With equal sang-froid, the Secretary of State met threatened aggression from another quarter. In September of this same year, the Czar issued a ukase claiming the Pacific coast as far south as the fifty-first parallel and declaring Bering Sea closed to the commerce of other nations. Adams promptly refused to recognize these pretensions and declared to Baron de Tuyll, the Russian Minister, "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." *
* Before Adams retired from office, he had the satisfaction of concluding a treaty (1824) with Russia by which the Czar abandoned his claims to exclusive jurisdiction in Bering Sea and agreed to plant no colonies on the Pacific Coast south of 54 degrees 40 minutes.
Not long after this interview Adams was notified by Baron Tuyll that the Czar, in conformity with the political principles of the allies, had determined in no case whatever to receive any agent from the Government of the Republic of Colombia or from any other government which owed its existence to the recent events in the New World. Adams's first impulse was to pen a reply that would show the inconsistency between these political principles and the unctuous professions of Christian duty which had resounded in the Holy Alliance; but the note which he drafted was, perhaps fortunately, not dispatched until it had been revised by President and Cabinet a month later, under stress of other circumstances.
At still another focal point the interests of the United States ran counter to the covetous desires of European powers. Cuba, the choicest of the provinces of Spain, still remained nominally loyal; but, should the hold of Spain upon this Pearl of the Antilles relax, every maritime power would swoop down upon it. The immediate danger, however, was not that revolution would here as elsewhere sever the province from Spain, leaving it helpless and incapable of self-support, but that France, after invading Spain and restoring the monarchy, would also intervene in the affairs of her provinces. The transfer of Cuba to France by the grateful King was a possibility which haunted the dreams of George Canning at Westminster as well as of John Quincy Adams at Washington. The British Foreign Minister attempted to secure a pledge from France that she would not acquire any Spanish-American territory either by conquest or by treaty, while the Secretary of State instructed the American Minister to Spain not to conceal from the Spanish Government "the repugnance of the United States to the transfer of the Island of Cuba by Spain to any other power." Canning was equally fearful lest the United States should occupy Cuba and he would have welcomed assurances that it had no designs upon the island. Had he known precisely the attitude of Adams, he would have been still more uneasy, for Adams was perfectly sure that Cuba belonged "by the laws of political as well as of physical gravitation" to the North American continent, though he was not for the present ready to assist the operation of political and physical laws.
