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But as our practical needs were served, so too was our idealistic strain. James Madison declared that "the free system of Government we have established is so congenial with reason, with common sense, and with a universal feeling, that it must produce approbation and a desire of imitation−Our country, if it does justice to itself, will be the workshop of liberty to the civilized world, and do more than any other for the uncivilized." The implications of this outlook would lead both to the advocacy of interventionism, as in Edward Everett's 1823 case for supporting the Greek revolution, and isolation, as in William Seward's 1863 rebuttal of requests to oppose Russia's mistreatment of Poland.
Yet throughout the 19th century, our greatest achievements came through efforts marked by both moral vision and practical purpose. Theodore Roosevelt noted that long before Jefferson negotiated an end to the French claim to Louisiana, that and other foreign claims had been effectively undermined by the great western movement of Americans and the free communities they quickly founded. But the consolidation of their pioneering achievements was made possible by those negotiations and by subsequent diplomatic successes. The annexation of Florida, the Oregon boundary settlement with Great Britain, the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the Gadsden Purchase, the purchase of Alaska from Russia−all were triumphs of diplomacy during decades when most citizens believed America did not have, or need, a foreign policy.
Indeed, our very achievements in dealing with the world brought most Americans under the sway of a shared mythology. As a society of men and women who had fled the persecutions and power politics of the Old World, Americans−whether Mayflower descendants or refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848−came to assume that we were beyond the reach of the imperatives of traditional foreign policy.
With our security assured, we became bemused by the popular belief that President Monroe's obligation to defend the Western Hemisphere, and indeed almost any obligation we might choose to assume, depended on unilateral American decisions
to be entered into or ended entirely at our discretion. Americans never paid attention to British Foreign Secretary George Canning's justification of the Monroe Doctrine: "We have called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the old." Shielded by two oceans and enriched by a bountiful nature, we proclaimed our special situation as universally valid, even for nations whose narrower margin of survival meant that their range of choices was far more limited than our own.
It was, as C. Vann Woodward has called it, "the age of free security." As usual, Abraham Lincoln depicted it most vividly. "Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years."