The U.S. Declaration’s account of inalienable rights became a prominent example to follow for other American movements, with its ideas proliferating throughout the hemisphere by way of the press, political manifestos, and the first constitutions. For instance, the language of liberty and happiness framed Mexican Revolutionaries’ 1813 Constitution of Chilpancingo, which granted citizenship to all Americans (people born in the “new world”) or to non-Americans who aligned with the project of anti-colonial resistance. Similar language would also appear in the “Declarations” of the Republic of Texas (1813), Cartagena de Indias (1811), and the United Provinces of South America (1816). As such, anti-colonial revolution in the Americas evolved as a shared project of popular liberation that stretched from Boston to Buenos Aires.
Shared sentiments associated with the Declaration, in turn, influenced the direction of 19th-century revolutionary U.S. politics. As historian Caitlin Fitz shows, many U.S. citizens understood themselves as part of the revolutionary efforts of their hemispheric “sister republics.” These connections manifested in songs, orations, poems, and plays like James Workman’s Liberty in Louisiana, which deployed comedy to simultaneously argue against Spanish rule in the region while celebrating the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. In the “borderlands” that today comprise Louisiana to California, in particular, national identities were not fully formed, and political rhetoric rarely operated within the constraints of state borders. This is reflected in the print activity of the region. Newspapers like El Misisipi (founded in New Orleans in 1808), for example, published in parallel Spanish and English columns to comment on events that cut across French, Spanish, and U.S. jurisdictions.
These points of exchange have been overlooked in favor of the simpler story of a nation-state that emerged and developed linearly and with little relation to parallel national projects. Nationalist histories are useful for retroactively concretizing the state as a perennial institution, but they do so at a cost. They evade the reality that cultural, social, and political practices and identities necessarily operated more freely. A more interesting history emerges when one takes seriously that early 19th-century nation-states were at best weak institutions with real concerns surrounding re-conquest. Americans throughout the hemisphere had a desperate need for regional allies and like-minded revolutionaries.