Caribbean Project: The Yankee Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1865-1905

Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders on San Juan Hill in Cuba
Caribbean

In my review of Robert E. May’s The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire: 1854-1861, we saw how Manifest Destiny became sectionalized in the late 1840s and 1850s and how Southerners made various failed attempts during this period to acquire a tropical slave empire in the Caribbean.

The Southern version of Manifest Destiny had been the acquisition of contiguous territories like Florida and Texas which could be transformed into new slave states and where the plantation system could be extended and agricultural commodities could be produced with African slave labor for export to foreign markets.

Before the extension of slavery became a polarizing issue that destroyed the Union in 1861, there had been a much broader consensus that American expansion into the Caribbean was only a matter of time. In 1823, John Quincy Adams had described Cuba and other Caribbean territories as a “ripe apple” that would eventually be pulled by America’s gravity into the Union.

During the early nineteenth century, American expansion into the Caribbean was blocked by the European powers whose mercantile empires had long dominated the region: Britain, Spain, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The United States expanded south and west into sparsely populated areas like Florida and Louisiana that were less important to the dominant European powers than their Caribbean possessions.

By the 1860s, the Netherlands and Denmark were marginal players in the Caribbean, Spain was considered the “sick man of Europe,” and France had been all but expelled from the Americas after its defeat by Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Cuba and Puerto Rico had also been pulled under American economic hegemony.

Confederate independence was a major setback to American ambitions in the Caribbean because Southerners sought diplomatic recognition and military intervention from the European empires: in 1861, Britain and France occupied Mexico and installed Maxmilian I as Emperor of Mexico, and Spain occupied the Dominican Republic.

The South’s defeat in the War Between the States and the subsequent destruction of slavery in 1865 eliminated the biggest political and military obstacle to Yankee imperialism in the Caribbean:

(1) In 1865, Spain withdrew from the Dominican Republic after the militarized Northern-dominated Union reasserted the Monroe Doctrine.

(2) In 1865, the United States sent 50,000 troops to the Mexican border, demanded the French withdraw from Mexico, and blockaded the Mexican coast to prevent French reinforcements from landing – the French soon withdrew from Mexico.

(3) After the war, American commercial supremacy was quickly reestablished over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

This was the earliest stage of the envelopment of the Caribbean into the Yankee Empire which began immediately after the War Between the States and would climax in the Spanish-American War:

Dominican Republic

President Andrew Johnson began the ill-fated attempt to acquire the Dominican Republic, but he was soon crippled and impeached by the Black Republicans in Congress over his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 1869, the president of the Dominican Republic attempted to sell his country to the United States. Ulysses S. Grant attempted to acquire the Dominican Republic in part to colonize the emerging Black Undertow problem in Northern cities there.

Grant was defeated in the U.S. Senate by Charles Sumner, the most famous Black Republican abolitionist in the Senate, who would later be the author of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

In spite of this, the Dominican Republic became a testing ground for a new type of Yankee imperialism that would be imposed all over the Caribbean and Latin America in the twentieth century.

This except comes from “The Rise of the American Mediterranean, 1846-1905” in The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples:

“The Confederacy’s defeat brought an end to the old Southern dream of a slave-based Caribbean empire. It also prompted the emergence of a new brand of expansionism they sought not to acquire Caribbean territories, but rather to establish commercial and naval dominance over the region. This new model responded to two basic forces. First, foodstuffs and manufactures were being produced beyond the capacity of the US market to absorb them. Second, the Civil War had underscored the importance of naval power, and particularly of securing coaling stations and navigation routes, to protect what historian Walter LaFeber termed the “New Empire” (LaFeber 1963).

This New Empire sought to turn territories into economic, rather than political or military, dependencies of the United States. Under such arrangements, the United States remained free from the entanglements, responsibilities, and expenses of direct rule while reaping economic benefits through the creation of what has been called “informal colonies.” Needless to say, econmic dominance often brought with it indirect political control.”

The North’s free labor system which produced foodstuffs in the Midwest and manufactures in the Northeast was even more, not less, expansionist than the so-called “Slave Power” of the 1850s – this was a major reason why the North competed so ferociously with the South over control of the West.

Industrial economies are driven by growth and the American domestic economy soon became saturated and unable to absorb the surplus output of Northern farms and factories. Thus began the endless quest for overseas markets and the accompanying military interventions to provide outlets for American agriculture, industry, and capital to sustain “growth”:

“Much of the foreign investment came in the guise of generous concessions by the Dominican government: railroads, mines, harbor dredging, road building, utilities, even factories and sugar mills. European investors poured capital into the republic, while Dominican authorities also worked closely with, and favored, US economic interests, which in turn worked with the US government to gain indirect political control over the struggling republic.

These cases were early manifestations of what later came to be known as “dollar diplomacy”: in essence, the policy of the US government to use its diplomatic and, if need be, its military might to create conditions they allowed US financial and commercial interests to penetrate weaker countries, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America. This cycle, in turn, benefited the US government, as US financial interests made loans and acquired foreign debt bonds, displacing European financial interests and thus expanding the political influence of the United States over nations such as the Dominican Republic.”

The aim of “dollar diplomacy” or “gunboat diplomacy,” as it was later called after the arrival of the Marines, was to financially and economically dominate small Caribbean and Latin American countries in order to turn them into “banana republics” indirectly controlled by the Uncle Sam for the benefit of Wall Street and American corporations like United Fruit.

In 1903 and 1904, TR sent troop to the Dominican Republic to deter European creditors who were practicing their own version of dollar diplomacy. The U.S. took over the Dominican Republic’s finances in 1904 and established a protectorate in 1903.

Haiti

In 1903, the United States took over Haiti’s finances to deter a similar intervention by aggrieved European creditors. The U.S. would later occupy Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

Danish West Indies

President Ulysses S. Grant attempted to purchase the Danish Virgin Islands and expanded the Monroe Doctrine to declare that Caribbean colonies could not be sold or transfered to any power other than the United States.

Denmark sold what is now the “American Virgin Islands” to the United States under President Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

Panama

In 1903, the United States engineered the secession of Panama from Colombia, established a protectorate over Panama, and used its puppet government to cede the rights to the Panama Canal Zone.

Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Spanish Virgin Islands

In 1896, the United States intervened in the Cuban War of Independence and defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War.

Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Spanish Virgin Islands to the United States – in 1898, Puerto Rico and the Spanish Virgin Islands became and remain to this day an American colony, and in 1902 the American occupation ended and Cuba became a quasi-independent American protectorate.

American capital flooded into Cuba and soon Americans dominated the Cuban economy and foreign investors bought up most of the cattle ranches and sugar plantations.

By 1904, the Yankee Dream of a Caribbean Empire had been realized, and the United States had displaced Britain as the dominant power in the Caribbean and Central America. The United States controlled the Caribbean outside of the British, French, and Dutch West Indies.

During the Cold War, American influence would further penetrate Jamaica and much of the former British West Indies, and in 1983 the United States under President Reagan would invade the former British colony of Grenada in the Windward Islands.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

29 Comments

  1. “and the Moravians’ and William Penn’s peaceful, missionary approach might have led to a mixed Indian X European present-day population.”

    Mosin- I don’t see how that is in any way, a good thing. Miscegenation (and the White Man’s opposition to it) was the main fear of the South, both before, and clearly now, after the WBTS.

    “The imported Africans probably had the net functional effect (but only in the beginning) of another “weapon” for the conquest, along with the guns, diseases, alcohol, horses, ships and machinery, etc.”

    Isn’t this by now obvious? Yes, but the problem came, when we didn’t see the Nigger as disposable as used rifle shells, discarded petri dishes, outmoded outriggrs, and improvements on the Cotton gin….. but rather, in folly and great sin, gave them souls and personhood, as if they were the Sons of the Living God… and then tried to ‘convert’ them from being Black to being White.

    400 years of failure on that account, is more than enough to define stupidity, IMHO.

  2. @Fr John: “seems correct” referred to the content of your sentence not the lack of a comma. I didn’t see your last comment until mine was posted.

  3. And I certainly hope that there are no fools on this forum, that would be ‘offended’ at my statements above, who actually still believe in the ‘inherent goodness’ of the ‘cousins of the apes from the Niger- or that ‘sand niggers’ are any better- when our own country, our children, and our religion are at peril, from those very same races; on the one hand, from black violence- and otoh, from unswerving maniacal devotion to a demon and not a god by that latter group?

    “The group sponsoring the assembly is far from the mainstream Muslm community. The Grand Imam for the Jumah will be Siraj Wahhaj, Imam of the al Taqwa Mosque in Brooklyn, who was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade center bombings. He is well known for his ability to be considered ‘moderate’ by much of the media, on the one hand, and for his inflammatory statements, such as the one he once gave in a speech, when he said that it was his “duty and our duty as Muslims to replace the U.S. Constitution with the Quran.”

    http://frontporchpolitics.com/2012/09/islamic-jumah-disappears-from-official-dnc-schedule/

  4. “Mosin- I don’t see how that is in any way, a good thing. Miscegenation (and the White Man’s opposition to it) was the main fear of the South, both before, and clearly now, after the WBTS.”

    Fr John, in the context of all my comments here, how likely does it seem that I consider that “possible outcome” a good thing?

  5. — or “believe in Libertarianism” or represent an “ideology that is genocide,” etc, as some opined, even in the context of all my comments to the contrary on this site, on the very active Ron Paul bashing thread yesterday.

  6. Hominids I grant you. Human- as it is defined in Scripture- which means (doesn’t it?) Adam-‘kind,’ I wonder…. more and more and more and more, each day that passes.

    That our ancestors asked the question, ‘Do Negroes have souls?’ clearly points out that the question is far from ‘settled’. Darwin’s desire for egalitarianism (see my post on “Charles (Darwin) and Harriet (Beecher Stowe) sittin’ in a tree…”) diverted us for 150 years, but SBPDL, this blog, and Avdeyev’s ‘Raciology’ (have you gotten a copy yet?) are opening the floodgates of questions, that should have been answered decisively by the Eugenicists, Nordicists, and real Americans, before Scofieldism, Bolshevism, and ‘One World-ism’ took over the stage of public indoctri…… errr, opinion.

    (But you did have me a bit confused with your earlier comments….I admit that!)

  7. Hunter, please excuse the brief digression off topic, but we do need to understand one another’s positions better to “facilitate” discussion.

  8. I couldn’t wait to see what happened with the Boskopoid link I left here. (Nothing.) Oh well, it’s something on the order of the Ancient Aliens “theory,” by the way — http://www.amazon.com/Big-Brain-Origins-Future-Intelligence/dp/1403979782/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203978190&sr=1-1 — and in reality there is no historical or prehistorical evidence of superior intelligence arising in Africa, and Boskops are debunked.

    http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/return-amazing-boskops-lynch-granger-2009.html

    http://www.edinburghgeolsoc.org/edingeologist/z_29_10.html

  9. “we also should NEVER have given up the Canal.”

    We didn’t. We installed a puppet regime and we also have had a continuous troop presence on the ground there since we invaded in order to oust Noriega in 1989.

    “Hominids I grant you. Human- as it is defined in Scripture- which means (doesn’t it?) Adam-’kind,’ I wonder…. more and more and more and more, each day that passes.”

    I rarely read your posts and it is moronic, unscientific crap like this that is the reason why. Do you personally even know any Negroes? … I thought not. You need to shut your yap about biology and keep howling your religious lunacy at the moon. Don’t post here, you stink the place up with your abject ignorance of even the most basic scientific discoveries of the last 500 years after we started to rid ourselves of the centuries of superstitious crud built up by Christianity. Indeed you even know less about science than was discovered by the ancient Greeks.

    BTW, the average IQ of African Bushmen such as the San is around 65 not the 50 as you or one of your stupid ignorant sidekicks previously stated. And it is a lot sharper intelligence than that of a white mane with the same IQ who would act retarded. A Bushman would come across as a rational actor unlike the white who would cloearly be mentally and socially impaired. IQ as represented by a general score of ‘G’ is only a rough approximation of mental capabilities.

    But you don’t know that because you are an ignorant religious fanatic and a drag on our race.

  10. The Bushman in his natural state is reasonay well adapted to his environment. But like the Aborigine of Australia when they encounter urban living they fall apart. I have a great deal of sympathy for them in certain contexts.

  11. “The Bushman in his natural state is reasonay well adapted to his environment. But like the Aborigine of Australia when they encounter urban living they fall apart. I have a great deal of sympathy for them in certain contexts.”

    Well said.

  12. “we are no longer in Panama and if memory servers the ChiComs are running it now”

    Good to know. We waste our money and human capital in god forsaken armpits of the world like Afghanistan while the Chinese weasel themselves in to our own back yard. They are insinuating themselves into Africa nowadays too. They have no moral qualms about it either. The industrialization of 1.3 billion Chinese generates a high demand for natural resources.

  13. It’s also a pity that the Suez isn’t occupied by a European nation. The Chinese shouldn’t even get a sniff of African mineral wealth.

  14. “BTW, the average IQ of African Bushmen such as the San is around 65 not the 50 as you or one of your stupid ignorant sidekicks previously stated. And it is a lot sharper intelligence than that of a white mane with the same IQ who would act retarded. A Bushman would come across as a rational actor unlike the white who would cloearly be mentally and socially impaired. IQ as represented by a general score of ‘G’ is only a rough approximation of mental capabilities.”

    Other sterling qualities of Bushmen include their fondness for child rape, infanticide, and cannibalism. The Bushman in his natural state epitomizes the “noble savage” of whom Rudel seems to be so fond.

    Quibbling over numbers aside, their average mental capacity is significantly below the norm for any group by an order of magnitude. Bone density, cranial capacity, Neanderthal DNA, etc…

    There is less difference between a wolf and a dog than there is between a white European and a Bushman. Classification of species is as tricky as it is arbitrary and influenced by the times. Making a fetish of science is as bad as any other religious lunacy.

    Just because negroes are humanoid does not make them human.
    The family pet is not a human either, however much the family may be attached to it.

    One banana.

    Deo Vindice

  15. Noble savage?

    Well, what about “slightly harmless little hunter gatherers.”

    Crazy Horse was a noble savage. Could have used that bastard in the Crusades.

  16. “Neanderthal DNA, etc…”

    Neanderthal DNA? Sub-Saharan Africans (Negroes) don’t have any, you moron. Only Whites and Asians show any admixture.

  17. “their average mental capacity is significantly below the norm for any group by an order of magnitude.”

    Knowing what an order of magnitude means is hardly a “fetish.” Change that from moron to blithering idiot.

  18. “Neanderthal DNA? Sub-Saharan Africans (Negroes) don’t have any, you moron. Only Whites and Asians show any admixture.”

    Exactly my point. It’s like we’re talking about a different species, isn’t it?

    “Knowing what an order of magnitude means is hardly a “fetish.” Change that from moron to blithering idiot.”

    Seems I’m not the only one blithering around here…

    Shouldn’t you be getting back to the nice negro gentlemen you have befriended. I’m sure you will agree their aptitude for witty verbal repartee vastly exceeds what you may find here.

    Go on now. It’s terribly rude to keep them waiting. How uncivilized!
    One must always, always be civilized with savages…
    How noble you are in every respect.

    Deo Vindice

  19. “Neanderthal DNA? Sub-Saharan Africans (Negroes) don’t have any, you moron. Only Whites and Asians show any admixture.” How about those Boskopoids, Neanderthal-Cromagnon-related lost race of African geniuses?

  20. — those supposedly giant-brained South Africans, otherwise considered quite average, prehistoric ancestors of the Bushmen.

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