At the time of his speech, Buchanan had no idea that he would soon fill Randolph’s boots and trudge into the uncertain terrain of U.S. commercial negotiations with Russia amid this torrent of international condemnation. Once nominated and confirmed in 1832, Buchanan sighed to his diary about his fate: “to leave the most free and happy country on earth for a despotism more severe than any [other] which exists in Europe. These gloomy reflections often came athwart my mind.” Nonetheless, Buchanan weathered well the next year from his luxurious legation headquarters overlooking the Neva River. “My time here is gliding on not unpleasantly,” he wrote to his brother that autumn. With considerable diplomatic talent, he eked out an unprecedented bilateral commercial treaty with Russia, which his predecessor Randolph had failed to seal but Jackson had remained adamant to win. Buchanan confided to Jackson from St. Petersburg that, “the Emperor is the very beau ideal of a sovereign for Russia; and in my opinion, notwithstanding his conduct towards Poland, he is an able and a better man than any of those by whom he is surrounded. I flatter myself that a favorable change has been affected in his feelings towards the United States since my arrival.” Buchanan thought himself a favorite of the emperor and empress. Although he claimed to be a “greater Republican than ever” when he sailed home 15 months later, in that time Buchanan went from assailing Russia’s assault on Poland’s constitutional rights as an independent nation to mourning the “suffering” and “gallant” Poles, from condemning to condoning the tsar’s policy in Eastern Europe, from demonizing Russia to cherishing their friendship.What happened there?
Buchanan’s surprise success forging a commercial treaty with Russia in 1832 shows us much more about U.S. foreign policy at this historical juncture than has been recognized. In contrast with the twentieth-century canonization of the 1823 “Monroe Doctrine” as a firm barricade against European colonization in the Americas and U.S. intermeddling in Europe, Buchanan and Randolph were among the myriad Americans who in practice fretted about European affairs and debated the role that the U.S. should play across the Atlantic in the antebellum period. Between the Spanish American wars of independence and the European revolutions of 1848, Americans gazed out at a panorama of liberal nationalist movements, big and small, in the Atlantic world. Buchanan’s diplomatic mission to Russia revealed that Jackson’s vision of aggressive commercial expansion grated against the ideals and historical identity that many Americans could not simply anchor at the water’s edge. During Jackson’s presidency and Buchanan’s mission to Russia, however, the American response to the Polish independence movement ultimately made clear that U.S. commercial interests could trump Americans’ ideological commitment to a foreign people fighting in the name of Americans’ own historical identity.