Hey there and welcome back to Heimler’s History. So we’ve been going through Unit 4 of the AP U.S. History curriculum and in this video we’re going to talk about how the U.S. government sought to gain more territory and establish a growing influence in the Western Hemisphere. So as you probably know, your brain cows ain’t gonna milk themselves, so I stand at the ready, let’s get to it. So the main thing you should be able to do after watching this fair video is the following: Explain how and why American foreign policy developed and expanded over time. So in the last couple of videos I mentioned the causes and consequences of the War of 1812. In 1814 it was the Treaty of Ghent that ended the war between the U.S. and Britain, but that treaty left an awful lot of things unclear, especially with regards to Canada. And so as our boy James Monroe took the presidential office in 1817, he sought to do something about that. So he sent our other boy John Quincy Adams to London to settle some lingering territorial claims. He ended up negotiating a treaty which established the border between the U.S. and Canada right along the 49th parallel. Additionally, it established a joint U.S.-British occupation of the disputed Oregon Territory for the next ten years. So the soothing of territorial disputes in the north is going swimmingly, so let’s head south and see what’s happening there. Now you may recall that at this point in history the Florida Territory belonged to Spain. Now Spain was having a little difficulty governing their Florida Territory on account of them moving out their troops to go squash rebellions in their South American colonies. #empireprobz, am I right? As a result of this territory being in supervised, Seminole Indians and runaway slaves and various scrappy white folks who lived in Florida were crossing the border and raiding U.S. territory. Well Monroe decided to put the kibosh on such lawless behavior by sending general Andrew Jackson down to Florida in 1817 to stop all this foolishness. BUt Monroe was smart. He knew such an action might ignite a war with Spain, so he told Jackson in no uncertain terms that he was not to engage directly with Spanish forces. His only job was to protect the American border and push the interlopers back to where they came from. So Jackson went ahead and attacked two Spanish forts, executed two Seminole chiefs and two British citizens who were in the territory. Not surprisingly this enraged both Britain and Spain, but ultimately they both decided to forget the insult in order to avoid war. The biggest effect of all of this was that Spain could see that the U.S. was gunning for Florida and so instead of fighting them to keep it, they decided to sell the Florida Territory to the U.S. And so John Quincy Adams negotiated the Adams-Onis Treaty in 1819 which made that sale official and formally defined the border between U.S. territory an Spanish holdings in the West. Now this win for the U.S. government got them thinking about how to limit European influence in the rest of the Western Hemisphere. And to the great pleasure of the Americans, by 1822, Columbia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Argentina had all thrown off European colonial power. Giddy about this, President Monroe quickly recognized their independence and established diplomatic relations with them. And this got the president to thinking: “Europe is the worst, and we don’t want them tangling in our affairs on this side of the globe.” And so in 1823 he formally articulated what became known as the Monroe Doctrine. This doctrine basically said that the lands and nations in the Western Hemisphere were in our backyard, and thus were our business. We don’t need no European militaries coming over here and handling stuff. If anything goes wrong over here, we’ll handle it. And in stating this, Monroe officially challenged Europeans for authority in the Americas. Now I always think of the Monroe Doctrine like a giant American dog. In this declaration, what the U.S. did was essentially urinate all over the Western Hemisphere and claimed it as their own. So listen, everybody, as you can smell, this mailbox belongs to us, so move along, put that leg down, and keep moving… there you go. Now of course, all this new finagling of territory and claims to power and influence wasn’t all about power. A significant motivating factor in everything I just said was trade as well. By the late 1820s, Americans established a thriving trade relationship with Mexico, especially New England manufacturers who delighted to find a new market for their goods. Additionally, U.S. merchant ships carried goods across the Pacific and established a robust trade in Chinese porcelains and silks. And that got the Americans to thinking that maybe what they needed a couple Pacific Islands like Hawaii and Samoa. Now eventually that would happen, but it’s about seventy or eighty years in the future at this point, so we’ll leave it on the table for now. Now all of this increased demand for U.S. goods led to a revolution in manufacturing which later became known as the Market Revolution, however that is a topic for the next video, so for now, we’ll leave it there. Okay that’s what you need to know about Unit 4 topic 4 of the AP U.S. History curriculum. 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