Professor Stagg, the editor-in-chief of the Papers of James Madison at the University of Virginia, here provides us with a tightly written history of the policies of Madison, secretary of state under Thomas Jefferson (1801–9) and then Jefferson's successor as president (1809–17), toward Spain's provinces on the United States' southern border. Five chapters totaling just over two hundred pages are followed by over eighty pages of notes. The first chapter surveys US relations with Spain from the 1780s to 1809. Then come one each on Madison's activities in his first presidential term (1809–13) in West Florida, in East Florida, and in Texas. The concluding chapter, “Toward the Transcontinental Treaty” (1819), discusses the final conveying of the Floridas to the United States and creation of an American claim overland to the Pacific coast for the first time.

Impressively and hardly surprisingly, the footnotes reveal thorough immersion in the Madison papers and much else. Virtually all published scholarship on US–Spanish relations in the period is cited appropriately. Spanish historians, however, are seldom mentioned and are never really engaged, nor are others who assess Spain's positions seriously. This is unfortunate because without them, the book avoids a detailed, frontal evaluation of whether the Jefferson–Madison contentions that the Louisiana Purchase was entirely legitimate and that West Florida and Texas were part of Louisiana and thus of the purchase were sound. (Spain vehemently disagreed.) Although Stagg states that the United States “wrongly insisted” on these points, he continues that Spain “was obliged by treaty to cede these territories to France” (7). (Why?) Thus the Jefferson–Madison contentions are taken as givens, as is the idea that “at no time after 1809 did Madison ever assume that the nation's territorial disputes with Spain could be solved by means that were other than legal” (4).

The author notes “the indisputable fact that in the summer of 1810 Madison sent executive agents into all three of the Spanish provinces … with instructions that envisioned their incorporation … into the Union after the displacement of their [Spanish] colonial regimes” (8), referring to William Wykoff in West Florida, George Mathews and John McKee in East Florida, and William Shaler in Cuba and Texas. But he stoutly denies that Madison was “implicated … in illegal revolutions” in the Floridas and an “equally illegal … filibuster” in Texas. True, Madison was very careful not to involve US regular troops (which would have been a casus belli). But his and his administration's control – at best lax, and certainly provocative – over his agents and insurgents permitted the unilateral annexations of West Florida and the occupation of parts of East Florida.

It is also fact that Congress passed the Mobile Act in 1804, when Madison was secretary of state, authorizing annexation of West Florida, which followed in 1810 and 1813. When Spain's representatives, the Marques de Casa Yrujo and then Luis de Onís, protested these actions, Madison considered them impolite or irritating (Stagg does not disagree). Armed incursions into both Floridas by Andrew Jackson followed (1813–18), without rebuke.

Madison comes off well at nearly every turn. Although this is “not to say … that Madison's pursuit of [the Floridas] was flawless” (206), the portrait here of Madison is more favorable than most historians, anglophone or otherwise, have painted. These include, inter alia, Henry Adams, Isaac J. Cox, Frank Owsley Jr. and Gene Smith, William Earl Weeks, Wanjohi Waciuma, Jerónimo Becker, Elena Sánchez-Fabrés Mirat, and this reviewer. Stagg even credits Madison, rather than (as usual) John Quincy Adams, with first seeing “the significance of the Pacific Northwest for the future of the United States” and thus being willing to trade Texas for clear title to “Florida and the Pacific coast” (210). Yet Stagg's book certainly deserves a reading, after which one can decide whether Jefferson, Madison, and their successor James Monroe were disingenuous in their repeated mantra that the United States had a right to expand into Spanish territory, or were so sure that they were leading an “empire of liberty” that they felt honestly justified in doing so.

Though the notes occupy almost a third of the book, there is no bibliography, which would have been helpful and would have obviated places and dates of publication now scattered throughout the notes.