Thread by @arctotherium42

A few excerpts from "Years of Peril and Ambition: US Foreign Relations 1776-1921." Several terms from the Treaty of Paris, especially that Britain would abandon its Great Lakes forts and the US would have the right to navigate the Mississippi, were not upheld.

Americans who moved into Spanish Louisiana retained "allegiance to the United States and displayed open contempt for their nominal rulers." Imagine that.

An 1810, American immigrants to Spanish West Florida seized control of Baton Rouge, proclaimed an independent republic and requested annexation by the US, though this failed.

The US attempt to conquer Canada in the War of 1812 failed due to the nearly non-existent and unprofessional army.

The Kentucky militia was notorious for wearing paint and carrying (and using) scalping knives in the War of 1812.

Only 6000 Mexicans lived in California before 1848. An American captain, Thomas Jones, accidentally conquered the province in 1842 because he thought a war had started, then gave it back and apologized when he realized he was mistaken.

US annexations (during/shortly after the Mexican-American War) were limited by racial concerns; this is why the US did not annex the Yucatan (or, separately Hawaii) despite the request of Yucatan's (Hawaii's) rulers: not wanting to be contaminated by uncivilized Indians.

The New York Times, 1854: Central America will be great if a race of Northmen supplant the tainted, mongrel, and decaying race which now occupies the region.

The Republican ascendancy after the Civil War (ie, the people who fought and won the Civil War) disdained expansion into the Caribbean on the grounds that incorporating a large non-white population might "poison the future of this great nation."

This attitude applied to Cuba as well (in 1868, just a couple years after the Civil War); Republicans opposed taking territory inhabited by mixed races on the grounds that it would degrade the American people and their institutions.

Demographic changes in Hawaii, specifically the immigration of white American planters and Asian (mostly Japanese) laborers, rendered the native Hawaiians a "dispossessed minority" and set the stage for later annexation.

One of America's first humanitarian aid initiatives was relieving the massive Russian famine of 1891, feeding perhaps 125,000 people.

Americans fighting in Cuba during the Spanish-American war came to view their Spanish enemies more favorably than their Cuban allies, as a bulwark against race war and for the protection of property and order.

Anti-imperialists opposed toe annexation of the Philippines on the grounds that it would add another race problem to the existing black one in the South.

One of the first cases of diaspora pressure changing US foreign policy was the Jewish lobby successfully destroying the Russian-American Commercial Treaty of 1832 in 1906.