Sea Control - Sea Control 499 - The US Navy and Diplomacy in South America with Dr. Katrina Ponti

Episode Date: March 2, 2024

Links:1.  Seapower by Other Means, edited by J. Overton, ISPK Seapower Series, 2023. 2. Sea Control 487 - Naval Exploration and Global Empire with Dr. Michael Verney, CIMSEC, December 28, 2023. 3. Dr. Katrina Ponti

Hey, folks, it's Jared. Dr. Katrina Ponte is our guest today, and we're going to discuss her chapter contribution to a larger edited volume. She covered U.S. Navy diplomacy in South America. This episode was edited and produced by Nate Miller. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Technology.

Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Katrina Ponte, and we're going to be discussing her contribution to the book, Sea Power by Other Means. Her chapter was entitled, Our Proud-Spirited Fellows, the U.S. Navy and Diplomacy in South America. So Katrina, welcome aboard. Could you start by telling the listeners a little bit more about your background, please? Yeah. Hi, Jared. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. So I grew up in South Central Pennsylvania, right along the Susquehanna River and the larger Chesapeake Bay watershed. So I did much of my academic work there in central Pennsylvania at our wonderful state

schools. I mainly studied political science and international affairs, and then I saw the light and became a historian. And for my graduate work, I moved up to Rochester, New York for my PhD in history, where I worked with Professor Mike Jarvis. There I got a great education on Atlantic history, as well as the larger maritime world that the young United States lived in. Today, I'm an Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center attached to the Harvard Kennedy School. One aspect of this

fellowship is to encourage other young historians to both pursue academic history, but also find aspects of that research that might offer lessons for modern public policy issues. And that's what brought me to write about this project. All right. Well, then this is a good outreach platform for folks who are interested in the program that you just described. Can I ask what led you sort of down the maritime path? What captured your attention as you were pursuing your academic degrees? Maybe a little shallow, but Bermuda. My advisor wrote the book on the history of Bermuda and he kind of hooked me. He studies one of the sister colonies of Jamestown and it just sort of opened this really wonderful world of historical maritime international relations that I hadn't

known existed before. And it was just this kind of great eye-opening experience, especially to alter my own personal understanding of early America and our colonial past that I hadn't thought of before. And that interconnectedness really, really interested me. All right. I'm glad I asked to follow this. I will follow up with you afterwards about your advisor and his book, because that sounds like an episode unto itself. But we'll get into the larger questions here. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. You start with a vignette about an American ship visiting Brazil, then a Portuguese colony. Why did you choose that particular vignette to open

the paper? I liked the wording of it. So two reasons. I did like the wording. It was really striking to me how that's where I got the quote, our proud spirited fellows. The writer of the journal that I drew this from, William Henry Murray Brackenridge, excuse me, he just had a great way with words. The second was the vignette, which describes this kind of spontaneous encounter between Queen Carlotta of Portugal and just these strapping young American sailors, I think is kind of this beautiful contrast. These sailors, American sailors were attached to the USS Congress and they were part of what James Monroe called the South America Commission, which was three American commissioners sent to on a fact-finding mission to both Brazil and Argentina to understand

the geopolitical situation unfolding there and I thought this was just a really cool moment of contrast where on one hand it draws you into the reality of wait there's royalty of like an ancient the ancient Proconza family living in the new world and then these Americans are there meeting them which you don't right what are the odds that like a common young working class American man is a queen so so that's kind of those um striking contrasts but it also draws us at least hopefully i hope so it draws us straight into what is a really interesting contrast into american democracy coming straight into clash with european aristocratic old world retrenchment and i really wanted to kind of draw that that straight into my discussion of the larger commission and

why America was there and these really old entrenched systems that the U.S. came to represent as the opposite of. Can you explain the geopolitical situation in Brazil in that time period and why it was so fraught? So the world, to take a quick zoom out of the world that the United States, now about 40 years old, as an independent nation, was sailing into. In 1818, when this essay takes place, the larger Atlantic world was in a pretty significant moment of transition. Napoleon was just defeated. He had died on his exile island. And the governments of Europe were essentially in a moment of retrenchment. The Congress of Vienna had occurred in 1815. which essentially set up the five-power system.

These five European nations led the rest of Western Europe in a concert of nations discussing and arguing over foreign affairs together. But they were really trying to harken back to days in which aristocracy governed and all of these upstarts that want republics and democracies. We tried that. You saw what happened in France. We don't want that revolution ever again. But in the flash over to the New World, South and Central America, there are revolutions occurring, partially caused by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. And as a result, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of South America and Central America saw their moment to revolt, and at least the intent was to develop a Republican-style system of countries in that region, largely inspired by what the United States had done. so essentially between 1808 and 1822 a series of revolts juntas insurrections and civil wars

were essentially ravaging spanish south america and in the middle of all of this portuguese royal family has now decamped from portugal fleeing napoleon to its own colony in brazil and now Rio de Janeiro instead of Lisbon is now the capital of the Portuguese empire. So essentially they went right from the frying pan into the fire in a lot of ways, right? They went from Napoleonic Europe fleeing that warfare to now what was relatively a peaceful colony in Brazil, however, surrounded by all of this unrest. So in 1818, when the U.S. Navy ship, the Congress arrives in Rio de Janeiro, crammed, you know, a military vessel crammed full of officers and sailors rolling into Rio de Janeiro, claiming to be a diplomatic mission. Everyone's a bit

on edge because this could bring war or peace just by virtue of what was happening around the Atlantic Rim at that point. Which two groups was the U.S. most interested in influencing with this mission and why? So as the Congress is sailing into Rio de Janeiro, the U.S. government with President Monroe at its head didn't know what was going on. The situation on the ground was constantly changing. So essentially, they roughly knew the lines of battle. They knew the leaders of the revolutions occurring in Argentina and the larger Rio de la Plata region. they roughly knew the situation of Brazil. Brazil, which was relatively peaceful, it was a point that they understood, they knew, right? Which is a little ironic, right? The American

members of a democracy found the aristocrats more familiar and friendly to deal with than their fellow revolutionaries in Argentina and so in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro the Americans were seeking to cultivate good relations with the court there with other diplomats the more formal echelons of society there so they really wanted to to show off to these the king and queen and aristocrats that yeah we're we're a real nation we're a little different but they're just trying to be friendly, you know, just be more formal. And then, so that was the first group they wanted to get to, or to show off to with their strapping young sailors. But then the second group was the revolutionaries of Argentina, who were in the process of trying to form a larger union of

South American states. It succeeded and failed to various measures. And I think what they were trying to do there was the more informal type of diplomacy where each individual leader of the three commissioners, as well as their secretaries, were trying to make more informal friendships. Certainly one of the commissioners, Cesar Rodney, met with the leaders of the junta, but ultimately it was the secretaries who was, one was a botanist and one was a linguist, were going out talking to farmers about their crops and making friends with other scientists, right? It was a much more informal kind of friendly way of fact-finding and intelligence gathering compared to what was going on in brazil and i think by including kind of these more

informal members of the mission which i was very interested in and i i study more in my my more formal book research that i found the most interesting about this commission yes we have these really you know really well respected american commissioners um who are very established in their political careers but then you do have right you have the sailors you have the secretaries who are actually doing right a lot of the practical more clerical work or martial work but but are also right they're meeting people they're getting to know each other they're the first americans many of these south americans will will have or will ever meet and right there this kind of effect of showing the flag and showing the american human body is is i think a really important aspect of

diplomacy that gets overlooked. Why was USS Congress selected to undertake this mission? So the USS Congress was one of the six foundational frigates of the U.S. Navy, very legendary. It was built in 1799. It was sent on this mission mostly for the reason this was it's part of its regular patrol route. At the time, these original frigates mostly had patrol duty. They were essentially policemen trying to protect the U.S. coast as well as U.S. shipping throughout the Atlantic. So the Congress had the South Atlantic leg of this Atlantic area. So it had frequently patrolled the Gulf of Mexico, South Atlantic, its officers, and many of its crewmen were all at least familiar with these ports. They knew the waters very well, and it

was free. The U.S. government didn't have to pay the ship to take its commissioners if they had taken a more private merchant vessel. And what was the ultimate outcome of the mission? So I think the big overarching one here is that the information gathered by the commissioners was essentially that James Monroe had enough information on the situation on the ground to formulate his early ideas for the Monroe Doctrine, which he eventually promulgated in 1823, December 2nd, so 200 year anniversary this year or last year. And essentially this was his declaration of the Western Hemisphere was closed to future colonization or recolonization, which the five powers of Europe seemed interested in doing as part of their retrenchment scheme.

That, among other things, the Monroe Doctrine is a very complicated history in and of itself. Another of the three major outcomes of this mission as well was that the U.S. Navy had essentially proved its use in both diplomacy and in deterrence. Often, the very presence of the U.S. Navy in the waters around South America helped protect U.S. merchant shipping into the Pacific. Congress eventually, the vessel Congress, eventually extended its patrol route into the Pacific and became the first Navy vessel to reach China. And so the U.S. Navy, alongside the British Navy. They worked in partnership. They essentially enforced the Monroe Doctrine into South America. And on the political front, the commissioners of Congress,

each of them wrote public pieces in American newspapers pleading their case for what they found. So they essentially brought the American public into the discussion for the doctrine. Here's what we found in South America. There are our sister republics, to shout out Caitlin Fitz's book, Our Sister Republics, a great book to read on about, again, the cultural and social situation and economic situation between the U.S. and South American republics. So they essentially introduced this new discussion about foreign affairs in the U.S. And finally was also the cultural front.

As I mentioned, there were botanists on board the vessel, and many of their specimens went into what would eventually become the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. And again, bringing the public into this world, sharing openly what the commission did, what they found physically and ideologically. So I think that was also a major outcome for U.S. foreign affairs, or at least the democratic aspects of foreign affairs, right? Bringing the public into this wider discussion of the U.S. presence in the hemisphere and really opening up these discussions in a public way. And I think those were definitely the major outcomes of the mission. And I think kind of this moment in my essay kind of is a really interesting little look into a larger, you know, geopolitical moment of upheaval in American history that can get overlooked sometimes. well i'm sorry that that's all that we have time for today i will highlight for listeners one thing if you want to go back and listen to sea control 47 with dr michael verney uh talking about naval

exploration um there's there's a lot of similar themes in the discussion that we just had with katrina but i'd like to thank my guest dr katrina ponti where can we find you online and what are you working on next i'm not really much on twitter anymore blue sky um fortunately um but i do have a website, just Google Katrina Ponte. I'll pop right up. But for my next project and my larger book manuscript, which I am writing for University of Virginia Press, is entitled Virtuous Emulations of Liberty. It explores U.S. diplomatic history between the Revolution and Monroe Doctrine. And I use the lens of citizen diplomacy and culture as a way to kind of get at these 40 years of diplomacy and there's a lot of great characters that appear and it hopefully should be out on

shelves in the next year and a half to two years are there a lot of sailors popping up in the research there yeah there's quite a few okay great so i look forward to when it comes out and maybe we can bring you back to discuss it uh we will have a link for your website include in the show notes as well so uh if for the listeners if like if your google's not working out for you, you should be able to find it in our show notes. But thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you.