“Recognition of Cuban Independence”: Henry Adams and Empire Building

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Drawing on the correspondence of Henry Adams (1838-1918), one of the keenest observers and commentators on US politics throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century, this paper examines a report he prepared on behalf of Senator James Donald Cameron (1833-1918) of Pennsylvania, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, entitled “Recognition of Cuban Independence” (1896), to try and justify the right of intervention of the United States in the cause of Cuban independence. Centered on two major arguments, national interest and the existence of a government already in place on the island of Cuba, the document in question, which hitherto has not been subject to any major scholarly examination, embodies many of the principles Adams felt should have guided American foreign policy at the time, bringing to light the extent to which he was a firm believer in the “manifest destiny” of the United States to help Latin American colonies break away from their European rulers within the framework of the Monroe Doctrine.