The sun was just beginning to rise and flicker through the bare trees that encircled the town square and flanked the road to Boston. A soft thudding gradually grew louder, announcing the imminent appearance of new arrivals and drawing outside the group of men who had gathered in the middle of the night at Buckman Tavern. They organized themselves into orderly lines on the common and watched as a single British officer rode forward on horseback. He ordered the men: “Lay down your arms, you damned rebels!”1
In a raspy voice wracked by tuberculosis, Captain John Parker ordered his men to go home. Those closest to him heard the orders and turned to leave, but his voice was drowned out by the movement and confusion. A shot rang out from somewhere beyond the town square. There was a tense moment of silence before the morning air was shattered by rounds of volleys.
It was April 19, 1775, and the Revolutionary War had begun. The lone shot by an unknown gunman was later dubbed the “shot heard round the world.” If the Massachusetts rebels had been captured and the war immediately suppressed, few history books would mention this small skirmish. Instead, the deaths of eight militiamen and the retreat of British forces to Boston sparked a war that spanned eight years, covered the globe, entangled the most powerful empires and their colonial holdings, and permanently reshaped the international community.
As the United States gears up to celebrate and squabble over the meaning of the 250th anniversary—of the American Revolution, the Army, and the Declaration of Independence—the commemorative celebrations are a reminder that the nation has never been an island unto itself. The Revolution was an international event from the beginning.
Submitted to a Candid World
Historians have debated the origins of the Revolution since David Ramsay published the first history of the United States in 1789.2 Most nod to the Enlightenment ideals that proclaimed liberty and the natural rights of man. Political conflict over representation in Parliament and the right of taxation certainly played a role. Social conditions, including the colonies’ booming population, exacerbated existing tensions. Every historian and every argument agrees, however, that Americans’ participation in the global community was at the core of the disagreements that led to the American Revolution.
Eighteenth-century colonists were no strangers to war. Many of the colonies had fought a series of wars against Native nations, but they were largely regional. The Seven Years’ War (1756–63) altered the political, social, and economic character of the North American colonies. For the first time, the colonies fought together in the same major conflict. Soldiers from Massachusetts to South Carolina volunteered alongside British regulars to fight the French and their Native allies. The colonies raised money to pay for regiments, food, and armaments. They were immensely proud of their contributions and saw themselves as some of the most patriotic members of the British Empire.
To the victor went the spoils. Under the terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, British territory doubled in size, bringing expanded borders to defend, Native peoples to subdue, and land that sorely tempted the colonists. The British government stationed regiments of British regulars on North American territory for the first time to protect these new holdings. They also passed revenue measures to pay down the enormous war debt and support the expanded military, including taxes on luxury items like tea and sugar.
Colonists objected to the revenue measures in principle and practice. They argued that they had already contributed more than their fair share to the war effort. They had spent blood and treasure fighting the French. They had defended their homes from the threat, while Britons at home were far from the gunfire and bloodshed.
In practice, they also resented that the taxes were designed to limit their economic choices. The Sugar Act of 1764 increased taxes on sugar and molasses imported from French and Dutch merchants and called for strict enforcement against smugglers. The bill was designed to force colonists to buy sugar from the British Caribbean islands. Similarly, in 1773, the Tea Act actually lowered prices on tea imported from the East India Company, a British company, to undercut smuggling. Many American merchants enjoyed a tidy profit from these smuggling activities and resented the attack on their livelihood.
American protests against these measures insisted that the colonies could not be taxed without their own political participation. But they also reflected a widespread desire to participate in the global economic market free from imperial limitations. When these protests failed to produce the required political reform, the colonies declared independence.
The famed Declaration of Independence, published in 1776, was an afterthought domestically. The war had begun 15 months earlier. Congress had created the Continental Army, appointed George Washington as commander in chief, and authorized ongoing fighting. In April 1776, the British forces retreated from Boston, licked their wounds in Nova Scotia, and departed for New York City. The world’s largest navy arrived in New York Harbor on June 29, 1776.
While the war raged, at least 90 states and localities had already issued their own declarations of independence between April and July of 1776, including Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.3 The Pennsylvania state legislature declared
that as the former Legislative powers of this Province cannot act without being under oath or affirmations of allegiance to the King of Great-Britain, and dependent on him, which by the cruel and wicked proceedings of that King and Parliament of Great Britain, more especially by a late Act of Parliament declaring the Colonists Rebels, and cutting them off from the protection of that Crown, the same has become incapable of legislation, and in that respect totally extinct.4
The legislature then resolved to create a new government “formed on the authority of the people only.”5 There was no turning back.
Globally, however, the Declaration was critically important, and the drafting committee, led by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, designed the document with an international readership in mind. They wrote the Declaration to convince European nations that the US was indeed an independent nation, its cause was righteous, and American independence was not inherently anti-monarchy. They crafted language to convince the monarchies in France and Spain to support the overthrow of the British monarchy while trying to reassure them that the same revolutionary forces would not spread to their territories.
The Declaration styled the colonists’ rebellion as just by arguing that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” to protect mankind’s unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If the “Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”
The document acknowledged that revolution should be a last resort: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” Extraordinary measures were justified when “a long train of abuses and usurpations” were heaped upon a people with a “design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” In this scenario, and only in this scenario, the people have a duty “to throw off such Government.”
The Declaration then listed 27 complaints against King George III as evidence of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
The Declaration closed by reassuring other monarchs that colonists had pursued every peaceful measure before turning to violence. “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” Accordingly, the colonies declared themselves “Free and Independent States,” with the “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”
This list of rights enjoyed by independent nations was not random or arbitrary. Congress could have mentioned any number of responsibilities and privileges. Instead, the Declaration centered on international engagement as the purpose and primary focus of an independent and sovereign nation.
Congress’s first actions after declaring independence reflected this commitment. On July 18, Massachusetts delegate Adams presented a draft to Congress of a model treaty, which would serve as a template for future commercial treaties. On September 17, 1776, Congress approved the text, formally naming it the Model Treaty.6 Over the next several years, Congress ratified treaties with France and the Netherlands based on this template.
A few days after approving the Model Treaty, Congress appointed Franklin as a diplomatic agent. In October, he sailed for France, where he attempted to negotiate for arms and money. But financial support would only go so far. The colonies needed allies. They needed France to enter the war, to use its own navy to relieve the pressure on the colonies and open a new front in the conflict to divide British attention. None of these aims were possible unless France recognized the United States as a sovereign nation.
The rights of independent nations listed in the Declaration—war, alliance, and commerce—reveal the new nation’s priorities. These rights are foundational foreign policy actions and the basis for full participation in the international community. From the beginning, the US was committed to that role.
Foreign Relations
The Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War on September 3, 1783. Although the US had been operating as a quasi-independent nation for eight years, the treaty made it real. Great Britain recognized American independence and sovereignty for the first time, inviting other nations to do the same. America’s allies, including France, Morocco, the Netherlands, and Spain, had offered recognition during the war. After the treaty, Bremen, Denmark-Norway, Hamburg, the Papal States, Prussia, and many others recognized the new nation over the next decade.
Once independence was secured, foreign relations remained the Confederation Congress’s top priority. The United States owed foreign nations millions of dollars from the Revolution. Repaying those debts and loans was a basic first step for the US to exist in the global community. No further trade, loans, or treaties would be possible if Americans did not uphold their earliest agreements. If they failed to repay their debts, foreign nations would not take the US seriously. They would ignore American sovereignty and seize American goods and territory in lieu of payment.
European empires were sorely tempted to meddle in American sovereignty and territory anyway. Because the United States had no money, it could not pay an army or navy to protect its trade, people, or newly recognized borders. American settlements in the West and South were particularly vulnerable to incursions and raids by Native nations and their European allies. European agents used nonviolent means to stir up trouble as well. They encouraged dissatisfaction with the US government in Western communities and encouraged disgruntled Americans to break off and rejoin the European fold.
Congress could not afford to ignore the perils that international actors posed or hide behind the safety that the Atlantic Ocean offered. Instead, maintaining peaceful relations with existing allies and avoiding further conflict dominated Congress’s attention in the immediate years after peace. These motivations also prompted massive reform that empowered the federal government to better represent the nation on the world’s stage.
In May 1787, representatives from 12 states gathered in Philadelphia to reform the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first governing charter. (Rhode Island refused to send delegates.) Quickly, the delegates voted to scrap the articles and start fresh. After four months, the delegates sent a proposed constitution to Congress and the states for ratification.
The Constitution created a much more powerful federal government and vested it with three critical powers. All three were lacking under the Articles of Confederation and critical to international engagement. First, Congress received the power to raise money. Previously, the Confederation Congress could pass tax assessments, and each state was then expected to raise the required funds however it saw fit. Nevertheless, the Confederation Congress had no power to enforce the assessment, and states frequently ignored these requests. The Constitution empowered the new federal Congress to raise money to pay off foreign debts and raise and supply an army and navy to defend American borders, citizens, and trade.
Second, the new Constitution streamlined the process of foreign policy. Under the Articles of Confederation, the 13 states regularly pursued their own diplomacy when Congress proved inept or unwilling. Unsurprisingly, 13 separate foreign policies produced a giant mess. Going forward, Congress would declare war and the president would be the nation’s diplomatic chief.
Third, the federal government claimed responsibility for all trade and economic relationships. No longer would each state negotiate its own duties, taxes, and trade arrangements with foreign nations, squabbling to undercut each other.
Notably, the Constitution left most domestic powers to the states. This power-sharing arrangement reflected not only the federal government system but also delegates’ commitment to the United States’ place in the global community. The federal government’s main responsibility would be to look outward, while the states would focus inward. The US was never expected to be isolated, and the framers envisioned a government that could best represent the American people around the world.
Nor did the world expect the United States to remain separate from the global community. Very quickly, the American Revolution shaped the postwar international landscape far beyond its borders. In the following decades, a series of cascading revolutions tore down ancient regimes and built new republics, ushering in the age of the republic.
One month after Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States, the Estates General gathered in Paris to address the financial crisis and social upheaval tearing across France. France’s expenditures during the American Revolution had left the monarchy in deep debt. King Louis XVI attempted to reform the inefficient and haphazard tax system, but regional legislatures blocked these efforts. A series of poor harvests and social movements espousing liberty and equality spurred further social unrest. On July 14, 1789, mobs stormed the Bastille, an ancient fortress that housed royal arms and ammunition. The mob executed the prison governor, paraded his head around Paris on a pike, and tore down the Bastille stone by stone—a symbolic end to the ancien régime.
Over the next nine years, a series of governments seized power, drafted new constitutions, exacted vengeance, and remade French society. During the most violent period, the Reign of Terror, the revolutionary government executed King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, as well as tens of thousands of innocent civilians, without trial.
The French Revolution of the 1790s ended with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. The creation of the French Republic and Napoleon’s rise reignited the centuries-old hostility between France and Great Britain. This newest conflict, which stretched over 20 years, defined foreign policy in the early American republic.
The war immediately forced the United States to consider its position. This debate, known as the Neutrality Crisis, was the major foreign policy moment in Washington’s administration. In 1778, the US had signed a Treaty of Alliance with France, which obligated it to come to France’s aid if France was attacked. But the US was in no position to fight a war. The nation was just beginning to recover economically and environmentally from the Revolution. Even if Americans had wanted to fight, the country had no army or navy to engage in battle.
Washington and his cabinet, including Alexander Hamilton and Jefferson, quickly decided to declare neutrality under a technical loophole. The Treaty with France was a defensive one. France’s declaration of war on Great Britain negated any need for the US to offer aid. But enforcing that neutrality without violating the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain (1783) and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France (1778) proved harder to navigate.
The French had their own interpretation of the Franco-American treaties and expected American support. If the US could not field an army, then French officials expected a warm welcome in American ports. Citizen Edmund Charles Genêt, the new French minister to the United States, arrived in May 1793 and immediately hired and outfitted a fleet of privateers. Privateers are private ships, captained by civilians, that sail under a letter of marque (or license) from a foreign nation. The French privateers captured British vessels, dragged them back to port, sold off the valuables, and armed the ships to become new privateers.
Privateering was a standard part of 18th-century warfare, but privateers’ activities were limited in neutral ports. In neutral waters, privateers could buy essentials, including food and supplies, and make necessary repairs. They could not buy armaments or sell off their captures.
Genêt ignored the Washington administration’s proclamation and used Philadelphia’s port as his own personal privateer factory. This behavior did not go unnoticed by the president, who lived six blocks from the port, or the British minister to the US, who also resided in the city. Secretary of State Jefferson demanded Genêt cease these activities, but to no avail. In August 1793, Washington and the cabinet requested that France recall Genêt. They also wrote a series of rules that defined neutral behavior for domestic and foreign actors.
Later that fall, two important developments followed. First, France granted Washington’s request and issued an order to recall Genêt. This decision was a tacit recognition that the United States, as a sovereign nation, had the right to set its own foreign policy and demand respect for that policy by foreign actors on its soil. Second, Congress codified Washington’s rules of neutrality. The law governed periods of neutrality until the end of the 19th century. These precedents laid the foundation of American diplomacy, established the president’s dominant role in foreign policy, and demonstrated the importance of international engagement to the early republic.
While Washington’s administration established foreign policy foundations, American involvement with the world had just begun. As Washington’s presidency ended, the European war extended far beyond the Continent and engulfed Americans, whether they wished to participate or not. British and French vessels patrolled the Atlantic and the Caribbean and were eager to capture American vessels, seize the goods for their war efforts, and impress American sailors into their own armies. From merchants in New England to plantation owners in South Carolina, Americans protested the attacks on their goods and national honor.
In response to these provocations, President Adams sent a three-person diplomatic commission to Paris to negotiate a new trade arrangement and obtain reparations for French naval depredations. After arriving in the fall of 1797, the American commission was met with hostility and demands for bribes, loans, and embarrassing apologies to even begin negotiations. When reports of this treatment arrived in the United States, American outrage was swift and ferocious. Over the next several months, Congress authorized a series of defensive measures to prepare for war, including beefing up coastal defenses, creating a naval department, significantly increasing the Army, and passing legislation designed to root out French sympathizers on American soil.
The conflict, known as the Quasi-War, never escalated to full-fledged war, however, and Adams remained convinced that a diplomatic solution was possible. Tapping into his extensive global network of informants, Adams received assurances from the French government that France had seen the error of its ways and was eager to receive American diplomats with the “respect due to the representative of a free, independent, and powerful nation.”7
Defying the hardline voices in his own party, Adams nominated another peace commission in February 1799. The next fall, William Richardson Davie, Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, and William Vans Murray signed the Treaty of Mortefontaine with the French Republic. France and the United States have been at peace since this treaty—one of the longest lasting alliances in the world.
Eighteenth- and 19th-century Americans paid close attention to these developments. Voters understood that the United States was still relatively small and weak. Its economy depended on the whims and good will of foreign nations. That did not mean, however, that all Americans shared the same views on foreign policy. Instead, domestic politics were shaped by diplomatic ideologies, biases, and preferences.
The first two political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, held diametrically opposed visions for the republic’s future. Federalists supported a strong national government that invested in defense, trade, and industry. Their supporters included merchants, bankers, and traders, and they tended to congregate on the Atlantic Seaboard. Democratic-Republicans visualized a nation of yeoman farmers with a smaller federal government that offered limited protection for agricultural trade but distrusted standing armies and moneyed interests. They viewed cities as dens of corruption and sin, and their supporters congregated in the South and West.
Most importantly, however, the two parties differed on foreign policy. Federalists preferred a close relationship with Great Britain, which was the United States’ dominant trading partner and possessed the world’s largest navy. Democratic-Republicans nurtured an ideological affinity for France as their sister republic and inheritor of the revolutionary tradition. These debates over alliances dominated state and federal elections from 1794 until the Federalist Party’s collapse in the 1820s.
Disagreements over foreign policy sparked the beginning of the end of the Federalist Party. The Arch Federalists, the party’s more extreme wing, pressured Adams to pursue war with France in 1798. The threat of war was excellent for the Federalist Party’s electoral prospects, and the expanded army served as a spoils system for Federalist supporters. Diplomacy would undermine these political opportunities. Nonetheless, Adams understood that neutrality with France and Great Britain was in the young nation’s best interest. When he pursued diplomacy over his party’s objections, former allies began to refer to him as an “evil” to be endured.8 Arch Federalist leaders, including Hamilton and former Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, campaigned against Adams in the 1800 presidential election. The intraparty strife fueled Democratic-Republican victories in local, state, and federal elections that fall. The Federalist Party never recovered.
Partisan divisions were further exacerbated by international developments, including pandemics, revolutions, and the flow of refugees. In 1793, an outbreak of yellow fever dominated coastal ports from Baltimore to New York. Philadelphia was particularly hard-hit, losing 10 percent of its population to the terrifying disease. With no cure or understanding of the cause, responses to the pandemic split along partisan lines. Federalists blamed immigrants for importing the disease from places like New Orleans and the Caribbean. Democratic-Republicans disagreed, arguing that the squalid conditions in port towns produced the virus. They were both right: Mosquitoes bit people who had recently arrived from warmer climates and were carrying the virus; the mosquitoes then proliferated in standing water and cesspools along the wharves.
The parties responded in a similarly divisive manner to the arrival of refugees fleeing rebellions in Europe and the Caribbean. Democratic-Republicans welcomed the arrival of Irish immigrants retreating from the failed rebellion against Great Britain. Irish immigrants were natural allies because they shared similar hostilities to the British and cast their votes for the pro-French Democratic-Republicans.
On the other hand, Federalists took active measures to restrict the Irish community. They feared, with good reason, that some Irish in America were sending funds to support ongoing rebellions in Great Britain. Furthermore, they questioned the Irish community’s loyalty in the event of a French invasion. They worried that the Irish would join the Democratic-Republicans and side with France to tear down the republic from within.
While the Democratic-Republicans welcomed Irish immigrants, they exhibited their own xenophobia toward a separate class of refugees. The inspiring revolutionary rhetoric, first shouted on the streets of Boston, published in the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, and then proclaimed outside the Bastille in Paris, irrepressibly made its way to the coffee and sugar plantations on the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. The Haitian Revolution began when white planters demanded independence from France, citing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which the French National Assembly had published in 1789, declaring all men free and equal. These claims were quickly adopted by the enslaved and free black populations. Eager to avoid conflict, the French government granted citizenship to wealthy free black residents. When white planters refused to recognize their citizenship, fighting broke out between the island’s white and black residents.
In August 1791, the localized skirmishes exploded into a full-fledged race war, expanding to include an estimated 100,000 enslaved people. By the next year, enslaved rebels controlled one-third of the island. Over the next 12 years, British, French, and Spanish forces attempted to regain control of the island, reestablish slavery, and seize control of the sugar production. Yellow fever and malaria outbreaks decimated the European forces’ ranks, and the Haitian forces, led by General Toussaint Louverture, defeated the remaining armies. The last French forces capitulated in 1803, and Haiti declared its independence on January 1, 1804.
Democratic-Republicans were terrified that the refugees fleeing the Haitian Revolution, who often brought enslaved people with them, would import slave uprisings to the South. In October 1800, Gabriel’s Rebellion, the largest planned slave revolt at that point in US history, seemed to validate these fears.
The history of the first decades of the United States cannot be separated from global wars, trade, pandemics, social movements, or migration. Nor did 18th-century Americans wish to see themselves as separate. They declared independence to participate fully in the international community and fought for the nation’s ability to do so in the future.
A Growing Power
As a country that was still relatively small with limited military muscle, the 19th-century United States largely played the role of spoiler on the world stage. The US was not shaping the global order, but it was scrappy and could still pose plenty of irritation for European empires.
As early as the 1820s, however, Americans began to envision a future in which they would enforce their worldview on other nations. In 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams penned a theory of international engagement, which became known as the Monroe Doctrine. President James Monroe included Adams’s language in his presidential address to Congress in December 1823, while Adams asserted the same message in his correspondence with Great Britain and other foreign nations.
The Monroe Doctrine declared the Western Hemisphere closed to European meddling and claimed the hemisphere as the United States’ sphere of influence. In 1823, the US had little power to enforce this doctrine.9 The British and French armies far outnumbered American forces, and the British navy ruled the seas. The Monroe Doctrine survived because the British navy tolerated it.
By the end of the 19th century, the US was poised to put some heft behind the rhetoric. American economic growth and territorial expansion coincided with a mindset shift. No longer were many Americans content to limit their ambitions to the North American continent; they were ready to join the ranks of global empires.
Under President William McKinley, the US fought the Spanish-American War. The American victory effectively ended Spanish presence in the Western Hemisphere. The United States added Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico to its imperial territory and seized Cuba as an American protectorate.
Theodore Roosevelt had enthusiastically participated in the war, leading his cavalry troops, known as the “Rough Riders.” They gained fame for their bold charge up Kettle Hill in the Battle of San Juan Hill. Roosevelt cherished his “bully fight” in the “splendid little war,”10 and he brought this expansionist zeal to his presidency.
Like Monroe 80 years earlier, Roosevelt used his 1904 State of the Union address to make a major foreign policy declaration. He announced that the US had the right and intention to interfere in the affairs of Latin American nations if they committed “chronic wrongdoing,” which produced the “loosening of the ties of civilized society.”11
Roosevelt backed up his words with warships. In the fall of 1903, he sent naval vessels to Panama City to support Panamanian independence from Colombia. In the shadow of American cannons, Panama signed the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which ceded control of a 10-mile strip for the Panama Canal. In return, Panama received a onetime $10 million payment and an annual annuity of $250,000. In 1908, Roosevelt personally visited the construction site, which was completed in 1914 and produced the first transisthmian canal.12
The two World Wars cemented the United States’ role as a global superpower. While it didn’t fight the longest, sacrifice the most men, or endure the worst devastation, its participation tipped the scales toward victory. After the wreckage of World War II, the US emerged unparalleled in its fiscal and military might. The United States had served as the Allies’ factory, and the fighting had largely taken place far from American shores, leaving the country relatively unscathed compared with the rest of the world.
In the decades after World War II, the Soviet Union gained ground and challenged the Western world in the Cold War. The United States imperfectly led the coalition for democracy against the Soviets and their Communist allies.
In previous generations, the United States’ political parties had often squabbled over the appropriate level of foreign engagement and isolation. During the Cold War, the Democratic and Republican Parties united in their view of the Soviets as the nation’s primary threat. They differed on how best to combat the Communist menace, but they notably agreed on foreign policy’s role. At the beginning of the Cold War, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, coined the perfect phrase to characterize the era: “Politics stops at the water’s edge.”13 That might have been true during the Cold War, but it was not often the case in US history.
In between conflicts, isolationist sentiment often gained traction. In the 1920s, many Americans questioned the futility and senseless loss of life in World War I. In the 1950s, the Republican Party’s isolationist wing urged a retrenchment after the expenses of World War II, the rebuilding of the world under the Marshall Plan, and the stalemated war in Korea. The failed “forever wars” in the Middle East, the global economic collapse in 2008, and the lack of accountability for both have produced a resurgence of isolationism in the past two decades.
The Separate and Equal Station
The American Revolution is a reminder that hiding from the world is not, and was never, possible. There are no oceans large enough to keep us isolated from a world characterized by the movement of people, ideas, goods, and contagions. In the 18th century, those oceans took months to cross in small wooden vessels battered by wind and waves. Today, airplanes cross them in a matter of hours. Words and images cover the distance online in nanoseconds.
As we celebrate the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary, we should embrace America’s role in the world—one that the revolutionaries fought so hard to achieve.
