No-Transfer Resolution
No-Transfer Resolution
No-Transfer Resolution, the first U.S. government statement, for the purpose of its own security, expressing opposition to the transfer of territories in the Western Hemisphere from one European power to another. With the Spanish colonial empire crumbling, the United States faced the possibility that the Floridas, particularly West Florida, where Americans had settled under Spanish land grants, might fall under British or French control. With Spanish authority weakened, President James Madison in 1810 placed the territory between the Mississippi and Perdido rivers under U.S. control. In response to British and Spanish protests, Congress, on 15 January 1811, quickly passed a resolution and legislation that empowered the president to take the land in question until future negotiations settled the issue. In so doing, Congress set a fundamental principle of U.S. policy toward the Spanish Borderlands, which Secretary of State John Quincy Adams extended in 1823 to include Cuba, and Monroe, in his doctrine, extended to all Latin America. In 1940, following the outbreak of the European war, Congress passed a resolution calling for joint hemispheric action in case of transfer or attempted transfer of colonies. The no-transfer principle was adopted by the Latin American governments at the Havana Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs in July 1940.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
John A. Logan, No Transfer: An American Security Principle (1961).
Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine, rev. ed. (1963).
Additional Bibliography
Dent, David W. The Legacy of the Monroe Doctrine: A Reference Guide to U.S. Involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Hilton, Sylvia-Lyn. "La 'nueva' doctrina Monroe de 1895 y sus implicaciones para el Caribe español: Algunas interpretaciones coetáneas españolas." Anuario de Estudios Americanos. 55:1 (January-June 1998): 125-151.
Smith, Gaddis. The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.
Thomas M. Leonard