“A Stalwart Motor of Revolutions”: An American Merchant in Pernambuco, 1817-1825

Abstract

A new order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century, or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all of Portuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe, casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governments instead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, as the new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well as offer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete European alliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together around republican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicians were no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from the hemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures and agricultural surplus.