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 merchants—those “apostles of republicanism”—would 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.
Two of the most intriguing filibustering plans for Cuba never advanced beyond the planning stage. The first was the work of William Walker, an ambitious, if not megalomaniacal, native of Tennessee who wanted to extend the American republic southward into Central America. In 1853, Walker tried and failed to establish an independent state in Baja California. In May 1855 he led a band of U.S. and Latin American mercenaries to Nicaragua, then in the midst of civil war. In September of that year he defeated the Nicaraguan army in a pitched battle; in October he captured the city of Grenada. By May 1855 he had set himself up as the puppet of a new political regime that won recognition of the outgoing Pierce administration. The next year, Walker was “elected” president of Nicaragua, at which point he re-legalized slavery (abolished there in 1824) and undertook an Americanization campaign.
Walker’s ambition did not stop there. From Nicaragua he hoped to establish a federation of five Central American republics that would include Cuba. But by this point, Spain and Costa Rica had had enough. Despite the new Buchanan administration’s recognition of Walker’s regime, Spain and Costa Rica moved on the man from Tennessee, who ended up fleeing into the arms of the U.S. Navy, who spirited him home to the United States.52
Walker’s ambitious plans for Central America and Cuba received close scrutiny from what appears at first glance to have been an unlikely source: the African American black nationalist philosopher Martin Delany. Unlikely, that is, because Delany scrutinized Walker and the other filibusterers not simply to oppose their effort to infinitely extend the scope (and life) of slavery, but also to emulate them, in black form: to liberate Cuba from Spain and complete its “Africanization.” But for Delany, too, Cuba was just the beginning. Just as Nicaragua in Walker’s mind was to serve as the focus of a new southern slaveholding republic, so Cuba would occupy the heart of a prospective confederation of African–Latin American states. Long ambivalent about projects to recolonize free African Americans to Africa, Delany saw black Cuba and a black confederation in Latin America as an ideal solution to the problem of U.S. racism. He rejected the notion that blacks and whites could coexist in the United States, but he did not want blacks to “return” to Africa. In the end, Delany was no less blind to the imperialism of his project—no more sensitive to the individuality of the actual Cuban or Latin American peoples—than the others who went before him.53
After 1854 and the uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the new Republican Party wasn’t alone in believing that the containment of slavery would put it on the road to ultimate extinction.54 Southern proponents of slavery agreed with them. Southerners saw their political influence in Washington diminish as slavery was excluded from part of the territory taken from Mexico. As beleaguered defenders of slavery came to see Cuba as the salvation of slavery and the southern way of life, the deb
ate over Cuban annexation betrayed signs of the sectional polarization of the national political parties that was finally breaking the nation apart. Democrats generally advocated the annexation of Cuba as a slave state; Whigs (-cum-Republicans) generally opposed it.55
In November 1857 a correspondent for the New York Weekly Herald witnessed “over three hundred young negroes in excellent health” being off-loaded at Guantánamo. One day, the correspondent speculated, this “beautiful” and “capacious” harbor was likely to become “the center of a large and active [and presumably legal] commerce”; for now, it remained a “favorite harbor for the off landing of cargoes of negroes from Africa, as [its] numerous bays and inlets surrounded and separated from each other by high hills enable the slavers to discharge their cargoes in perfect security.” In this case, the writer suggested, the traffic transpired with full knowledge—indeed, collusion—of the district governor and local commander, whose forces corralled the slaves, exacted a fee, then sent them on their way. Within days, the slaves were said to be at work building a new railway for an English merchant named Thomas Brook.56
On the eve of the American Civil War, U.S. traders seemed to be ramping up their traffic in slaves, as if anticipating an interruption in the trade. In July 1860 The Chicago Tribune reported that its sources in “Guantánamo, Cuba, assert that ten or twelve American vessels have landed over 5,000 negroes on the island within the last six weeks.”57 A few years later, Abraham Lincoln’s naval secretary, Gideon Welles, contemplated occupying Guantánamo Bay as a coaling base to help enforce the Union blockade of the South. Whether the Union navy could have succeeded in curbing the American traffic in slaves at Guantánamo Bay is impossible to say, but the thought of such a showdown there is intriguing.58 In fact, the outbreak of the Civil War deflected pro-annexation sentiment in the United States, when formerly pro-annexationist enthusiasts in the Confederacy found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to throw themselves at the mercy of Spain for recognition of the Confederacy and access to Spanish ports. After the Civil War, many former southern planters moved to Cuba (and to Brazil), seeking to revive their fortunes there.
It was not the U.S. Civil War but the Ten Years’ War in Cuba (1868–1878) that effectively ended the slave trade and precipitated the formal abolition of Cuban slavery in 1886. The Ten Years’ War was Cuba’s first war of independence, and like so many Cuban revolts and insurrections, it arose in the east, more precisely in the western region of Oriente province, to the west of Santiago and Guantánamo Bay, where Creole planters had grown old waiting for Spain’s promises of liberal reform to improve their lives. From the very beginning of the war, the revolutionaries faced an intractable dilemma of needing both to marshal into its army Cuba’s restive slave population and to retain the sympathy of the majority of Creole planters without whose support the revolution was sure to fail. In the end, military necessity overwhelmed political strategy. Marshaling the slaves of eastern Cuba into their ranks, the revolutionaries alienated planters across the island, so that the spirit of independence never caught on.59
In the region around Santiago and Guantánamo, planters who did not ally themselves with the rebels had their fields destroyed, their crops burned, their slaves freed. The coffee and sugar economies of the region, just hitting their stride, would take years to recover, and even then in unrecognizable form. Many of the war’s original leaders were ambivalent about the destruction. But as the revolution ran on and became a war of attrition, older, white Creole leaders were pushed aside, to be replaced by younger men of mixed blood, less ambivalent about the economic and political system they laid to waste. The French planters of the Guantánamo Basin had seen this before. Eastern Cuba had become Haiti. Their world crumbled around them as Cuba descended into racial conflagration.60
Meanwhile, many U.S. planters who had abandoned the American South for Cuba after the Union victory returned to the United States 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. Meanwhile, the Grant administration, in office for eight out of the ten years of the war in Cuba, muddled through, alternately threatening Spain and resisting the calls of Cuban partisans in the United States for recognition first of belligerent rights, then of Cuban independence. To Grant, Cuba remained “a friendly nation,” one “whose sympathy and friendship in the struggling infancy of [America’s] own existence must ever be remembered with gratitude.” Intervention would wait a quarter century.61
The Ten Years’ War in Cuba, though confined largely to the east, crippled Cuban industry and commerce. As in the aftermath of most wars, the first to recover were individuals and businesses with surplus capital to invest, and in 1880s Cuba this meant above all American businessmen, who took advantage of the depressed Cuban economy to consolidate and recapitalize once-small sugar, coffee, tobacco, cocoa, and indigo plantations. Big was in. “The tendency of modern times is toward consolidation,” remarked Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge in March 1895. Lodge spoke to justify U.S. imperialism and America’s absorption of smaller states such as Cuba, which were a thing of “the past and have no future.”62 But he might just as well have been referring to the smaller farms of Cuba (and the United States) at the time when Cubans needed them most. If bad for Cubans, post–Ten Years’ War Cuba was good for U.S. investors, tamping down annexationist sentiment in the United States. By 1896, American investment in Cuban sugar and mining exceeded $50 million. Ripe for American investment, Cuba was also a good market for the United States, whose exports to Cuba exceeded $105 million by 1894.63
The consolidation and recapitalization of the Cuban economy mimicked developments in the United States in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Industrialization proceeded apace, spurred by improvements in communications and infrastructure and the arrival of millions of immigrants desperate for work. These were simultaneously exhilarating and anxious times, full of opportunity but also uncertainty, as the nation became further and further enmeshed in a global economy whose subtleties were not always easy to discern. Like other ambitious countries at this time, the United States thought to stabilize its economy and quell anxiety by venturing out into the world. Truly, the would-be world empire had come of age at an opportune time. Its warehouses were full of goods, its factories hungry for resources. Its writers and statesmen were poised for adventure and imbued with a sense of mission. Its rivals were curious, expectant, not precisely sure what to make of the ambitious young republic. When the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced the “closing” of the American frontier in 1894, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Albert Beveridge, Elihu Root, and John Hay, among others, heeded Turner’s essay like a starting gun, charging onto the public stage and laying the ideological groundwork for new imperial adventures.
When so-called anti-imperialists protested that republics do not lend themselves to empire, Roosevelt and company replied with a resounding Hogwash! What, after all, had the United States been doing to the Indians on this very continent lo these many years? On the frontier, American settlers confronted an indigenous population that had not owned that land and thus had no claims worthy of respect, Roosevelt argued. The U.S. government could hardly have treated the Indians as individuals with attendant civil rights. Indians were “warlike and bloodthirsty,” living lives “but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.” In the face of such savagery, neither “the rules of international morality” nor the nation’s founding principles applied. Like the defenders of the Indians before them, anti-imperialists were not only sentimental but dangerously naïve. “To withdraw from the contest of civilization because of the fact that there are attendant cruelties,” Roosevelt observed, “is, in my opinion, utterly unworthy of a great people.” All Americans benefited from Western conquest, all were implicated
in the violence. “The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all of civilized mankind under debt to him.” American was to Indian as Boer to Zulu, Cossack to Tartar, New Zealander to Maori: in “each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundation for the future greatness of a mighty people.”64
In Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval officer who hated nothing so much as to go to sea, the propagandists of empire found a bard.65 Twice president of the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, Mahan was one of the world’s foremost authorities on naval power at a time when the term naval power could be said to be redundant. Mahan shared many of the assumptions about American nationhood just described: a century of isolation had come to an end, liberty and empire were compatible, the United States had a right to appropriate distant territory for strategic interests, U.S. commercial expansion would benefit the entire world.66 But where many nineteenth-century Americans underemphasized the conflict entailed in American global expansion, Mahan took conflict for granted, insisting that the nation be prepared for it. When, around 1890, he began to write his influential essays on the history of naval warfare, he became convinced that the nation was decidedly unprepared. The nation needed not just ships, coastal defenses, and overseas bases—though it needed those in spades—but also an education in the role of sea power in promoting and maintaining national prosperity in an industrial age.
Two premises, closely related, undergirded Mahan’s writing on naval policy: first, that “control of the seas, and especially … the great lines drawn by national interest or national commerce, is the chief among the merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations”; second, that “communications are … the most vital and determining element in strategy, military or naval.” Though blessed internally by two coasts and a river system with few rivals on earth, the United States was woefully underrepresented in the region that mattered most: the Caribbean Basin, which Mahan described as “one of the greatest nerve centers of the whole body of European civilization.”67
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