Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Cuba's economic rise was propelled in part by merchants from the northeastern United States, who were every bit as adamant as southern planters in advocating annexation. The same is true of northern manufacturing and banking interests.
39
To southerners and many northerners alike, physical expansion went hand in hand with the spread of slavery. This was the premise not only of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, but also of James Polk, James Buchanan, and journalist John O'Sullivan, the foremost propagandist of Manifest Destiny. Southerners dominated the call for the annexation of Cuba, but the impetus had plenty of support in the North. By mid-century, the South lagged behind the North in population, jeopardizing its political influence in Washington, D.C., despite rough parity in the U.S. Senate. But the North was highly invested in Cuba, with northerners owning plantations there and northern manufacturers and merchants dependent on Cuban commerce. Before the U.S. Civil War, northerners and southerners salivated over the thought of Cuba; southerners imaged two new slave states cut from Cuba returning balance to the Union; northerners hoped to consolidate and expand their markets. After the Civil War, former southern planters moved to Cuba (and to Brazil) in droves, seeking to revive their fortunes there. Many returned to the United States or sought their fortune elsewhere after the outbreak of the Ten Years' (civil) War in 1868. But those who endured in Cuba triumphed
at the war's end as the devastation wrought by the conflict created new opportunities for planters with the capital to invest in Cuba's rapidly consolidating sugar industryâeven after slavery was abolished there in 1886.
A principal force behind the renewed interest in Cuba was the Democratic U.S. president James Polk, the man credited with delivering Oregon, California, and New Mexico into U.S. possession. Polk turned his attention to Cuba after John O'Sullivan suggested to the president that the acquisition of Cuba would be the perfect capstone to a remarkable career. Thus began a renewed effort on the part of successive American administrations to acquire Cuba from Spain, which halted only with the outbreak of the American Civil War.
40
Goaded by O'Sullivan, Polk ordered his secretary of state, James Buchanan, to find out what it would take for Spain to part with Cuba. Buchanan's letter to the U.S. minister in Spain, Romulus M. Saunders, summarizes U.S. thinking about Cuba at this time. The specter of British ambitions in the Caribbean and Cuba haunts Buchanan's note. If Britain ever took control of Cuba, he warned, it could bring U.S. commerce to a halt. Despite endless denials, there could be no doubting Britain's resolve to monopolize the Cuban trade. Parliament knew full well how a British Cuba would transform British commerce while thwarting the commercial ambitions of the United States. On the other hand, a Cuba in U.S. possession would thrust American commerce to the top of the world. “Were Cuba a portion of the United States,” Buchanan observed, “it would be difficult to estimate the amount of bread-stuffs, rice, cotton and other agricultural, as well as manufacturing and mechanical productionsâof lumber, of the products of our fisheries and of other articlesâwhich would find a market in that island, in exchange for their coffee, sugar, tobacco, and other productions.”
41
Was there ever a riper time for adding Cuba to the American confederation of states? Early worries about overextending the American confederation “seem to have passed away,” Buchanan noted. Time had confirmed Madison's and Jefferson's hypothesis that a proliferation of states would strengthen rather than erode the union, binding parts to the whole, the whole to parts. It was not space so much as race that potentially limited the scope of the American empire. But where some
Americans balked at a union with Cuba's “Spanish race,” Buchanan thought the problem sufficiently mitigated by an abundance of white Americans (“large holders of property”) settled in its midst. As in Louisiana, Cuba's heterogeneous population would be “Americanized” speedily enough. And Cuba's sea-lanes would provide access to the states of the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf of Mexico, thereby energizing the economies of the “ship-building and navigating states,” further binding the sections together. But the benefits of adding Cuba to the Union transcended the United States itself. A Cuba in U.S. possession promised “free trade on a more extended scale than any which the world has ever witnessed,” thereby promoting the most “rapid improvement in all that contributes to the welfare and happiness of the human race.”
42
Britain was not the only rival whose ambitions unsettled U.S. officials in this era. In making the case for the annexation of Cuba, Americans invoked Spain's mounting hostility toward the United States. As evidence, U.S. officials pointed to Spain's supposed “Africanization” of Cuba, a charge meant to conjure the nightmare of revolutionary Haiti. Just how Spain went about Africanizing Cuba is not exactly clear, unless talk among Spain's reform-oriented government of ending Cuban slavery constituted such a threat. What is clear is that an illegal and booming slave trade, propelled by U.S. merchants, continued to swell Cuba's black population at mid-century, raising fears among Spanish and foreign businessmen alike that Cuba could go the way of Haiti. The Louisiana legislature formally condemned the Africanization of Cuba.
43
Mississippi governor John Quitman was among those who took the bait about Cuba going the way of Haiti. As early as 1835, Quitman had begun talking about secession as the surest means to defend the institution of slavery. By the late 1840s he had come to see the annexation of Cuba as a slave state as the means to save the institution of slavery itself while redeeming Cuba from Africanization. Like many of slavery's defenders, Quitman was disinclined to wait for the federal government to act on Cuba. Beginning in the late 1840s he began to keep company with Cuban exiles and militant proslavery advocates in the United States determined to wrest Cuba from Spain.
In early 1850, Quitman was approached by a Venezuelan-born
Cuban exile named Narciso López, who asked the governor to lead a filibustering campaign against Cuba. At this time,
filibuster
, derived originally from a French word for pirate, referred not to the hijacking of political debate but to the overthrow of Latin American states in order to make them safe for the expansion of slavery. With the self-assurance that would later curse the Bay of Pigs invasion, Lopez assured Quitman that Cuba was eager for annexation to the United States, and that the island would virtually roll over upon the filibusterers' arrival. Though tempted, Quitman demurred, offering financial and political support in place of his own leadership.
44
This was actually López's second attempt at the liberation of Cuba. His first had been thwarted by U.S. president Zachary Taylor, in July 1849, before it was able to set sail. (Private invasions of foreign countries were obviously illegal.) In his second attempt, López made the coast of Cuba, but the expedition did not advance much beyond that. The anticipated Cuban support never materialized, and López was forced to withdraw. Undeterred, he readied yet another expedition, this time offering its command to Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, and to Robert E. Lee. Worried about staking their political futures on an illegal (and unlikely) expedition, both gentlemen declined, but not before endorsing López's vision of Cuba as a slave state in the American Union. Davis and Lee proved prescient. Like the first expedition, this one never gained the Florida Straits. President Millard Fillmore did not want to antagonize the government of Spain. The next expedition would be López's last. Launched in August 1851, it penetrated the Cuban coastline, but fell apart shortly thereafter. López was caught and executed along with fifty members of his filibustering crew, among them the Mexican-American War veteran William Crittenden.
45
The aims of curbing Britain's colonial appetite and beating back Spain's insults while preventing Cuba's Africanization gained new currency in the administration of President Franklin Pierce. A native of New Hampshire, Pierce ascended to the presidency in 1853 believing that a vigorous foreign policy might deflect the mounting sectional animosity tearing the union apart. After a series of failed attempts by the American minister to Spain, Pierre Soulé, to persuade Spain to sell Cuba to the United States, Pierce ordered Soulé to convene a meeting
of his fellow ministers to Britain and France (James Buchanan and John Mason, respectively) to devise a strategy by which the United States could finally acquire Cuba.
The three ministers convened in the autumn of 1854 at Ostend, Belgium. There they produced what became known as the Ostend Manifesto, a classified document that when leaked to the press caused an uproar of condemnation at home and abroad. Most of the manifesto restated old themes: “It must be clear to every reflecting mind that, from the peculiarity of its geographical position, and the considerations attended on it, Cuba is as necessary to the North American republic as any of its present members, and that it belongs naturally to the great family of States of which the Union is the providential nursery.” The three ministers treated audiences to a lesson in geography: “The natural and main outlet to the products of this entire population, the highway of their direct intercourse with the Atlantic and the Pacific States, can never be secure, but must ever be endangered whilst Cuba is a dependency of a distant power in whose possession it has proved to be a source of constant annoyance and embarrassment to their interests.”
46
Still, there was much that was new in the manifesto, too, most significant, perhaps, the ministers' suggestion that they, as
Americans
, knew best the interests not just of the United States but of Spain besides. “We firmly believe that, in the progress of human events, the time has arrived when the vital interests of Spain are as seriously involved in the sale, as those of the United States in the purchase, of the island.”
47
To be sure, such presumption had imbued American rhetoric since before the Revolution. But rarely had rhetoric been directly translated into policy. The consequences of such thinking were ominous. After presuming to know Spain's interests (and Cuba's value) better than Spain, and after offering Spain “a price for Cuba far beyond its present value,” and after then being refused, the United States couldn't help but ask: “Does Cuba, in the possession of Spain, seriously endanger our internal peace, and the existence of our cherished Union?” Should the answer be yes, then “every law, human and divine,” justified the United States' taking Cuba from Spain on the same grounds that justified a person “tearing down the burning house of his neighbor if there were no other means of preventing the flames from destroying his own.”
48
As if a feckless Spain incapable of maintaining the status quo weren't grounds enough, there still loomed the specter of Africanization. “We should ⦠be recreant to our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers, and commit base treason against our posterity, should we permit Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo, with all its attendant horrors to the white race.” Current conditions in Cuba appeared to be “rapidly tending towards such a catastrophe.”
49
Leaked to the public, the Ostend Manifesto became the subject of controversy, at home and abroad, and was quickly repudiated by the Pierce administration. Soulé himself shouldered much of the blame and ultimately resigned. Still, if ahead of the field in his expansionist zeal, Soulé was only slightly so. This was the heyday of Manifest Destiny, and there were other Soulés anticipating the annexation of Cuba with equal urgency. George Fitzugh, for example, one of the leading apologists of slavery, saw in Cuban annexation “the richest and most increased commerce that ever dazzled the cupidity of men.” In the epic struggle about to begin, American merchantsâthose “apostles of republicanism”âwould once and for all vanquish the placemen of Spain's “greedy Queen.”
50
Though mounting sectional controversy would gradually make the Pierce administration cool to filibustering, in his first year in office, the president approached John Quitman, López's old sponsor, about leading an filibustering expedition. No longer governor of Mississippi, Quitman agreed, and between July 1853 and the following May, he amassed a small arsenal and army of men for an attack on Cuba. Only the uproar between free-soil and pro-slavery advocates sparked by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed settlers in those territories to determine their fate, induced Pierce to withdraw government support for the expedition. Quitman continued to plan into 1855.
By this time, England and France had joined Spain in protest. It was one thing for these American filibustering expeditions to be the work of a few proslavery zealots. It was another thing entirely for them to be sponsored by the U.S. government. Wasn't that the definition of war? One vigilant British resident of Adams County, Ohio, thought so. In a letter to the British foreign secretary, W. H. Holderness warned of “an expedition of immense magnitude now on foot in the United States
for the subjugation of Cuba. General [John A.] Quitman is at the head of it. It is secretly organized, chiefly throughout the Slave States. General Quitman proposes raising 200,000 men, of which I have been informed that 150,000 are enrolled already.” Though the expedition was apparently the work of southerners, Holderness had no doubt that the U.S. government was aware of it. His information was dependable, he insisted; it came “from one who has been among the conspirators, and has seen their arms.” What was his motivation for coming forward? Only “to prevent, if possible, the consummation of as dark a piece of villainy as can disgrace the 19th century, to be carried out under the hypocritical pretext of enlarging the area of freedom.”
51
By this time, England and France had dispatched warships to Havana, to protect Spanish Cuba from American aggression.