HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Spain and Portugal: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 375

War was the siege of Pensacola and the
defeat of the British forces there in 1781.
Once the United States had secured recog-
nition as a sovereign nation, the Spanish
government assumed a less benign attitude.
Although there was a treaty providing for
normal diplomatic relations, the new nation
was already worried during the 1780s by
Spain's control of East and West F LORIDA ,
the L OUISIANA Territory, and, at least in the-
ory, the greater part of western North
America. Spain was perceived by the United
States in these early days of the republic in
much the same light as Great Britain, being
officially at peace with the United States
but as much a potential menace along the
southeastern borders as the British were
along the Canadian and Great Lakes fron-
tier. One of the senior officers of the U.S.
Army, General James Wilkinson, was in
fact secretly in the pay of M ADRID , provid-
ing valuable information about his coun-
try's political and military policies.
The wars of the French Revolution and
Napoléon completely altered this situation.
After 1815 the United States no longer saw
Spain as a looming menace but rather as a
power in decline. The Louisiana Territory,
which Spain had retroceded to France, had
then been acquired by President Thomas
Jefferson, and Florida was sold by Spain to
the United States, under pressure, in 1819.
Within another decade Spain had been
ousted from M EXICO , and the frontiers were
now issues between Washington and its
Mexican or Amerindian neighbors. Ameri-
can expansionism was not limited, how-
ever, to former Spanish colonies, such as
T EXAS and C ALIFORNIA . By the 1830s there
was already talk of intervening in C UBA as
a possible zone of expansion for slave-hold-
ing interests. The disputes between Wash-

ington and Madrid over the slave ship
Amistad, the issues raised by the Ostend
Manifesto, and the ongoing implications of
the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 were merely
reminders of Spain's reversal of fortune in
a region where it had once predominated.
Even the literary activity of such American
writers as William H. Prescott and John L.
Motley emphasized the darker side of
Spain's Golden Age, while George Bancroft
presented the rise of American democracy
in clear conflict with the perceived Black
Legend (L EYENDA N EGRA ) of Spanish infamy.
Once the Civil War had swept away slavery
as an issue, a rising spirit of imperialism,
fueled by such prophets of naval power as
Alfred Thayer Mahan, turned American
eyes upon Spain's remaining colonies in the
Caribbean and the Pacific. As early as 1876
George Bancroft, ambassador to Germany,
was instructed to pursue secret (and ulti-
mately unsuccessful) negotiations with
Spain for the sale of Vieques, a dependency
of P UERTO R ICO , as a naval base. American
sympathy, if not outright support, was
extended to Cuban insurrectionists in the
1860s and 1890s. Similar American interest
was displayed toward nationalists in the
P HILIPPINE I SLANDS during the same period,
as American commercial and political inter-
ests spread across the Pacific.
Early in 1898 the ambivalences of a
century's relations ended in war. The
S PANISH -A MERICAN W AR lasted only a few
months but resulted in the loss of nearly
all of Spain's remaining colonial empire.
The Philippines were annexed outright, as
was Guam, the most valuable of the
M ARIANA I SLANDS . Cuba was “liberated”
but maintained as a virtual protectorate
of the United States for some 60 years.
Puerto Rico, transformed since 1898 into