The decline and fall of the Spanish Empire does not challenge the imagination like the decline and fall of that other Empire with which alone it can be compared, possibly because no Gibbon has chronicled its greatness. Yet its dissolution affected profoundly the history of three continents. While the Floridas were slipping from the grasp of Spain, the provinces to the south were wrenching themselves loose, with protestations which penetrated to European chancelleries as well as to American legislative halls. To Czar Alexander and Prince Metternich, sponsors for the Holy Alliance and preservers of the peace of Europe, these declarations of independence contained the same insidious philosophy of revolution which they had pledged themselves everywhere to combat. To simple American minds, the familiar words liberty and independence in the mouths of South American patriots meant what they had to their own grandsires, struggling to throw off the shackles of British imperial control. Neither Europe nor America, however, knew the actual conditions in these newborn republics below the equator; and both governed their conduct by their prepossessions.
To the typically American mind of Henry Clay, now untrammeled by any sense of responsibility, for he was a free lance in the House of Representatives once more, the emancipation of South America was a thrilling and sublime spectacle--"the glorious spectacle of eighteen millions of people struggling to burst their chains and to be free." In a memorable speech in 1818 he had expressed the firm conviction that there could be but one outcome to this struggle. Independent these South American states would be. Equally clear to his mind was their political destiny. Whatever their forms of government, they would be animated by an American feeling and guided by an American policy. "They will obey the laws of the system of the new world, of which they will compose a part, in contradistinction to that of Europe." To this struggle and to this destiny the United States could not remain indifferent. He would not have the Administration depart from its policy of strict and impartial neutrality but he would urge the expediency--nay, the justice--of recognizing established governments in Spanish America. Such recognition was not a breach of neutrality, for it did not imply material aid in the wars of liberation but only the moral sympathy of a great free people for their southern brethren.