When Past Meets Present: Russian California and the Monroe Doctrine
During this week’s Radio Free California podcast, cohosts David Bahnsen and myself discussed the return of the Monroe Doctrine, now offered as the logic behind the Trump administration’s decision to blow up Venezuelan drug boats and to invite that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, to step outside.
It’s unlikely most Americans know that the doctrine, which President James Monroe announced in his December 2, 1823, address to Congress, was a direct response to events in California.
To understand that story, begin with the Russian-American Company’s establishment in 1799 of a fur-trapping settlement in Sitka, Alaska. By 1805, it was clear the Sitka project was in deep trouble. The Russian fur trappers had wiped out the local sea otter population. Savage North Pacific storms had sunk countless resupply ships dispatched from Siberia. The settlers’ attempts to cultivate crops in the frozen, rocky soil had come to nothing. Scurvy and starvation stalked Sitka.
Into this desperate scene sailed Nikolai Rezanov, a high-ranking envoy of the Russian Empire, tasked with saving the Russian-American Company’s settlement. In dispatches to St. Petersburg, he declared the place in “an extreme state of want,” “without bread, flour, or meat enough to last the winter.” And though local Tinglit fighters, “brave and well-armed,” had already destroyed the place once, in 1802, Sitka remained “barely defensible.” The “damp, cold, overcrowded quarters” were, he declared, “unfit for long habitation.”
Significantly, he concluded, “The colony cannot sustain itself without trade beyond our borders.”
Rezanov faced a practical problem: The nearest relief supplies might be available in Spanish California. But the Sitka colony had no ship capable of making that long voyage, so Rezanov purchased the Juno, an American-built brig that had just dropped anchor in Sitka’s harbor.
With the sparest of crews, Rezanov turned the Juno’s prow south and sailed along the Pacific Coast toward Spanish California. The Juno slipped into San Francisco Bay in March or early April of 1806. Rezanov was struck by what he saw there: fertile hills, mission fields rich with grain and cattle, and, most noteworthy, a sparsely defended Spanish presidio.
The Spaniards greeted the Russian uneasily. Trade with foreigners was forbidden under Spanish law, and a Russian ship in their harbor was an obvious threat. But they treated Rezanov with a mix of courtesy and suspicion. They hosted him at the presidio, offering accommodations, guided tours and lavish dinners. Rezanov was especially struck by the barbacoa.
Despite the letter of Spanish law, Commandant José Darío Argüello allowed limited trade, exchanging grain and flour for Russian nails, gun powder, textiles, jewelry, and, of course, vodka.
The 42-year-old Rezanov surprised everyone by openly courting Argüello’s 15-year-old daughter, Concepción. Their speedy engagement alarmed officers, who feared it could be a pretext for Russian claims on Alta California.
Within weeks, Rezanov boarded the Juno, now riding low in the water with its cargo of grain and flour for Alaska. He departed with a promise: He would seek the Czar’s blessing, and when successful — as he knew he would be — he would return to marry Concepción.
Rezanov survived the Juno’s return to Sitka, and made the second leg of the journey to the port of Okhotsk in Siberia’s Far East. But the third leg, a 7,000-mile overland journey to St Petersburg, ended when he was reportedly thrown from a horse. He never returned for Concepción. Heartbroken, she entered the Convent of Santa Catalina de Siena in Monterey, Alta California, and served the rest of her life in the California missions.
But Rezanov’s vivid descriptions of Northern California survived him. At court in St. Petersburg, they proved inspiring: Five years after Rezanov’s death, the Russian-American Company established Fort Ross, about 90 miles north of San Francisco, in modern-day Sonoma County. That colony of Russian settlers, Aleut hunters, and local laborers would help supply Sitka and provide a foothold for Russian expansion throughout the North American West.
Fort Ross proved so successful that, in 1821, Russia issued its claim to vast stretches of the Pacific Northwest of what’s now the U.S.-Canadian border. Foreign shipping and fur trapping were absolutely prohibited, the Russians said.
In Washington, alarm bells rang. In July 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, soon to become the nation’s sixth president and already a man of capacious diplomatic experience, summoned the Russian envoy to his office. Adams told the Russian that the U.S. would “contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent” and emphasized that the American continents — North and South — “are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments.”
Adams’s assertion was included in President James Monroe’s annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. What we now call the Monroe Doctrine warned Europeans that any attempt — including Russian — to extend their political systems into the Americas “will be considered as dangerous to our peace and safety.”
Thus, a Russian mission to save an Alaskan fur-trading settlement, the purchase of an American ship, a Spanish California romance, and the settlement of a Russian fort in California helped spark the Monroe Doctrine — a policy that would shape hemispheric politics for generations right down to this very week.
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host with David Bahnsen of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast.
This article originally appeared in National Review.
