Pierce administrationordered a significant increase in military preparations on the southwestern frontier. Connor andFaulk, North America Divided, 119, 176–78; J. Fred Rippy, The United States and Mexico (New York:F. S. Crofts, 1971), 121, 116, 123, 145–46; Garber, The Gadsden Treaty, 72–73; George Griggs,History of Mesilla Valley, or the Gadsden Purchase (Las Cruces: Bronson Printing, 1930), 30; andCalvin Horn, New Mexico’s Troubled Years: The Story of the Early Territorial Governors (Albuquerque:Horn and Wallace, 1963), 47.

163. Odie B. Faulk, Too Far North . . . Too Far South (Los Angeles: Westernlore, 1967), 75; andGarber, The Gadsden Treaty, 22.

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the use of military force to resolve the dispute in America’s favor. Given theinterests at stake here, which Pierce accepted, the president’s firm support forGovernor Lane’s contention that the Mesilla Valley belonged to the UnitedStates, and the militant expansionist character of his administration (in hisinaugural address, President Pierce had declared that he would not accept anytimidity in the expansionist dimensions of American foreign policy), we mightexpect that Pierce would have used military force to guarantee American pos-session of the valley.164 Moreover, the Pierce administration had little to no164

faith that diplomacy could resolve the issue in America’s favor.165 It is also165

clear that, although President Pierce saw Mexico’s military response to thecrisis as sufficient to exercise its authority in the Mesilla Valley in the absenceof U.S. opposition, he also believed that, in the face of the power Americacould deploy to the region, Mexico could offer little more than a hollow showof force.166 Furthermore, despite Mexico’s appeal for European assistance,166

France and the United Kingdom had no interest in becoming embroiled in awar in North America as the Crimean crisis developed in the east. Pierce couldhave guaranteed American possession of the territory with military force atlittle cost relative to the great benefits at stake, and military force offered amuch more certain outcome than diplomacy.

Despite all of the conditions that lend credence to the military option,President Pierce refused to sanction the use of force in any way to secure theMesilla Valley for the United States. In fact, Governor Lane was removed fromoffice and the new governor of New Mexico was instructed to “abstain fromtaking forcible possession of the tract, even if on your arrival in New Mexicoyou find it held adversely to the claim of the United States by Mexico.”167

167

In essence, the Pierce administration was so insistent on avoiding militaryconflict that it would overlook Mexican occupation of this American territory.

164. Roy Franklin Nichols, Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia: Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), 266; Secretary of State William Marcy to Alfred Conkling,United States Minister to Mexico, 18 May 1853, in Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States:Inter-American Affairs, 1831–1860, ed. William R. Manning (Washington: Carnegie Endowmentfor International Peace,1937), 131–32; Larry Gara, The Presidency of Franklin Pierce (Lawrence:University Press of Kansas, 1991), 44, 70; and Ivor Spencer, The Victor and the Spoils: A Life ofWilliam L. Marcy (Providence: Brown University Press, 1959), 256.

165. In a letter to James Gadsden, the U.S. minister in Mexico, Marcy downplayed the chancesof diplomatic success. Marcy admitted that the “questions now pending between the twocountries [are] of grave importance and conceded difficulty; and it is apprehended that you willfind the government and people of Mexico not favorably disposed to fair adjustment of them.The hostile feelings engendered by the late war with Mexico, embittered by the severe woundsinflicted on her national pride, have not wholly subsided; and it is feared that the degree ofirritation yet remaining will embarrass our negotiations with her.” Marcy to Gadsden, 15 July1853, in Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence, 134.

166. Rippy, The United States and Mexico, 105, 127; and Griggs, History of the Mesilla Valley, 44.167. Rippy, The United States and Mexico, 119–20. Similarly, the military commander of

New Mexico was ordered to “avoid, as far as you consistently can, any collision with thetroops or civil authority of the Republic of Mexico or the State of Chihuahua.”

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The president made an independent decision to de-escalate the crisis; he neverrequested congressional approval to support the New Mexico governor withmilitary force, nor did Congress intervene on its own initiative to block the useof force. In short, the evidence in this case indicates two domestic factors thatcompelled Pierce to exercise self-restraint: (1) his overriding concern aboutlatent domestic opposition that he believed would be activated if he initiatedcongressional action on this issue, and (2) the fear that the use of force wouldjeopardize the Democrats’ hold on Congress and the White House in the nextelections. In other words, he faced the double-barreled institutional risk ofboth long-term debilitating political penalties against his own political futureand his party’s, and the more immediate likelihood that Congress would refuseto sanction armed conflict. Most important, his calculations of the politicalconsequences of war in this case were rooted in federal asymmetry over thequestion of using military force to secure additional Mexican territory.168

168

Despite the large majorities the president’s Democratic party enjoyed inboth the Senate and the House in 1853, this was a period in which partyloyalty was progressively loosened by the slavery debate.169 Pierce knew that 169

any effort to seize the Mesilla Valley with force would be perceived by northernmembers of Congress as a policy oriented explicitly toward southern interests.The prospects of another war with Mexico would surely split the Whigs and themajority Democrats along North-South lines, just as the debate over expansioninto Mexico had from 1846 to 1848. Although there was no direct link toslavery in the Mesilla Valley dispute, a second war fought to take territoryfrom Mexico could not escape this earlier context. It was clear to Piercethat a coalition of northern representatives and senators, which would benumerically larger than a similar coalition of southerners,170 would stand united 170

168. Although we do not have direct textual evidence on exactly what Pierce himself wasthinking when he ordered U.S. officials to avoid a clash with Mexico, all historians of this incidentand Pierce’s biographers agree that this decision was based on his belief that a move toward warwould produce intense regional divisions. These divisions would in turn prevent congressionalsupport for war and posed a serious political danger to both Pierce and his party. Rippy, UnitedStates and Mexico, 127; Nichols, Franklin Pierce, 300; Roy Franklin Nichols, The Democratic Machine,1850–1854 (New York: Columbia University, 1923), chap. 1; Gara, Presidency of Franklin Pierce,79; Faulk, Too Far North, 124; Odie B. Faulk, Land of Many Frontiers: A History of the AmericanSouthwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 55; and Odie B. Faulk, Destiny Road:The Gila Trail and the Opening of the Southwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 50.Nichols noted that Pierce destroyed his personal papers from the presidency and all WhiteHouse correspondence has disappeared. The papers of his cabinet officers and departmentalfiles provide the best information on decision making in his administration. Nichols, FranklinPierce, 547. Also see Gara, Presidency of Franklin Pierce, 201.

169. Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge: LouisianaState University Press, 1953); and Silbey, The Shrine of Party, 135.

170. Of the 38 Democratic senators in 1853, 22 were from free states, and 16 from slavestates. In the House, the Democrats had 85 representatives from the North compared to 60

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against the use of force in this instance. The president was also held in checkby the fear that, if he took the United States to war, the Democratic partywould suffer in the next congressional elections and would probably lose theWhite House in 1856. Electoral accountability had a strong ex ante effect onPierce’s decision making because of the electoral costs the Democrats had paidso recently in the past, after the Mexican-American War. In the presidentialelection of 1848, the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, was defeated by hisWhig opponent, Zachary Taylor, a loss the Democrats blamed purely on thesectional divisions within the Party caused by the war with Mexico and thedebate over territorial expansion and slavery.171 President Pierce was certain171

that another war with Mexico would have the same effects, and this was anoutcome he was determined to avoid. The use of military force in the MesillaValley dispute was a political loser in the short term and would impose long-term political costs that Pierce was unwilling to pay.172

172

The early 1850s was also a period of serious agitation in U.S.-Spanish relationsover Spain’s colony of Cuba. This period was notable for specific crisis pointsthat may have been used by the United States as pretexts for taking militaryaction to advance its long-standing interests in Cuba.173 Upon entering office,173

President Pierce had declared that attaining Cuba would be the administration’snumber one foreign policy priority. His cabinet and diplomatic corps fullysupported this goal and the use of American power to achieve it.174 A crisis was174

touched off in February 1854 when Cuban officials seized an American ship

from the South. Overall in the House, northern representatives had a majority of 146 to 88from the South. Overall in the Senate, northern states sent 34 senators to Washington, whilesouthern states sent 28. Kenneth C. Martis, The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the UnitedStates Congress, 1789–1989 (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 106–7.

171. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 50–51. On Pierce’s sensitivity to the electorallessons of 1848, see Gara, Presidency of Franklin Pierce, 79; and Faulk, Destiny Road, 50. On hiscommitment to avoiding divisive regional issues see Nichols, Franklin Pierce, 299–300; Nichols,The Democratic Machine; and Gara, Presidency of Franklin Pierce, 21–35.

172. Rippy, The United States and Mexico, 127; Faulk, Too Far North, 124; and Connor andFaulk, North America Divided, 178. The United States eventually was able to gain control ofthe Mesilla Valley through the Gadsden Treaty, defying the earlier negative expectations of thePierce administration.

173. The strategic position of Cuba, its commercial value, and the problems created by itsinternal social structure made the island a perpetual source of anxiety to the United States as longas it remained in foreign hands. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (EnglewoodCliffs: Prentice Hall, 1980), 286; Merk, The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansion, 235; andSidney Webster, “Mr. Marcy, The Cuban Question, and the Ostend Manifesto,” Political ScienceQuarterly 8, no. 1 (March 1893): 1.

174. Gara, Presidency of Franklin Pierce, 79, 127; M. E. Curti, “Young America,” AmericanHistorical Review 32, no. 1 (October 1926): 34–55; J. Preston Moore, “Pierre Soule: SouthernExpansionist and Promoter,” Journal of Southern History 21, no. 2 (May 1955); 203–23; and Meinig,The Shaping of America, 157.

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in Havana harbor.175 Southern imperialists hungry for Cuba, moderates in the 175

Democratic party, and the general public treated this as a grave insult that couldnot go unanswered.176 As it became clear that the Spanish government would 176

not acknowledge any wrongdoing on the part of its officials in Havana,177177

militants in the cabinet, in Congress, and among the press fanned the demandfor some form of retaliatory action.178 With time, a general war spirit swept 178

the Pierce administration.179 Tensions increased in early 1855 when a Spanish 179

frigate fired on an American merchant ship and the press carried reportsthat the U.S. vice-consul in Cuba had been arrested for conspiring with Cubanrevolutionaries.180 In response, Pierce directed “that as many of our ships of war 180

as could be made available should be ordered to rendezvous near Havana.”181181

In addition to these specific incidents, a deeper sense of urgency over thefuture of Cuba was compelled by the “Africanization scare” of 1854–55, aperiod in Cuba marked by reforms meant to prepare for full emancipation ofthe island’s slave population.182 Yet by the summer of 1855 the president had 182

fully rejected the use of force to achieve annexation or to punish Spain forharassing American ships.

One explanation we can discount for this decision is that the Pierce admin-istration was deterred by the expected costs of military conflict with Spain orby the possibility of British or French intervention against the United States.The widespread belief was that Cuba was so weakly defended that an Americanforce would encounter little resistance.183 The United Kingdom and France 183

were already fighting Russia in the Crimea, so American decision makers were

175. For a detailed account of the incident see Henry Lorenzo Janes, “The Black WarriorAffair,” American Historical Review 12, no. 2 (January 1907): 280–98.

176. Nichols, Franklin Pierce, 327; Binder, James Buchanan and the American Empire (Selinsgrove:Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 203; and Webster, “Mr. Marcy, the Cuban Question, andthe Ostend Manifesto,” 11–12.

177. Webster, “Mr. Marcy, the Cuban Question, and the Ostend Manifesto,” 16–17.178. Ibid., 25–26; and Janes, “The Black Warrior Affair,” 294.179. James Callahan, Cuba and International Relations: A Historical Study in American Diplomacy

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1899), 274, 277; and Janes, “The Black WarriorAffair,” 291. In October 1854, U.S. ministers to Spain, the United Kingdom, and France produceda report that provided the strongest argument yet in support of military action to seize Cubafrom Spain. James Buchanan, Pierre Soule, and James Mason, “Ostend Manifesto,” 18 October1854, in Graebner, Manifest Destiny, 287–93.

180. Spencer, The Victor and the Spoils, 322; and Nichols, Franklin Pierce, 394.181. Webster, “Mr. Marcy, the Cuban Question, and the Ostend Manifesto,” 26–28.182. C. Stanley Urban, “The Africanization of Cuba Scare, 1853–1855,” Hispanic American

Historical Review 37, no. 1 (February 1957): 29–38; and Callahan, Cuba and International Relations,274.

183. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific, 245–46. In 1854 and 1855 the Spanish governmentwas paralyzed by internal revolt and financial distress, and it appeared that the monarchy wasnear collapse. Gavin B. Henderson, ed., “Southern Designs on Cuba, 1854–1857, and SomeEuropean Opinions,” Journal of Southern History 5, no. 3 (August 1939): 373.

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confident that neither country would be willing to come to Spain’s aid in aconflict in the Western Hemisphere.184 The best explanation for Pierce’s deci-184

sion is found in the same dynamics of American federalism that kept the peacein the Mesilla Valley. Specifically, constraints on American power were rootedin strong sectional differences over the most basic questions of whether theUnited States should seek annexation of Cuba and use force to achieve thisgoal. Even though Cuba did have strategic value for larger American interests(a fact that extreme expansionists in the North pointed out), the vast major-ity in the North saw Cuba simply as a slaveholding colony that, if added tothe union, would strengthen the “slave power” in American politics. BecauseCuba policy had such clearly asymmetric effects on territorially distributedinterests in the United States, the politics of the issue were dominated by theNorth-South rivalry.185

185

A pattern of sectional disagreement, played out in the Senate and the House,is found at every point in the crisis, particularly when it appeared that the Pierceadministration was leaning toward military action.186 Each time northern op-186

position flared over some particular initiative, Pierce backed down, refusing tosustain any initiative that further split the Democratic party, that strengthenedthe opposition Free Soil party, or that forced northern Democrats to alignwith members of other parties in this region of the country.187 Because of the187

North’s numerical superiority in both number of states and total population,Pierce quickly recognized that it would be impossible to build a congressionalcoalition large enough to sustain any military action against Spain.188 In the con-188

gressional elections of 1854, any hope that Democratic unity in Congress couldsustain some portion of Pierce’s Cuba policy suffered a fatal blow. As a resultof the Democratic party’s association with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and thepolicy to acquire Cuba through the spring and summer of 1854, northern

184. Nichols, Franklin Pierce, 329.185. Gara, The Presidency of Franklin Pierce, 128, 155; Meinig, The Shaping of America, 158;

Nichols, Franklin Pierce, 340; and Basil Rauch, American Interests in Cuba, 1848–1855 (New York:Columbia University Press, 1948), 280.

186. Gara, The Presidency of Franklin Pierce, 152. The difficulty of holding a Democratic ma-jority together to support the use of force against Cuba was foreshadowed by the debate overannexation of Cuba in early 1853. In this debate, even peaceful annexation through purchase wasportrayed in starkly different terms by northern and southern Democrats. Southern Democratsargued that the United States could not survive without Cuba and the goal justified the costsof war, if necessary. Most northern Democrats argued that the only way to obtain Cuba wasthrough war, which they would never permit, and even if Spain agreed to sell the island, northernDemocrats would not allow this slave territory into the union. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific,267–68.

187. Spencer, The Victor and the Spoils, 319.188. Nichols, Franklin Pierce, 341; Callahan, Cuba and International Relations, 278; Spencer, The

Victor and the Spoils, 223, 261, 332; and Gara, The Presidency of Franklin Pierce, 128.

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voters turned away from the Party in droves to hand the Democrats a terribleelectoral defeat in this region. In the process, the huge margin of control theDemocrats had in the House was erased. Although the Democrats still con-trolled the Senate, northern Democratic senators were even more consciousof their constituents’ antislavery views than ever before. Accepting this fact,Pierce abandoned all efforts to acquire Cuba, by either peaceful or militantmeans.

The final three cases considered in this study again involve Mexico. By thetime James Buchanan entered the White House in 1857, Mexico was America’snumber one foreign policy problem. During the course of his administration,Buchanan presented Congress with three separate requests for authority tointervene in Mexico with military force. To Buchanan, there were three com-pelling reasons for the United States to pursue this policy. First, his adminis-tration was firmly committed to the Democratic party’s long-term policy ofperpetual territorial expansion.189 Mexico’s refusal to sell additional territory 189

made it clear that any territorial cession would most likely require the use ofAmerican military force.190 Second, the Mexican political system had collapsed 190

in 1858 as a violent struggle between two factions divided the country intorival regions.191 For the Buchanan administration, the ensuing chaos created 191

by this civil conflict and its effects on American interests within Mexico andalong the U.S.-Mexican border were simply intolerable.192 Third, and perhaps 192

most unsettling, was the mounting evidence that Spain, the United Kingdom,and France were preparing to intervene in Mexico to restore order. Buchananknew that the only way to prevent the impending European intervention wasfor the United States to intervene first.193

193

The potential domestic opposition over conflict in Mexico that Piercesought to avoid became formal legislative opposition that derailed Buchanan’splans and effectively constrained the use of force. Between December 1858and January 1859, Buchanan pressed Congress for authorization to establisha protectorate over the northern parts of Sonora and Chihuahua, to build

189. Buchanan set his sights on obtaining Baja California and large parts of Sonora andChihuahua during his administration. He also committed himself to securing a perpetual rightof way across the isthmus at Tehauntepec for transportation of American goods to the PacificOcean. James Callahan, “The Mexican Policy of Southern Leaders under Buchanan’s Admin-istration,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (1910): 136.

190. Rippy, The United States and Mexico, 212–14, 218; Callahan, “The Mexican Policy ofSouthern Leaders,” 135; and Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation, 289–90.

191. Donald Stevens, Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1991).

192. Howard Lafayette Wilson, “President Buchanan’s Proposed Intervention in Mexico,”American Historical Review 5, no. 4 (July 1900): 688.

193. Rippy, The United States and Mexico, 211, 222.

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military posts within Mexico to control violence in the northern regions, andto deploy military forces in other parts of Mexico. After a vigorous debatein which the question of intervention was cast in strictly sectional terms, theSenate rejected his request by a vote of 31 to 25. Of the 31 senators votingin opposition to Buchanan’s requested intervention, 20 were from the North.Only 4 northern senators voted with Buchanan. The South was more evenlydivided, but the majority of southern senators supported Buchanan.194 In his194

second request, in December 1859, Buchanan asked Congress to authorize anintervention to tip the scales in Mexico’s civil war by actively bringing down theconservative faction’s government. Despite the desperate situation in Mexicoand Buchanan’s call to arms, Congress completely ignored his recommen-dation and took no action. Neither the House nor the Senate even debatedthe Mexican problem.195 Buchanan made one final bid to force Congress to195

acknowledge the need for American military action in Mexico. He negoti-ated a treaty with the liberal faction that virtually ceded Mexico’s sovereignrights against external interference to the United States. The McLane-OcampoTreaty of 14 December 1859 established Mexico as one big protectorate ofthe United States.196 After a four-month delay, the Senate finally debated the196

treaty in earnest, and then rejected it on 31 May 1860, by a vote of 27 to 18.197197

Of the 27 votes against the treaty, 23 were from northern senators. Of the18 votes in favor of the treaty, 14 came from the South. Only four senatorsfrom the North approved of the treaty, and only four senators from the Southvoted to reject it.198 Buchanan tried to stimulate national-level convergence on198

the view that America’s interests demanded action by framing his policy as acorollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Despite the real danger of a joint Europeaneffort to install a European monarch in Mexico (which actually materializedduring the American Civil War), territorial identities were too polarized by thispoint for Buchanan’s arguments to be persuasive. With northerners dominat-ing legislative decisions, Buchanan’s hands were tied.199

199

194. Ibid., 217–19.195. Ibid., 222–23; and Binder, James Buchanan and the American Empire, 248.196. This would allow the United States to treat any attack on Mexico or threats to its

domestic tranquility as an attack on itself. Callahan, “The Mexican Policy of Southern Leaders,”148.

197. Binder, James Buchanan and the American Empire, 248–50; Rippy, The United States andMexico, 219–26; Wilson, “President Buchanan’s Proposed Intervention in Mexico,” 696; andCallahan, “The Mexican Policy of Southern Leaders,” 144.

198. Wilson, “President Buchanan’s Proposed Intervention in Mexico,” 696; and Rippy, TheUnited States and Mexico, 226.

199. Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, 208; Binder, James Buchanan andthe American Empire, 248; Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation, 290; Rippy, The UnitedStates and Mexico, 223–226; and Callahan, “The Mexican Policy of Southern Leaders,” 149.

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FEDERAL UNION AND THE POLITICS OF WAR: THEN AND NOW

TYPICALLY, STUDIES of early American foreign relations focus either onAmerican isolation from European power politics, which implies that the

United States was fairly insulated from the competitive international system,or on the wars America did fight against the United Kingdom and Mexico. Asthis article demonstrates, however, before the Civil War the United States wasrepeatedly engaged in competitive interactions with states holding territory inNorth America on the periphery of the union. As a result, this period providesa rich database for exploring the effects of democratic politics on the use ofmilitary force. This study also shows that, despite the fact that America did goto war twice in this period, there is a clear pattern of constraints on the use offorce by the United States in a larger number of other cases.

According to a prominent strand of realist theory, one that is found mostfrequently in the literature critical of the democratic peace, we would expectthe United States to avoid the use of force if the distribution of power favoredAmerica’s opponents in these crises, or if American leaders calculated that thecosts of using military force outweighed the expected benefits. The evidencefrom the nine cases of constraint in this study shows that at no time did theUnited States back down because executive decision makers were worriedabout an unfavorable distribution of power or intolerably high costs of warrelative to benefits. In fact, in most of these cases the distribution of powerfavored the United States. This is clearly the case in the dispute with Spainover East Florida in 1812–13, the Mesilla Valley crisis of 1853, the Cuba crisisof 1854–55, and the three cases involving President Buchanan and Mexicoin 1859–60. In the Oregon case we find that there was strong regional dis-agreement in the United States over the distribution of capabilities, the UnitedKingdom’s ability to project power in North America, and the expected costsof war. Yet it is also clear that President Polk had a rather fatalistic belief in theseeming inevitability of war with the British, took specific steps to prepare forwar, and never took the initiative to de-escalate the crisis. In objective terms itis easy to show that in 1807, 1809, and 1812 the distribution of power wouldfavor the United Kingdom. Yet America certainly was not deterred in 1812 bythis distribution of power, and the same can be said about President Madisonand his congressional Republican supporters in 1809, who fully intended toend the embargo and declare war by June of that year. At no time duringthe Chesapeake crisis of 1807 did President Jefferson demonstrate hesitancy touse military force because of pessimistic strategic calculations. On the con-trary, he made extensive preparations for war, then let Congress decide whatAmerica should do. In Congress there was no consensus on the relative costs

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and benefits of using military force as a response to British pressure. Theevidence also shows that the decision to escalate the conflict with Mexico in1845–46 and the passage of Polk’s war bill had nothing to do with domesticconsensus on the distribution of power, the threat posed by Mexico, or thematerial benefits of war.

The most convincing explanation in each of these cases is found in domesticpolitics, specifically in the logic of federal democratic peace. In seven casesfederal asymmetry on the question of crisis escalation, military intervention,war, or territorial expansion was reflected in competition within Congressover policy choices and regional coalitions that constrained the use of force.In two other cases, the Mesilla Valley and Cuba crises, the president actedas the institutional point of constraint with no congressional involvement.President Pierce was reacting to the effects of federal asymmetry that madecongressional approval for the use of force unlikely or that threatened toundermine the solidarity of his political party and risked electoral penalties inparticular regions.

The time frame selected for this study begs an important question: Howrelevant has America’s federal structure been for the politics of war and peacesince the end of the Civil War? After all, aside from the introduction of directelections for U.S. senators with the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, the fed-eral structure of the American political system remains the same as it was atthe founding. Despite this institutional continuity, it appears that the stronglink evident in the early nineteenth century between diverse regional interestsand foreign policy has loosened over time. The elimination of slavery as aterritorially divisive issue is one important change. Another is the changingcharacter of the challenges to American security and the scope of its inter-actions with other states in the international system. In the first half of thenineteenth century the greatest foreign policy challenges and opportunitieswere on the immediate geographic periphery, so each issue was more likelyto have asymmetric consequences for the particularistic interests of differ-ent regions of the union. By the end of the nineteenth century, as Americafaced new questions over its global role, specific foreign policy questions didnot have the kind of clear asymmetric effects seen in the first half of thecentury. This implies that the character of individual issues will be a decisivevariable determining whether the territorial structure of American democracywill produce the kind of congressional divisions or electoral incentives seenin the nineteenth century.

A number of scholars have noted that the United States continues to ex-hibit federal asymmetry on the basis of diverse economic interests, social

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characteristics, and geography. This has had a well-recognized effect on tradequestions and defense budgets.200 Less well recognized, however, yet of en- 200

during importance for questions of war and peace and the use of Americanpower, is federal asymmetry in the general orientation of Americans towardthe use of force in foreign policy.201 Most notable is the clear concentration of 201

pro-military, interventionist, unilateralist opinion in the American South andmountain West, and the concentration of anti-interventionist, multilateralistopinion in the Northeast, the northern Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest.This has been observed most recently in regional divisions over the Kosovocrisis202 and the 2003 war with Iraq.203 For those issues that stimulate this ter- 202

203ritorial division in attitudes on the use of force in American foreign policy, thefederal system will continue to provide an outlet in national politics throughcompetition within Congress and the presidential electoral system.

200. Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest.201. Chester noted, “Most scholars are in agreement that there was a sectional division

of opinion prior to World War II over the twin issues of isolationism and international-ism/intervention. . . . ‘[T]here were isolationists in all parts of the country, but they were mostpowerful in the Middle West and least so in the South’.” Conversely, “‘support for the interna-tionalist view came from all parts of the country, but the Northeast was the most consistentlyinternationalist section and the South the most vehemently interventionist section’.” EdwardChester, Sectionalism, Politics, and American Diplomacy (Metuchan: Scarecrow Press, 1975), 187.Regional asymmetry was also reflected in the failure to ratify the Versailles Treaty and join theLeague of Nations, and in the Neutrality Acts between the world wars.

202. Michael Lind, “Civil War by Other Means,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 5 (September/October1999): 123–42.

203. Scott A. Silverstone, “The Preventive War Taboo, American Democracy, and the Do-mestic Politics of Hegemonic Power,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the InternationalStudies Association, Montreal, Canada, March 2004.

FEDERAL DEMOCRATIC PEACE: DOMESTIC INSTITUTIONS AND INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT IN THE EARLY AMERICAN...

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