Lawrence Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, the Adamses, Monroe—in short, anybody who thought to capitalize on the resources of the North American continent—understood that the continent was valuable only to the extent that the United States had access to the rivers and seaports that drained it, and that the usefulness of those rivers and seaports, in turn, depended on access to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Though the Monroe Doctrine encompassed more than Cuba, Cuba was inspiration enough. “The right to use a thing, comprehends a right to the means necessary to its use,” Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had written the U.S. chargé d’affaires for Spain, William Carmichael, in August 1790, regarding U.S. access to the Spanish port at New Orleans. Jefferson and his successors knew that New Orleans was useless without control of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, and that control of these waters was the province of Cuba. The presence of an enfeebled Spanish empire in Cuba was acceptable to Jefferson and his successors; the advance of France or, especially, England was not. If a hostile power ever thought to use Cuba to deny U.S. merchants access to the Gulf of Mexico and the port of New Orleans, Jefferson warned Carmichael, “there is no saying how far we may be led”; the United States would never forsake its “western citizens” or abandon “their rights.”33
One of the clearest early elucidations of U.S. policy regarding Cuba came from—no surprise—Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in the spring of 1823. In a note to Hugh Nelson, U.S. minister to Spain, Adams observed that, despite America’s determination to steer wide of European conflagrations, Europe’s “maritime wars” inevitably concerned the United States, as they took place upon the sea, “the common property of all.” More than that of any other nation, Adams observed, U.S. well-being relied on that common property; the nation’s status as a neutral among belligerents was bound to create conflicting interests. At the time Adams wrote, France and Spain were on the verge of war. Adams worried lest a defeated Spain be put in a position of having to barter off her few remaining colonies in the New World: Cuba and Puerto Rico. These islands were nontransferable to any but the United States, Adams emphasized. They were “natural appendages to the North American continent,” he wrote, “and one of them, Cuba, almost in sight of our shores, from a multitude of considerations, has become an object of transcendent importance to the commercial and political interests of our Union.” Cuba’s location at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico and
the West Indian seas; the character of its population, its situation midway between our southern cost and the island of St. Domingo, … the nature of its production and of its wants, furnishing the supplies and needing the returns of a commerce immensely profitable and mutually beneficial—give it an importance in the sum of our national interests with which that of no other foreign territory can be compared, and little inferior to that which binds the different members of this Union together.
Cuba and the United States, insisted Adams, shared geographical, commercial, moral, and political interests rooted in nature. Current developments in the United States, Cuba, and the larger world made it “scarcely possible to resist the conviction that the annexation of Cuba to our federal republic will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself.” Of course, Adams understood the objections of many of his compatriots to extending the American republic overseas. Still, there were “laws of political, as well as physical gravitation,” he wrote, “and if an apple, severed by a tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection to Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only toward the North American Union, which by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom.” Like Jefferson three decades earlier in warning Spain to grant the United States access to New Orleans, Adams assured Nelson that America was ready to fight for these natural rights. In the interests of U.S. citizens, and now, crucially, the “incapable” Cubans, America could do no less.34 Thus Jefferson’s notion of an empire for liberty—an empire of equal and reciprocal and federated states—began to evolve into a narrower claim about America’s natural right to take Cuba, and to govern it on behalf of others not yet ready for self-government.
The United States was not the only American republic interested in Cuba. In the mid-1820s, Mexico and Colombia, two powerful and newly independent states, proposed mounting an expedition to liberate Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain, thereby finally ridding the hemisphere of the last vestige of the Spanish Empire. U.S. officials did not like the sound of this. In April 1826, Daniel Webster rose in the House of Representatives to weigh in on Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba. Webster declared Cuba unequivocally the “most important point of our foreign relations … the hinge on which interesting events may possibly turn.” Did Spain have the right to transfer Cuba to another European power? Was there a limit to U.S. rights in the Western Hemisphere? Wasn’t the United States, after all, the universal nation? Rights, Webster observed, are realized in geographical contexts. The United States enjoyed rights in its own hemisphere that European states plainly did not, and vice versa. “Proximity of position, neighborhood, whatever arguments the power of injuring and annoying, very properly belong to the consideration of all cases of this kind.” Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana was a case in point. That action had been based on “convenience,” “proximity,” and “natural connection.” Where some of Webster’s colleagues differentiated between a voluntary transfer by Spain of Cuba to another European state and a forcible transfer, Webster recognized “a distinction without a difference.” The question came down to whether there was “a danger to our security, or danger, manifest and imminent danger, to our essential rights, and our essential interests.” In the case of Cuba, there could be no doubt. Not only had U.S. trade with Cuba come by 1826 to exceed U.S. trade with France (“and all her dependencies”), but also Cuba commanded “the mouth of the Mississippi River. Its occupation by a strong maritime power would be felt, in the first moment of hostility, as far up the Mississippi and the Missouri as our population extends.” Moreover, Cuba lay “in the very line of our coastwise traffic, interposed in the very highway between New York and New Orleans.” The states of Europe must know—the Latin American republics, too, for that matter—that Cuba was transferable to none but the United States.35
U.S. concern about Cuba’s fate ebbed in the late 1820s and ’30s, when U.S. and European powers informally agreed to maintain the status quo. Meanwhile, the U.S. government pledged to do nothing to encourage Cuban insurrection. In 1830, Spain consented to the seating of a U.S. consul. Despite occasional diplomatic flare-ups, relations between the United States and Spain remained stable enough to encourage American investment in the Cuban sugar and railroad industries. Notably, it was at this time that American shipping gained control of the lucrative Cuban slave trade. A note from the U.S. secretary of state, Edward Livingston, to William Shaler, U.S. consul in Havana, aptly sums up U.S. interests during this era. “The great objects of our Government in relation to Cuba,” Livingston advised, “are a free and untrammeled trade, on its present footing, eased of the discriminating duties; to preserve it in the hands of Spain, even at the expense of war; and only in the event of finding that impossible, to look to its annexation to our confederacy.” Livingston himself appeared cool on the matter of annexation, not least because of widespread doubts about Cubans’ ability to shoulder the burdens of republican government. This was talk for a later day.36
In 1846, the United States went to war with Mexico over a border dispute in Texas. It emerged from the war with the New Mexico and California territories, which, along with the recent addition of the Oregon Territory, extended U.S. possessions to the Pacific. Disagreement about the fate of slavery in these new territories culminated in the Civil War. In the immediate aftermath of war with Mexico, many northerners and southerners alike looked to the annexation of Cuba as a means of forestalling, perhaps ending, the sectional controversy.
By the t
ime Americans’ attention returned to the subject of Cuban annexation in the late 1840s, Cuba had emerged as one of the world’s most valuable colonies and its leading sugar producer. Cuba was also one of the few remaining slave economies and, hence, one of the few remaining markets for what had become after 1831 (when Brazil became the last country formally to outlaw the African slave trade) the trade in contraband slaves. Cuba’s black market in slaves peaked in the five-year period between 1840 and 1845, when nearly one hundred thousand slaves were brought ashore, many off U.S. ships. This American bonanza inspired Spain to introduce stiff penalties for slave traders, and over the course of the next fifteen years, fewer than three thousand slaves arrived in Cuba.37 Whenever the market got tight, slavers looked to Guantánamo, which, as early as the 1820s, had come to the attention of British patrols as a leading depot for contraband.38
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 industry—even 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 productions—of lumber, of the products of our fisheries and of other articles—which 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 Americ
an 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.
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