At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the United States was a fledgling power, weaker than many European countries in both economic and military terms. The central government had effective control over only a small area of the continent, and disputes between it and the states were already well entrenched. The country had continental aspirations, but only gradually would it begin moving its border westward. The power imbalance between the United States and Latin America was therefore not yet great, but it would rapidly swing in favour of the U.S. in the first decades of the century. This chapter analyzes the challenges in establishing and maintaining relations between governments in the United States and Latin America and concludes with the post–Civil War period, at which time U.S. economic and military power markedly increased.

Chapter 3 addresses the most brazen instance of rogue diplomacy in the annals of U.S. statecraft: envoy Nicholas Trist's all but single-handed forging of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after he had been fired - not once but twice - by President James K. Polk. Trist's epochal act of mutiny obtained all the territory Polk had initially authorized him to demand - California, New Mexico, and Texas as far south as the Rio Grande - and at half the envisioned price: $15 million as opposed to $30 million. It also, I contend, saved the United States from the ordeal of a long, debilitating, and expensive guerrilla war with Mexico that would have poisoned U.S.-Latin American relations for over a century. Although Trist was ultimately arrested for his defiance of the president and spent the rest of his life working dead-end jobs to provide for his children, he did more than any other individual to make Manifest Destiny a reality. Trist's triumph, I argue, was in great part a consequence of his personality, for which the term "rebellious" could have been invented. I dig deep into Trist's life and career(s), establishing a constant pattern of behavior: he could not defer to authority, no matter how essential submission was to worldly success. This character defect, which would seem fatal for a diplomat, ironically facilitated Trist's great work in the winter of 1847-48.