I wish like no one else to see in America the foundation of the world’s largest nation, not as large in surface and richness as it’d be in freedom and glory… It’s a great idea to turn the whole new world into only one nation with just a single linkage that that ties up its parts and everything beyond. Since it has an origin, a tongue, traditions and a religion, it should therefore has one single government with a confederation of the different States.

Yet this is not possible because remote climates, diverse situations, conflicting interests, opposing characters are dividing America.

How good it’d be if the Panamanian Isthmus would be to us what Corinthia is to the Greeks! I wish someday we will be fortunate to install an august congress of representatives from the republics, kingdoms and empires to try to debate about the high interests of peace and war with the nations of the remaining three quarters of the world.

Excerpts from Letter to Jamaica, Kingston, September 6, 1815