Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

When Did America Become an Empire? The Law Says February 6, 1899

The founders called the republic an empire and meant a union of equal states. The break came when the country took people it never promised to make citizens, and a New Hampshire president signed the first law that made that possible.

There is no statute that defines an empire. There is a Supreme Court decision that defines a place the Constitution does not fully reach, and it came down on May 27, 1901. Between those two facts sits the answer to a question Americans have argued over for 127 years. The United States stopped being a republic that grew and became a republic that also holds colonies on February 6, 1899, the day the Senate voted to keep the Philippines.

That is a legal date, not a mood. Every acquisition before it came with a promise, written into the deal, that the people on the land would become citizens and the land would become states. The Treaty of Paris broke the pattern on purpose. Article IX says the political status of the people ceded to the United States “shall be determined by the Congress.” No promise. No clock. Congress could decide, or not decide, for as long as it liked.

New Hampshire is in this story twice. Its only president signed the first federal law that let the country hold land it never meant to keep. And six years after the Senate vote, Portsmouth is where the United States sat two other empires down and had them sign a peace.

The founders’ word

Empire was not an insult in 1783. Washington used it in the circular he sent the states that June, writing that the country’s independence was acknowledged abroad only in “our united Character as an Empire.” Jefferson, three years earlier, had sent George Rogers Clark toward Detroit with orders that spoke of adding fertile country to the “Empire of liberty.”

They meant something specific by it. The Northwest Ordinance of July 13, 1787 laid out the rule: once a territory held 60,000 free inhabitants it would enter the Union “on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever.” Territory was a waiting room. Nobody was meant to live in it permanently.

The Louisiana Purchase followed the rule. Article III of the 1803 treaty says the inhabitants “shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States” and admitted to the rights of citizens. Every acre bought from France, taken from Mexico in 1848 or bought from Mexico in 1854 now sits inside a state.

The rule had a victim, and the record should say so. The same ordinance pledged good faith toward the Indian nations already on the land and promised their property would not be taken without consent. The country broke that pledge by treaty and by force for a century. Native nations were an empire’s subjects long before anyone in Manila was. But the settlers got the deal the founders wrote: equality, on a timetable. The break in 1899 was that an entire population got no timetable at all.

Hillsborough writes the first exception

Franklin Pierce was born in Hillsborough on November 23, 1804, and served as the fourteenth president from 1853 to 1857. No other New Hampshire native has held the office. His administration was expansionist by design. It bought the last 29,670 square miles of the continental map from Mexico for $10 million, in a treaty the Senate approved in April 1854. That October three of his diplomats, James Buchanan among them, produced the Ostend Manifesto, which argued the United States should buy Cuba and take it by force if Spain refused. The administration disowned the document once it leaked.

Then, on August 18, 1856, Pierce signed the Guano Islands Act. It is a short law about bird droppings, and it changed what the country could be. When an American citizen finds guano on an island no other government holds, the island may be treated as appertaining to the United States. Appertaining. Not annexed. Not a territory on the road to statehood. Belonging to, the way a shed belongs to a house.

Section 4 of the original act is the tell. Nothing in the law, it says, obliges the United States to retain the islands once the guano has been removed. For the first time Congress wrote a way to own land with no intention of ever making it part of the country. The act was approved the same day as a bill about a bridge in Washington. It remains on the books at 48 U.S.C. 1411 through 1419, and the House’s statute database listed it among the laws in effect as of March 6, 2026. Pierce’s signature sits on the first draft of the machinery that 1899 would run at scale.

1898, the year the pattern broke

It happened fast. Hawaii first. A treaty of annexation died in the Senate after 21,269 Native Hawaiians signed a petition against it, so Congress annexed the islands by joint resolution, a simple majority in each house, and William McKinley signed it on July 7, 1898. Then the war with Spain, over in months. Then the Treaty of Paris, signed December 10, 1898: Cuba relinquished, Puerto Rico and Guam ceded, the Philippines sold for $20 million.

Put the two treaties side by side. Louisiana, 1803: inhabitants incorporated, citizenship promised. Paris, 1898: status to be determined by Congress. That is the definition the question asks for. An empire, in the only sense American law can measure, is a government that holds people it has not promised to make its equals.

The Senate knew what it was voting on. American troops and Filipino forces began shooting at each other in Manila on February 4, 1899. Two days later the Senate ratified, 57 to 27, one vote past the two-thirds line. The war that followed killed more than 4,200 Americans and more than 20,000 Filipino fighters. As many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died of violence, famine and disease. The Philippines got its independence on July 4, 1946, and the proclamation granting it counted the forty-eight years of American control out loud.

The Court writes it down

Two years after the vote, the Supreme Court told the country what it had done. Downes v. Bidwell, decided May 27, 1901, began as a dispute over duties charged on oranges shipped from San Juan to New York. The question underneath was whether the Constitution followed the flag to Puerto Rico. The Court said not all of it. Justice Henry Billings Brown’s lead opinion warned that a wrong answer could be fatal to what Chief Justice Marshall had once called the American empire, and worried in print that distant possessions might be inhabited by races so different in religion, law and custom that government on Anglo-Saxon principles would be impossible for a time. Justice Edward Douglass White’s concurrence supplied the phrase that has outlived everyone who wrote it.

That is the doctrine of the unincorporated territory. No clause of the Constitution contains it. It turned 125 years old on May 27, 2026, and it is still the law.

Still on the books

About 3.6 million people live under it, in Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, by the 2020 Census count. They elect no senator. Their delegates in the House can speak and serve on committees but cannot vote on the floor. The Constitution gives presidential electors to states, the Twenty-third Amendment added the District of Columbia, and the territories got nothing.

In April 2022 the Court upheld the exclusion of Puerto Rico residents from Supplemental Security Income. Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the result and then attacked the ground it stood on, writing that the Insular Cases “rest on a rotten foundation” and belong nowhere in American law. On November 10, 2025, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, he went further in a dissent from the Court’s refusal to hear Veneno v. United States. The Territories Clause, he wrote, does not give Congress plenary power even inside the territories themselves, and the day of reckoning for that theory must come, sooner or later. Two justices have said it. Five have not. Congress has not answered at all.

Portsmouth, 1905

The other New Hampshire chapter is the one the state likes to remember. In August 1905 Theodore Roosevelt sent the Russian and Japanese delegations to the Portsmouth Navy Yard to end a war that had cost both empires dearly. The delegates stayed at the Wentworth in New Castle and crossed the harbor to negotiate, as guests of the state and its governor, John McLane. The treaty was signed on September 5, 1905, and Roosevelt received the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for it. Portsmouth still marks the day with a shipyard salute and a ringing of church bells.

Read the two chapters together. In 1856 a New Hampshire president signed the first law for holding land the country would not keep. In 1905 New Hampshire hosted the moment the United States stopped asking whether it was an empire and started refereeing the others. Six years separated the Senate vote from the Navy Yard. That is how fast it went.

So when?

Three dates hold up. August 18, 1856, when the law first allowed possession without membership. May 27, 1901, when the Court blessed a two-tier country. And February 6, 1899, when the Senate, knowing shots had already been fired in Manila, voted to keep the islands’ people without promising them anything. If you want one date, take the third. The first was a loophole and the last was a rubber stamp. The vote was the choice.

America turned 250 on July 4, 2026. In the strict sense this piece uses, it has been an empire for 127 of those years, and for 125 of them the Supreme Court has held that the Constitution stops at the water’s edge for some of the people who live under it. Two justices now say that cannot stand. New Hampshire has four members of Congress. Whether 3.6 million Americans should have a vote for the people who write their laws is a question each of them can answer in a sentence. The question is on the record here. The answers are not.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the primary document where one exists; see the fact-check table. The 57–27 tally, the Ostend Manifesto account, the Portsmouth hosting details and the annual commemoration are attributed to the secondary sources named in the table. The 3.6 million figure is the 2020 decennial count and has not been updated for later estimates. This piece rests on documents and court opinions; no one was interviewed for it. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.