James Monroe while expanding the United States at the expense of the Spanish Empire, from which he obtained Florida and the recognition of a border across the continent. Faced with the breakdown of the expansionist consensus over the question of slavery, the president tried to provide both North and South with guarantees that future expansion would not tip the balance of power between slave and free states, a system that, Weeks remarks, did indeed allow the continuation of American expansion for the best of four decades. Monroe pursued warmer relations with Britain in the aftermath of the War of 1812. In 1817
José Joaquim Almeida January 1817, Ambassador Onis began filing the Spanish claims against James Monroe, then in charge of the Secretary of State, focusing specifically on Almeida. Onis presented testimony from several captures in the first months of the year, including two sailors who testified that on March 15 near Havana, he shot and boarded a British brig. Monroe became president, and when in March 1817 he arrived in Baltimore, Almeida was immediately processed by the Maryland state prosecutor Elias Glenn, imposed neutrality laws, in spite the protests of Ambassador Onis to Richard Rush, at that time the Secretary of State, to judge