In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Border Law: The First Seminole War and American Nationhood by Deborah A. Rosen
  • J. C. A. Stagg
Border Law: The First Seminole War and American Nationhood. By Deborah A. Rosen (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2015) 316pp. $45.00

Historians are generally skeptical about the “legality” of Andrew Jackson’s incursion, in the spring of 1818, into Spanish Florida, territory belonging to a nation at peace with the United States. The invasion lacked the sanction of any constitutionally mandated process, and it subjected persons of African, British, and Indian descent to summary execution, with scant regard for due process. Americans condemned or defended these actions according to a variety of criteria that they could draw from natural law, the law of nations, legal positivism, and racially based ideologies about the attributes of “civilized” and “savage” peoples. Jackson’s gambit worked, however. Neither Great Britain nor Spain broke relations with Washington, and the United States gained undisputed title to Florida while strengthening its control over the African and Indian peoples residing along its southern borderlands.

The great value of Rosen’s new study of this episode is its illumination of the complexities, which she analyzes in terms of legality, as Americans understood it at the time. She describes the episode as a turning point in both the building of the American nation-state and the formation of an American national identity. The United States began to move away from its formative identity as a federal republic, constituted by inclusive and universalistic notions of law, to become a more exclusionist sovereign state willing to advance its interests aggressively in the name of exceptionalism and nationalism. Rosen presents this case with thoroughness and skill, relying largely on evidence drawn from Congressional debates and voting patterns and incorporating a range of insights derived from recent developments in cultural, intellectual, and legal history.

Rosen’s contribution is an important one, though at times her arguments both clarify and distort the meaning of the events. The transformation that she describes was less the result of a distinct turning point in 1818 than of a crystallizing moment—only one of many—in a much longer process that began before 1818 and did not reach full fruition until the imperial expansionism of the 1890s. Rosen understands this process well enough, but students of American expansion would do well to [End Page 603] recall a remark attributed to Jackson by John Quincy Adams that does not appear in her book. It speaks volumes about Jackson’s regard for legal propriety: “Damn Grotius! Damn Pufendorf! Damn Vattel! This is a mere matter between Jim Monroe and myself!”1 Legalities be damned indeed!

J. C. A. Stagg
University of Virginia

Footnotes

1. See Henry A. Wise, Seven Decades of the Union: The Humanities and Materialism, Illustrated by a Memoir of John Tyler, with Reminiscences of Some of His Great Contemporaries: The Transition State of This Nation, Its Dangers and Their Remedy (Philadelphia, 1881), 152.

...

pdf

Share