In the conventional wisdom, the young United States was weak, with no international posture or military. But as Michael Verney shows, early American naval expeditions, often characterized as merely exploratory, were fundamentally imperialist. These expeditions circled the globe and were backed by a wide range of domestic constituencies, including people who wanted to promote America as an evangelical beacon, a lucrative node in the slave trade, or the base of a conventional empire. Verney shows that early Americans-Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, militarists and pacifists, abolitionists and slaveholders-all agreed that the country had an interest in showing the world its power"--