had fought so passionately in the War of Independence. To be meddlers themselves would have represented a betrayal of the revolutionary cause. In addition, the rest of the Americas had yet to be liberated from the yoke of Spain, so the notion of the U.S. leadership in a hemisphere of free nations did not yet have relevance.
By the turn of the century things had begun to change. Jefferson, once he had assumed the presidency, began to change his views on the limits of U.S. expansion. In 1803, the United States purchased from the French an enormous piece of land whose acquisition doubled the size of the nation. Justifying the Louisiana purchase, Jefferson told Americans in his second inaugural address that it was "better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should be settled by our own brethren and children than by strangers of another family."
The crumbling of the Spanish Empire several years later heightened the American's awareness of the vulnerability of the European powers. In the 1920s Monroe and his Secretary John Quincy Adams saw the shifting of influence as both a threat to and an opportunity for the United States. But Adams did not wish the United States to be a "cock-boat in the wake of a British man-of-war" and instead urged Monroe to act unilaterally." By declaring the newly independent states of the Americas "henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power," Monroe was staking a claim, perhaps unwittingly, to the role of sole hemispheric protector.
If the Monroe Doctrine set a tone of paternalism to its relations with Latin America, it certainly did not prevent Europe from interfering in the internal affairs of the independent states. Indeed, records reveal at least 16 examples of New World incursions by European powers during the 19th century, ranging from a French and British naval blockade of Buenos Aires in 1843 to the installation of a British prote...