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Monroe was re-elected President in 1820 by an electoral count of 231 to 1* And it was in his second term that he promulgated his durable doctrine.
What It Said. From his days as Secretary of State, Monroe had taken a keen and solicitous interest in the Latin American colonies that revolted against Spanish rule; in 1822 the U.S. became the first power to recognize any of Latin America's new nations. In that same year, two potential menaces to the New World loomed up in the Old.
Alexander I, Czar of Russia, issued a ukase claiming the entire Pacific Coast of North America and the surrounding seas down to the 51st parallel (the northern tip of Vancouver Island). Monroe directed his Secretary of State—a prickly genius named John Quincy Adams—to draft a protest. Foreshadowing a major segment of the Monroe Doctrine, Adams informed the Russian minister in Washington "that we should contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent, and that we should assume distinctly the principle that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments." To the U.S. Minister in Russia, Adams wrote: "There can. perhaps, be no better time for saying, frankly and explicitly, to the Russian government, that the future peace of the world, and the interest of Russia herself, cannot be promoted by Russian settlements upon any part of the American continent." The second threat loomed up at the congress of European powers at Verona, Italy, in the autumn of 1822. In Spain a revolution had forced the tyrannical Ferdinand VII (Ferdinand the Unbeloved) to accept a liberal constitution. Bent on preserving absolutism, France and the Holy Alliance powers—Russia. Austria and Prussia—decided at Verona to intervene in Spain to crush the revolution.
Early the following year, a French army marched across the Pyrenees and swiftly routed the revolutionary forces.
The French invasion of Spain stirred uneasiness in Washington. It seemed possible that the Verona powers, having restored Ferdinand the Unbeloved to full power, might now turn to the New World and Spain's former colonies.
"Perfectly Moonstruck." While President Monroe was pondering this prospect, Britain's Foreign Minister George Canning proposed a joint declaration by the U.S. and British governments warning the European powers against any attempt to reconquer Spanish America.
Canning was no friend of republican revolutions, but he valued the profitable trade between Britain and the new nations of Latin America. The U.S. Minister in London laid down a condition: Britain would first have to recognize the independence of the former Spanish colonies. Canning bluntly balked.
That autumn, with the U.S.-British