| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James E. Lewis, Jr.. The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783–1829. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 304. Cloth $49.95, paper $18.95.

Historians of United States foreign policy now assume an intimate linkage among ideas, interests, partisanship, external context, and personality in order to understand how diplomacy unfolds. Policy makers in the early republic, the period covered in this study by James E. Lewis, Jr., quickly felt the constraints within which they worked as ideas fought reality. Lewis focuses on presidents and secretaries of state for two major themes: the War of 1812, and Spanish-American relations. He analyzes the latter more subtly than Frank L. Owsley and Gene A. Smith did in Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800–1821 (1997). And while he accepts expansionism as a driving force, Lewis believes that American leaders to the Jacksonian era had a primarily defensive cast of mind. The book's title misleads somewhat, however, because its author is at least as concerned with how early American nationalism interwove with republicanism, federalism, and union—as enshrined in the Constitution of 1787—as he is with the concept of neighborhood. . . .

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