For Colombia, already crippled by a costly civil war, Roosevelt’s “most important action” meant the loss of what since the days of Bolívar had appeared to be its most valuable natural treasure, the Isthmus, with its unique geographic position “between two oceans.” It meant also the loss of the $10,000,000 lump sum that was to be paid by the United States, the $250,000 annual payment by the Panama Railroad (for decades a crucial part of the national income), and the $250,000 annual payment that was to be forthcoming from the United States as part of the canal agreement. There were riots in Bogotá; desperate offers were to be made by special Colombian emissaries dispatched to Washington, including an offer to accept the treaty as it stood, which served only to satisfy the Administration conclusively that the earlier rejection of the treaty had been an outrageous act of extortion.
The damage done to American relations with Colombia, indeed with all of Latin America, was enormous, just as John Tyler Morgan had prophesied. As an American minister at Bogotá, James T. Du Bois, would write in 1912, the breach worsened as time passed.
By refusing to allow Colombia to uphold her sovereign rights over a territory where she had held dominion for eighty years, the friendship of nearly a century disappeared, the indignation of every Colombian, and millions of other Latin-Americans, was aroused and is still most intensely active. The confidence and trust in the justice and fairness of the United States, so long manifested, has completely vanished, and the maleficent influence of this condition is permeating public opinion in all Latin-American countries, a condition which, if remedial measures are not invoked, will work inestimable harm throughout the Western Hemisphere.
“I fear,” declared a much embittered John Tyler Morgan on the floor of the Senate, “that we have got too large to be just and the people of the country fear it.” But in fact the people of the country were generally well satisfied with what had happened, with the results –and with Theodore Roosevelt.
* According to John Bigelow’s private journal, Bunau-Varilla had actually received a letter from Obaldía leaving no doubt as to his sympathy with the planned revolt.
* Tobar, as it happens, was well supplied with cash. Knowing that the national treasury at Panama was virtually empty, he had had the foresight to bring some $65,000 in American money to meet his own payroll and that of the local garrison.
14
Envoy Extraordinary
I had fulfilled my mission . . . I had safeguarded the
work of the French genius; I had avenged its honor; I had served France.
–PHILIPPE BUNAU-VARILLA
I
The newly designated “confidential agent” of the Republic of Panama –a citizen of France who had not laid eyes on Panama for eighteen years–had waited out the birth of the nation in the privacy of his room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. On first word of success from Dr. Amador he had cabled an emotional reply hailing the infant republic (“small in extent but great in the part she will play”) and like proud fathers he and the banker Lindo had celebrated with a bottle of champagne in the Waldorf dining room.
Some anxious days followed, during which Amador made the expected request for $100,000 but made no mention of diplomatic powers for Bunau-Varilla, who grew “very suspicious” and refused to honor his side of their bargain. Cables went back and forth; for a time something went wrong with the code. Then at last came official word from Arango, Boyd, and Tomas Arias designating him “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary near the Government of the United States of America.” So by Sunday, November 8, he was installed in the new Willard Hotel in Washington, ready to embark on another chapter of “The Great Adventure,” and the next day at a private lunch at Lafayette Square, he was received by the Secretary of State, whose only concern was a dispatch in the morning papers saying that a special commission was about to leave Panama for Washington to make the canal treaty.
The situation was indeed perilous, declared Bunau-Varilla. “Mr. Secretary of State, the situation harbors the same fatal germs–perhaps even more virulent ones–as those which caused at Bogotá the rejection of the Hay-Herrán Treaty.” Before, there had been only the intrigues of the Colombians to contend with. Now, he said, to the intrigues of the Colombians would be added the intrigues of the Panamanians. (“Against my work formidable interests were up in arms,” he would confide in a memorable, melodramatic aside in his Panama: The Creation, Destruction, and Resurrection. “Fortunately the firm basis of clearness and straightforwardness, which I had, throughout my life, taken for my acts, defied the most desperate assault.” The departure of a special commission from the Isthmus could only conceal a “maneuver” and Amador was a party to it. “I knew his childish desire to sign the Treaty.” It was the start of “a plot against me.”)
“So long as I am here, Mr. Secretary,” he said, “you will have to deal exclusively with me.” It was all John Hay wished to know.
The special commission sailed on the mail steamer City of Washington the following day, November 10. On the eleventh, Vice-Consul Felix Ehrman cabled the news of their departure to the State Department, explaining that they were coming only to assist Envoy Bunau-Varilla. “I am officially informed,” the cable said, “that Bunau-Varilla is the authorized party to make treaties.”
Who had thus informed the American vice-consul remains obscure, but in actuality the written instructions for Bunau-Varilla being carried north from Colón were quite to the contrary. It was quite clearly specified that the envoy extraordinary was to “adjust” a canal treaty, that all clauses in the treaty were to be discussed in advance with Amador and Boyd, that he was “to proceed in everything strictly in accord with them.”
Just seven days later, on November 18, 1903, came the signing of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty. What had transpired within those seven days, the document that resulted, would evoke a whirlwind of controversy. The treaty would be the subject of one of the angriest debates in the history of the United States Senate and would remain a bone of contention between Panama and the United States for generations to come. This is what happened.
Between his Monday luncheon with John Hay and a ceremonial first call at the White House on Friday the thirteenth–the call that marked the formal diplomatic recognition of Panama by the United States-Envoy Bunau-Varilla made a flying visit to 23 Wall Street, the six-story, white-marble headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Company. He saw the regal head of the firm in a glass-enclosed ground-floor office and in less than an hour an arrangement was agreed to. Morgan would serve as financial agent for the new republic. Morgan would supply an immediate loan of $100,000, which, for the moment, Bunau-Varilla would cover through the Lindo Bank. Morgan & Company was also to have the “exclusive faculty” (granted by Envoy Bunau-Varilla) of cashing the $10,000,000 indemnity to be paid by the United States. If Morgan’s friend and legal adviser Cromwell or Senator Hanna had played any part in this affair, as is quite possible, Bunau-Varilla never said so. He stressed only the wonder of a fledgling republic coming into its own not merely under the guardianship of the United States of America, but of the house of Morgan.
Returning to Washington with all speed, and accompanied now by his thirteen-year-old son, who he hoped might witness some of the history about to transpire, he had himself photographed in full diplomatic regalia–morning coat, striped trousers–and at 9:30 sharp the morning of Friday the thirteenth was at the State Department, ready to be escorted to the White House. Hay, however, insisted that first they pose together for an official portrait in his office. Chairs were drawn up to the end of a heavy, polished table. Thin patches of sunlight fell on a Brussels carpet. Hay, impeccable, stiff as a tailor’s dummy, his small white hands in his lap, sat in profile, gazing vacantly toward the windows; but Bunau-Varilla faced directly at the camera, his expression deadly serious, and cocked an elbow on the table. He was a man in perfect accord with his surroundings it would appear, and in perfect command of the situation.
They went down to the street, to Buna
u-Varilla’s waiting carriage, where young Etienne Bunau-Varilla sat idly absorbed in the passing scene. Hay, as Bunau-Varilla would recall, “instantly had the charming idea of taking him to the White House,” so moments later the boy too was ushered into the Blue Room and was provided a chair as his father and the President read their formal declarations and then shook hands. “What do you think, Mr. Minister,” Roosevelt asked, “of those people who print that we have made the Revolution of Panama together?”
“I think, Mr. President, that calumny never loses its opportunity even in the New World. It is necessary patiently to wait until the spring of the imagination of the wicked is dried up, and until truth dissipates the mist of mendacity.”
He then introduced his son to the President, who was plainly pleased by the boy’s presence.
The ceremony was over. Panama, in the formal sense, had attained legal status in the family of nations. Not a Panamanian had been present; not a word had been spoken in Spanish. And as was understood by all who had participated, there remained only four days until the special commission from Panama was due in New York.
To much of the press it had been a bit of barefaced comic opera. “Doubtless M. Bunau-Varilla, whirled along on the torrent of his own tropical eloquence, came almost to believe in it, and was too impassioned to wink,” wrote The New York Times. “Neither, we may be sure, did the President yield to his human impulse to drop the eyelid.” A cartoon in the Sunday Times, titled “The Man Behind the Egg,” portrayed the envoy extraordinary in top hat and spats clutching French canal stock in one hand and with the other applying a candle marked “intrigue” to hatch the Panama chick for Theodore Roosevelt.
Having seen Roosevelt, Bunau-Varilla concentrated next on Jusserand, the French ambassador, writing formally that same Friday of Panama’s abiding love for France and requesting that he be received officially by the ambassador (that is, that France recognize Panama) at the soonest possible moment. Then–“in a purely private character”– he went to see Jusserand to assure him that all former contracts and concessions between Colombia and the French canal companies would be honored by the new government of Panama, that there would be no “intrigue against French interests.”
Two days later, on Sunday, a large Manila envelope was hand-delivered to the Willard Hotel for M. Philippe Bunau-Varilla, Envoy Extraordinary for the Republic of Panama. It contained a copy of the Hay-Herrán Treaty with minor penciled modifications and a covering note marked “Most Confidential” from John Hay requesting that the document be returned with the envoy’s own suggestions at his earliest convenience.
Bunau-Varilla recalled later that he devoted the full day to appraising the treaty and the entire night as well, except for two hours’ sleep between midnight and two in the morning. By dawn he had decided it would not do. The “indispensable condition of success” was to write a new treaty “so well adapted to American exigencies” that it would be certain to pass in the Senate by the required two-thirds majority. A failure to obtain that two-thirds majority, he was convinced, could still mean a Nicaragua canal after all. The major difference in the new treaty must be in the share of sovereignty attributed to the United States within the canal zone.
Frank Pavey, his lawyer and long-time colleague in the Panama crusade, had already been summoned from New York and appeared at the Willard suite shortly after breakfast. A stenographer was installed in a room down the hall and the two men got to work. Bunau-Varilla drafted all the articles of the new treaty in longhand and in English. Pavey “corrected the literary imperfections, polished the formulas, and gave them an irreproachable academic form.”
Once during the day Bunau-Varilla hurried across town to tell Hay what was going on, and presumably Hay had no objections. By ten that night two finished copies of the treaty were ready. Despite the hour, Bunau-Varilla left directly to see Hay, but on reaching Lafayette Square found the big house in darkness. So it was not until the following morning, November 17, the same day the steamer from Colón was due at New York, that the treaty was delivered.
“It was with anxiety that I awaited a summons from the Department of State during the day . . .” Bunau-Varilla would remember. “It did not come. Mr. Hay made me no sign.”
To the Panamanian delegates, meantime, he sent a telegram of welcome through Joshua Lindo, instructing them to remain in New York, “to observe the greatest secrecy with regard to their mission,” and to say nothing to the newspapers.
By nightfall he and Pavey were still at the Willard waiting for word from Hay, not daring to leave their room. At ten, unable to stand the suspense any longer, Bunau-Varilla sent his own message. “I cannot refrain from respectfully submitting to you that I would like very much to terminate the negotiations . . .” he told Hay. “I feel the presence of a good deal of intrigues round the coming Commission and people hustling towards them who will find great profit in delaying and palavering and none in going straight to the end.
“I beg, therefore, dear Mr. Secretary, that we should fulfill our plan, as originally laid, to end the negotiations now.”
The answer, by return messenger, was immediate: He could come over that night if he preferred. Bunau-Varilla left directly for Lafayette Square, where a “long conference” ensued, at the conclusion of which Hay congratulated Bunau-Varilla on his work. But whether Hay was actually ready to accept the treaty remained unclear to Bunau-Varilla, who ended the evening with what he intended as the plainest possible inducement to action.
“So long as the delegation has not arrived in Washington,” he declared, “I shall be free to deal with you alone, provided with complete and absolute powers. When they arrive, I shall no longer be alone. In fact, I may perhaps soon no longer be here at all.”
“As for your poor old dad, they are working him nights and Sundays,” John Hay was to tell his daughter in a letter. “I have never, I think, been so constantly and actively employed as during the last fortnight.” Nor, in truth, had he ever enjoyed himself quite so much. The breathless sense of motion, the hurried messages after dark, the extraordinary Frenchman with the waxed mustache, were all the stuff of an adventure tale, and so to Hay, a devotee of the form, a novelist himself, all wonderfully therapeutic. In the morning mail, that Tuesday the seventeenth, was a light-hearted note from Richard Harding Davis saying he had been about to write a novel telling how a foreign adventurer robbed Colombia of Panama. “The day I started to write the story,” said Davis, “Panama became a republic, and somebody owes me the money I lost on the story.”
Hay was also thoroughly satisfied–overjoyed one must imagine–at the treaty he had been presented. Though much of the wording was identical to that of his own Hay-Herrán Treaty, the privileges now granted to the United States were far more sweeping and advantageous to the United States than in the earlier pact. As Hay himself was to confide in a letter to Senator Spooner, the new treaty was “very satisfactory, vastly advantageous to the United States, and we must confess, with what face we can muster, not so advantageous to Panama. . . . You and I know too well how many points there are in this treaty to which a Panamanian patriot could object.”
The basic tenets were these:
The United States was empowered to construct a canal through a zone ten miles in width (in contrast to a zone of six miles in the Hay-Herrán pact). Colón and Panama City were not to be part of the zone, but the sanitation, sewerage, water supply, and maintenance of public order in these terminal cities were placed under United States control. Further, four little islands in the Bay of Panama–Perico, Naos, Culebra, and Flamenco–were granted to the United States and the United States had the right to expropriate any additional land or water areas “necessary and convenient” for the construction, operation, sanitation, or defense of the canal. In return the United States guaranteed the independence of Panama.
The French canal company was granted the right to transfer its concessions and property (including the Panama Railroad) to the United States and the compensation to Pana
ma was to be the same as offered earlier to Colombia–$10,000,000 on exchange of ratifications and an annual annuity of $250,000 that would commence nine years later.
The most significant difference, however, between this and the earlier treaty was contained in Article III, which specified that Panama granted to the United States within the canal zone “all the rights, power and authority . . . which the United States would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign of the territory . . . to the entire exclusion of the exercise by the Republic of Panama of any such sovereign rights, power or authority.” Though not the sovereign within the canal zone, the United States was to be able to act like the sovereign.
And instead of a one-hundred-year lease of the zone that would be indefinitely renewable, as in the Hay-Herrán pact, the zone was to be held by the United States “in perpetuity.”
His one remaining obligation, Hay felt, was to have Root and Knox look the document over, and Leslie Shaw, the Secretary of the Treasury, all of whom he convened for lunch at Lafayette Square on Wednesday the eighteenth–that is, the very next day after Bunau-Varilla’s night visit.
Hay was “putting on all steam.” The lunch went smoothly, all were in agreement, and he hurried back to the State Department and “set everybody at work” drawing up final drafts. To Bunau-Varilla he sent a one-sentence note requesting that he call at his house at six that evening and either Hay or his stenographer was sufficiently excited to put the wrong date on the note.
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