Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
IF our government would have done the logical follow up to two wars, one with England and one with Spain.
Why, we could be one country from the North Pole to Central America!
We would have NO Northern border, and our Southern Border would be just South of the Panama Canal (which would still be ours!).
Cuba would perhaps be a state, or at least enjoy the same status as Puerto Rico.
Hmmmm...
Would that solve problems, or just create new and worse ones??
It is an interesting thought, though.
IF our government would have done the logical follow up to two wars, one with England and one with Spain.
Why, we could be one country from the North Pole to Central America!
We would have NO Northern border, and our Southern Border would be just South of the Panama Canal (which would still be ours!).
Cuba would perhaps be a state, or at least enjoy the same status as Puerto Rico.
Hmmmm...
Would that solve problems, or just create new and worse ones??
It is an interesting thought, though.
Actually; this thread belongs in the Great Debates or History Forum.
Although; had Manifest Destiny come to pass (Yukon to the Yucaton), North America would be largely Anglo White, affluent and English speaking-------both French and Spanish would have been suppressed and hard. Why I say 'Anglo' is that Mexico did not start exploding in population till after WW II (it quadrupled in size-------not counting several million of its citizens out of country). Had there been no Mexico, the birthrate in those hypothetical US states would have followed ours......
IF our government would have done the logical follow up to two wars, one with England and one with Spain.
I'm still patiently trying to figure out what you had in mind with that "logical follow up" term...
First off, which war with Spain are you talking about? Because we didn't exactly push Spain off the continent in 1848.
Second, we didn't "win" the war of 1812 either--the British burned down the White House, for heaven's sake! (And Andrew Jackson's famous victory at New Orleans took place in 1815...after the treaty was signed; communication in those days wasn't quite the same as it is today).
Suppose the British decided on a "logical follow up" in 1814 and came back for a second round. Do you think our independence would have survived?
Third, if not for a little sidebar known as the Civil War, which sort of tied President Lincoln's hands, we could easily have found ourselves in a war with France, which had decided to take advantage of the situation and invaded Mexico in 1864.
History rarely cooperates with speculation performed in hindsight.
The reason we did not exercise the "logical" follow-up is that we deemed such a follow-up to not be logical. Those decisions were made on the practicalities of the times.
Not sure which war with Spain you're talking about, but at the time of the Spanish American war, Spain had no possessions on the continental mainlands for us to take as spoils. The US took Florida in 1819, and at the time, we had very little interest in Tierra del Fuego, or even Panama, for that matter. The US pretty much took all it wanted in Mexico, just walking in saying "This is ours now" and fighting off a couple of skirmishes. We had more trouble taking it from the Comanches, than from the Mexicans. Originally the border was the Nueces, and we said what the hell, we'll take it to the Rio Grande, just to be on the safe side.
As has been mentioned, what we did WAS actually the logical follow-up to our wars with England which was thanking our lucky stars that we survived them because they were busy fighting France elsewhere, and to try to NEVER goad them into another war again where the stakes got too large for them to ignore....
Also, don't forget that we actually did invade Quebec during the Revolution. Had the results been better, we wouldn't have had a northern border other than the Arctic Ocean by the time the 18th century ended!
In the only war that the US had with Spain, the US did indeed wind up with the few sparrow fart colonies which Spain still had in the west. Had the US followed the war with Spain by invading and siezing all of Central America, that would have been new wars....wars against Mexico, El Salvador, Cosa Rica etc., not against Spain.
We should have kept Cuba and the Phillipines,like We did Puerto Rico and Guam.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
