Are You Not Large and Unwieldy Enough Already?

On May 25, 1836, John Quincy Adams addressed the U.S. House of Representatives in an hour-long oration. Eight years earlier, when Adams was still president of the United States, an address of such length by the erudite Harvard graduate would have been unremarkable. But by 1836, Adams was no longer president. He had been defeated for reelection by Andrew Jackson in 1828; left the White House in 1829 without attending his successor’s inauguration; quickly grown restless in retirement as he observed with dismay Jackson’s populist, expansionist, and proslavery policies; and returned to Washington in 1831 as a member of the House. The nominal issue that inspired Adams’ sprawling speech in 1836 was a resolution authorizing the distribution of relief to settlers who had fled their homes in Alabama and Georgia following a series of violent altercations with Indigenous people. Adams used that conflict as an opportunity to embark on a wide-ranging discourse. As a Congressional Globe journalist archly put it, the ex-president addressed the chamber “on the state of the Union.”

Although Adams expounded on numerous subjects, he focused on the most pressing issue of the moment: the rebellion in the Mexican province of Coahuila y Tejas (or, as Americans called the northern part of the province, Texas). Beginning in October 1835, “Texians,” as expatriate American settlers in Texas were known, had revolted against Mexican rule. By April 1836, the Texians had unexpectedly defeated the Mexican force sent to subdue them, achieved a fragile independence, and appealed to the United States for annexation. Jackson plainly favored annexation, and Adams accused numerous House members of “thirsting” to annex Texas as well.

In dire terms, Adams warned against expanding the boundaries of the United States to include Texas. His opposition to annexation may have surprised some of his colleagues in the House. As a U.S. senator from Massachusetts in 1803, he had been the only Federalist to vote in favor of Thomas Jefferson’s acquisition of the Louisiana Territory. In 1818, as secretary of state during the administration of James Monroe, he had defended Andrew Jackson when Jackson, then an army general, had invaded Spanish Florida. In 1821, Adams acquired Florida for the United States from Spain in return for setting the southwestern boundary of the United States at the Sabine River — the border between the modern states of Louisiana and Texas. With that agreement in place, Adams believed that U.S. expansion had gone far enough. Before the House in 1836, he argued that to extend the already “over-distended dominions” of the United States beyond the Sabine would be an untenable overreach. “Are you not large and unwieldy enough already?” he asked proponents of annexation. “Is your southern and southwestern frontier not sufficiently extensive? Not sufficiently feeble? Not sufficiently defenceless?” Annexation, he predicted, would precipitate a war with Mexico that the United States might well lose. Adams warned that Mexico had “the more recent experience of war” and “the greatest number of veteran warriors.” He reminded the House of ongoing U.S. military stumbles in Florida, where the United States had struggled to establish its control since acquiring the peninsula from Spain: “Is the success of your whole army, and all your veteran generals, and all your militia-calls, and all your mutinous volunteers against a miserable band of 500 or 600 invisible Seminole Indians, in your late campaign, an earnest of the energy and vigor with which you are ready to carry on that far otherwise formidable and complicated war?” Not least of all, he warned that if Mexico were to carry the war into the United States, the invader would find numerous allies among slaves and especially among the Indigenous people whom the United States was in the process of removing to the Indian Territory on the border with Texas. “How far will it spread,” Adams asked, should Mexico invade the United States, “proclaiming emancipation to the slave and revenge to the native Indian”? In such an instance, “Where will be your negroes? Where will be that combined and concentrated mass of Indian tribes, whom, by an inconsiderate policy, you have expelled from their widely distant habitations, to embody them within a small compass on the very borders of Mexico, as if on purpose to give that country a nation of natural allies in their hostilities against you? Sir, you have a Mexican, an Indian, and a negro war upon your hands, and you are plunging yourself into it blindfold.” Adams’ speech sparked a debate that consumed five hours, causing the House to stay in session long into the evening. That night, Adams, in his inimitably cramped handwriting, recorded the day’s events in his diary. He congratulated himself that he had succeeded in sapping the House’s enthusiasm for annexation. Indeed, Adams and his like-minded colleagues in Congress managed to deter annexation for nine more years.

In Adams’ view, the United States, which between 1783 and 1836 had expanded its territory northwest into the Great Lakes region, west into the Great Plains, and south to the Gulf of Mexico, had swollen beyond its capacity either to exercise effective sovereignty over border regions or to defend its extended borders against imperial competitors. The U.S. presence in the borderlands, a multilateral and multiethnic region, was tenuous: until the 1840s, Britain dominated the region between the western Great Lakes and Oregon, while Spain and, later, Mexico controlled the region between Texas and California. The success of the Seminoles together with the escaped slaves who were allied with them in resisting U.S. forces in Florida was hardly exceptional. In the western Great Lakes region, the Ojibwe dominated. The British liberally supported the Ojibwe and other Indigenous nations in the Great Lakes region. In the event of another war with Britain, the natives were likely to once again be British allies as they had been in the War of 1812. As for the horse-mounted natives of the Great Plains such as the Comanches and the Lakota, the United States in 1836 could not even begin to imagine challenging their control of the grasslands. Likewise, the fear that an invasion by a foreign power on the southwestern border might spur a slave revolt was quite real; by promising freedom, the British had encouraged thousands of enslaved people to join them in fighting against the United States in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. In the first decades of the 19th century, numerous slaves fled from Georgia and Louisiana to Florida and New Spain; once in Spanish territory, maroon communities encouraged further flight and, slaveholders feared, rebellion. In short, Adams was entirely correct that in the first decades of the 19th century, the United States maintained a relatively weak presence on its borders where it had to contend with powerful, autonomous native groups, fugitive slaves, and competing imperial powers.

Leaders such as Adams who in the first decades of the 19th century pondered the weaknesses of the United States in its border regions were in many respects confronting a new problem. Before 1800, the most profitable imperial holdings in the Americas were of two types: sugar plantations in the Caribbean and coastal Brazil; and Spain’s silver mines at Potosí in the Andes and the Bajío in Mexico. Almost everywhere else, until the end of the 18th century, the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires in continental North and South America were primarily commercial and tributary rather than territorial. European imperial settlements on the American mainland, with the notable exceptions of the Spanish silver mines and a few other places such as Mexico’s Central Valley, hugged the coastlines. European empires primarily claimed sovereignty over vast interiors of the Americas based on the reciprocal exchange of gifts and tribute with native leaders and by virtue of commerce in animal products and slaves that European merchants carried on with the Indigenous people of continental interiors.

Thus, throughout much of British, French, and Spanish North America, European imperial claims to territory depended on the commercial and diplomatic loyalties of Indigenous people. European military forces occasionally launched punitive expeditions into the interior against natives who resisted these commercial and diplomatic arrangements but rarely managed, or even tried, to establish an enduring military presence. Imperial boundaries, in this scheme, remained only loosely defined.

This system, in which Indigenous people held considerable influence, began to change in the late eighteenth and early 19th century, as European empires shifted away from defining sovereignty in terms of relationships with Indigenous people and toward negotiating imperial boundaries with each other. In 1777, for instance, Spain and Portugal agreed in the first Treaty of San Ildefonso to create a joint boundary commission to survey the border between their South American empires, marginalizing the Indigenous nations who lived in those lands. When the United States and Spain agreed to a border between Georgia and Spanish Florida in 1795, they did not consult with the Seminoles who inhabited the territory. Indigenous people were similarly excluded in 1818, when the United States agreed to a treaty with Britain establishing the northern boundary of the United States and providing for joint Anglo-American occupation of Oregon. They were likewise left out in 1821, when Adams negotiated with Luis de Onís, a Spanish minister, establishing the border between the United States and New Spain at the Sabine River. All these agreements belonged to a larger European-US effort to sideline Indigenous people and negotiate imperial boundaries among themselves. European- and American-made maps reflected the shift in imperial mentalities: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when imperial claims depended on alliances with Indigenous people, maps of the North American interior abounded with the names of Indigenous nations. By the 19th century, similar maps had erased references to Indigenous nations and showed only empty space.

Yet while European powers and the United States could erase Indigenous nations from their maps, they could not so easily dispense with the necessity of dealing with autonomous and powerful Indigenous nations on the outskirts of their territories. In the first decades of the 19th century, the old, somewhat unpredictable system of imperial sovereignty contingent upon diplomatic and commercial relations with Indigenous people persisted even as the new territorial system based on diplomacy (and sometimes war) between empires was ascending. For example, when the United States achieved its independence from Britain in 1783, it acquired — on paper at least — an extensive territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. In 1783, however, the borders spelled out in treaties remained less meaningful than commercial and diplomatic relations with Indigenous people. While the British formally ceded the trans-Appalachian region to the United States, they maintained for decades merchant outposts in what was nominally U.S. territory. The U.S. explorer Zebulon Pike encountered one such outpost on the Upper Mississippi River in January 1806: a North West Company trading post. Seeing “the flag of Great Britain” over the post in what was nominally U.S. territory, Pike wrote, “I felt indignant.” But there was little he could do to assert U.S. authority. 

More than just flying their flag in U.S. territory, the British, through their trade, retained the commercial and diplomatic allegiance of Indigenous people in the new US Northwest Territory. When the United States and Britain went to war six years after Pike stumbled across the British trading post, most of the Indigenous people in the Northwest Territory sided with the British. To the south, the Spanish had seized Florida from Britain during the American Revolution; the Florida peninsula almost immediately became a haven for fugitive slaves from the United States. The Spanish, who also controlled New Orleans, periodically inconvenienced American merchants by closing the mouth of the Mississippi River to commercial travel.

Between 1803 and 1821, the United States acquired both Florida and New Orleans by treaty. The United States thus removed those territories from the control of an imperial competitor but in so doing took on an extensive territory where it struggled to establish its sovereignty. Understanding the early 19th-century United States as weak relative to Indigenous people, escaped slaves, and imperial competitors contradicts both the popular and the scholarly view of the United States in this period. Most historians of what the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once called “the age of Jackson” depict U.S. expansion not only as inexorable but as one of the defining characteristics of the period. According to this view, the United States in the first half of the 19th century was like a seething boiler that could barely contain the outward economic and cultural pressures within it: a virulent, racist hatred of Indigenous people; an all-but-insatiable desire for land; a dynamic, profitable, and expanding slave-based plantation system; an explosive market economy; and a self-righteous American missionary Protestantism that saw itself as a reforming beacon to the world.

Expansion was not a national consensus, and the expansionism that Andrew Jackson advocated was always a politically divisive and contested issue. In 1819, by a vote of 107–100, Jackson only narrowly escaped censure in the House of Representatives for his unauthorized attacks against Spanish outposts and British subjects during an invasion of Spanish Florida the previous year; in 1830, Jackson’s Indian Removal Act barely passed the House of Representatives, 101–97; in 1832, an anti-Jackson coalition won a majority of the Senate; and beginning in 1836 and lasting for the next nine years, Adams and his congressional allies successfully deterred Texas annexation. Adams was one of numerous elected leaders — many of them Northeasterners who eventually coalesced into the Whig Party — who advocated strengthening U.S. commerce, manufacturing, and infrastructure within existing U.S. boundaries rather than overstretching U.S. power by sprawling across the continent. Adams understood a reality about the U.S. position in North America that “manifest destiny” obscures:  a relatively weak United States found itself engaged with powerful European imperial competitors, and even more powerful Indigenous nations, in a complicated struggle for sovereignty in several regions on its borders. Unable to simply impose its will, the U.S. often reached out into the borderlands through diplomacy or commerce. Manifest destiny was just one of many narrative visions for the borderlands; in the first decades of the 19th century, it was neither the dominant vision nor the most plausible. 

Excerpt adapted from The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850 by Andrew C. Isenberg. Copyright © 2025 by the University of North Carolina Press.