The Admiral and the Ambassador

by Scott Martelle

  President Cleveland, in his final address to Congress in December 1896, implied that the US government saw little difference between the insurgents and the government. Where Spain had once sought to preserve private property during the course of quelling the rebellion, it

  has now apparently abandoned it and is acting upon the same theory as the insurgents, namely, that the exigencies of the contest require the wholesale annihilation of property that it may not prove of use and advantage to the enemy. It is to the same end that, in pursuance of general orders, Spanish garrisons are now being withdrawn from plantations and the rural population required to concentrate itself in the towns. The sure result would seem to be that the industrial value of the island is fast diminishing and that unless there is a speedy and radical change in existing conditions it will soon disappear altogether. The spectacle of the utter ruin of an adjoining country, by nature one of the most fertile and charming on the globe, would engage the serious attention of the Government and people of the United States in any circumstances.

  Cleveland seemed to be laying the ground for eventual US intervention. Americans had invested upward of $50 million in Cuban enterprises, and trade between the two countries had hovered around $100 million a year before the insurrection broke out.

  Complicating the issue was the fact that many of the insurrectionists had both raised money and plotted strategy in the United States—some assuming American citizenship—before returning to the island. Stretches of the US coast were being monitored to intercept those going to join or arm the fight. Cleveland dismissed calls for the United States to side with the rebels as counter to American interests and instead suggested that granting autonomy to Cuba would both take the steam out of the rebellion and allow Spain to retain its financial and historical interests. But he also warned that American patience was not limitless:

  A time may arrive when a correct policy and care for our interests, as well as a regard for the interests of other nations and their citizens, joined by considerations of humanity and a desire to see a rich and fertile country intimately related to us saved from complete devastation, will constrain our Government to such action as will subserve the interests thus involved and at the same time promise to Cuba and its inhabitants an opportunity to enjoy the blessings of peace.

  That time was coming sooner than Cleveland anticipated. And it would lead, surprisingly, to a resurgence of American interest in a long-forgotten sea warrior, John Paul Jones.

  6

  Of War and Heroes

  IT TOOK AMBASSADOR PORTER nearly a week to respond to the letter from his boss, Secretary Sherman, but on July 13 he wrote back that he would welcome meeting with Woodford and his fellow ambassadors to England and Germany. He also reported that he had “already been taking measures to acquaint myself as to the views of influential persons in France, statesmen, financiers, etc., in reference to the Cuban question, and can soon ascertain pretty clearly the drift of opinion.”1

  French leaders were sympathetic to Spain for several reasons, including neighborliness—with a shared border, it made sense to pick disputes judiciously—and a recognition that with its own colonial possessions France had little moral authority to tell another country how it should deal with uprisings. More significant was that French investors held some $400 million in Spanish bonds and railroad investments, a significant portion of Spain’s $2 billion national debt. Without the trade revenue from colonial plantations, the financiers feared those bonds could become worthless.

  “I think it will be found that these considerations would not induce [France] to take any hostile steps towards us as a nation in case we should be obliged to resort to vigorous action in reference to the deplorable condition of things in Cuba,” Porter advised Sherman. Many of the financiers, he said, recognized that if the rebellion in Cuba continued its course, the bonds would lose their value anyway. There also was a counteranalysis that “if Spain lets Cuba go, stops the enormous expenditure of men and money … and devotes her energies to developing her resources at home and her possessions in Africa, there will be a prospect for the creditors to get a better price for the securities which they hold.”

  Woodford arrived in Paris in late July and spent a couple of weeks consulting with Porter and others. Porter, whose military experience had been forged in the direct confrontations of the Civil War, saw in the persistence of the Cuban rebels signs that they ultimately would succeed. “If we ever get this infernal Cuban question settled we will have some peace and quiet,” he wrote to his old friend and neighbor Cornelius Bliss, McKinley’s secretary of the interior. “It is perfectly absurd that Spain with 200,000 regular troops cannot handle 30,000 insurgents and it is the best proof that Cuba will some day be free in spite of everything. The administration has shown great patience, which is wise.”2

  Despite his own military history, or perhaps because of it, Porter was among those who would welcome war with Spain—and maybe even with Great Britain, if it came to it. While Woodford was in Paris, Porter arranged a series of private dinners for American diplomatic figures, as well as military attachés. The Cuban crisis was never far from their minds during those gatherings, but the conversations roamed far. Woodford’s naval attaché, George Leland Dyer, was bouncing around European ports to assess both military strength and happenings in those cities. Yet he was at the ambassador’s elbow during most of those Paris meetings and discussions, as well as at the less formal dinners. Dyer found Porter an odd figure. Over a meal of sweetbreads, duck, and champagne on the evening of August 17, Dyer listened to Porter in all his patriotic fervor. Woodford was the focal point of the dinner, and in addition to Dyer, he was accompanied by his army attaché, Tasker H. Bliss, and the new first secretary to the embassy in Madrid, John R. MacArthur. Andrew D. White, the ambassador to England, was also at the table.3

  Porter, Dyer later reported in a letter home to his wife, “did most of the talking and the rest of us, notably Bliss, MacArthur and I, did most of the listening. It was real good American jingo talk” by Porter, who repeatedly made himself the center of the stories he told, stories in which he inevitably “twisted the lion’s tail.” In one of Porter’s stories, he told of a conversation with “an Englishman of note and standing” who had asked Porter why Americans hated Great Britain. Porter launched into a monologue that began with British atrocities in the Revolutionary War, some of the same acts that had so incensed John Paul Jones. “He made out an indictment which took him a half hour to repeat” and that finished with detailing British military presences “from Halifax through Bermuda, the West Indies around to Belize, just for the purpose of watching us.” Porter told the group the United States should prepare itself for eventual war with Great Britain to ensure that the Americans maintained supremacy in the Western Hemisphere. The dinner dragged on until well past 10 PM, when Dyer and Bliss “left to give the high muckety-mucks a chance to talk together.”

  Summer in Spain, as in France, was a popular time for vacations, and there was no sense of urgency to the timing of Woodford’s arrival there. He needed to learn as much as he could about the general mood of the European powers before dealing directly with Spain. War against Spain would be one thing; war against Spain and a range of powerful European military allies would be something else entirely.

  A crisis within Spain itself added to Woodford’s delay. Prime Minister Cánovas and his wife left Madrid in July for a vacation at the Santa Águeda spa in Mondragón. Cánovas was standing in a hallway on August 8 waiting for his wife to emerge from the baths so they could go to lunch. An Italian anarchist named Michele Angiolillo, who had been following Cánovas for a day or two, stepped into the hallway and fired three shots from a pistol, one hitting Cánovas in the chest and the other two striking him in the head. Cánovas lingered for two hours before succumbing to the wounds.4 Angiolillo was himself executed two weeks later.

  Those three pulls of an anarchist’s trigger helped propel Spain and the United States to war. The killing of Cá
novas, which was believed to have been in retaliation for his brutal repression of anarchists, upended the political balance in Spain as Cánovas was replaced as prime minister by liberal leader Práxedes Sagasta y Escolar, who favored limited autonomy for Cuba. In the midst of the confusion, Woodford delayed his arrival in Spain, fearing his sudden presence could give a rallying point for those in Spain who wanted to continue the current policies in Cuba. He finally moved on to Madrid in September to present his appointment papers to the queen regent, Maria Cristina.

  Porter reported to Sherman that before Cánovas’s assassination, Spanish diplomats had been working quietly to organize support for its position among the European powers, but with little effect. Their task became even harder after the murder of Cánovas, whom Porter described as “the only statesman Spain possessed…. There is never much disposition on the part of a nation to entangle itself with the affairs of a country which has neither statesmen nor money.” Thus France, he said, was unlikely to respond should the United States act to “put a stop to the disastrous Cuban war” between Spanish forces and the Cuban rebels.5

  In November Sagasta’s new Spanish government issued a series of decrees granting more autonomy to Cuba and Puerto Rico, which was read by the United States as an attempt to both defuse the violence and to meet US demands that McKinley had delivered to the Spanish ambassador in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme. The president told the ambassador that he wanted Spain to withdraw General Valeriano Weyler, who was forcibly moving civilians from the countryside and small towns into cities; to take other unspecified steps to end the violence on the island; to adopt policies to relieve the suffering of the Cuban people; and to move toward some sort of home rule for Cuba, which inherently meant a lessening of Spanish control of the colony. Those communications were made quietly, through diplomatic channels. But McKinley would soon push the issue publicly.6

  McKinley delivered his first presidential address to Congress on December 6, 1897, just weeks after the new Spanish proclamations, and he put the Cuban crisis at the top of the nation’s international affairs. The insurrection, McKinley said, was a testimony to Cubans’ drive to determine their own destiny, and the violence on the island was of concern to the United States. “The existing conditions cannot but fill this government and the American people with the gravest apprehension,” McKinley said. “There is no desire on the part of our people to profit by the misfortunes of Spain. We have only the desire to see the Cubans prosperous and contented, enjoying that measure of self-control which is the inalienable right of man, protected in their right to reap the benefit of the exhaustless treasures of their country.” McKinley condemned Spain’s policy of reconcentration as “not civilized warfare. It was extermination.” Still, the president rejected calls for American intervention and urged patience to see how the new Sagasta policies might change conditions in Cuba, particularly after Sagasta recalled the hated General Weyler. “It is honestly due to Spain and to our friendly relations with Spain that she [Cuba] should be given a reasonable chance to realize her expectations and to prove the asserted efficacy of the new order of things to which she stands irrevocably committed,” McKinley said.

  Mixed in with this message of a clear desire to remain uninvolved in Cuba, McKinley added what could be read as an ultimatum to Spain, pressing the Europeans to effect meaningful change:

  The near future will demonstrate whether the indispensable condition of a righteous peace, just alike to the Cubans and to Spain as well as equitable to all our interests so intimately involved in the welfare of Cuba, is likely to be attained. If not, the exigency of further and other action by the United States will remain to be taken. When that time comes that action will be determined in the line of indisputable right and duty. It will be faced, without misgiving or hesitancy.

  Spain’s move toward more autonomy for Cuba backfired; the rebels saw it as affirmation that the rebellion was working, which hardened their resolve for full freedom. At the same time, McKinley ignored a request from Spain’s queen regent that the United States move against New York-based supporters of the rebellion, fearing that such action would be read as a tacit acknowledgement that the rebels were working from American soil. Yet he also renewed the American policy of courtesy visits by US warships to Cuba as a gesture of goodwill, in part to ensure the United States had a presence in case violence threatened American interests and civilians on the island. One of the US Navy’s newest ships, the twenty-four-gun battleship Maine under Captain Charles D. Sigsbee, was dispatched from Key West and anchored in Havana harbor on January 25, 1898. Sigsbee played the role of diplomat-without-portfolio, calling on local Spanish dignitaries and accepting social invitations in the capital.

  In February the subtleties of diplomacy disappeared in smoke. Cuban sympathizers got hold of a letter from Spanish ambassador Lôme, in Washington, to a friend in Havana. The letter included a rather undiplomatic passage about McKinley: “Besides the natural and inevitable coarseness with which he repeats all that the press and public opinion of Spain has said of Weyler, it shows once more what McKinley is: weak and catering to the rabble, and, besides, a low politician, who desires to leave a door open to me and to stand well with the jingoes of his party.”

  The letter was shared privately with US government officials, who were outraged and determined to demand Spain recall Lôme. Before they could act, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal published a translation of the letter, leading to a surge of anti-Spanish public opinion. In Madrid, a special guard was added to the house where Ambassador Woodford was staying.

  Six days later, a massive explosion ripped through the Maine as it lay at anchor off Havana, killing 266 men out of 354 aboard and within minutes sending the ship to the bottom of the harbor. Sigsbee suspected a mine; other naval officials thought it might have been caused by the Maine’s own magazine of explosives. The American public, spurred by sensationalized reports in the newspapers of Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, believed the ship had been attacked by Spanish forces. The demands for war reached a fever pitch, and the passions stretched all the way to Paris.

  Horace Porter didn’t leave diaries or a deep trail of intimate letters, but his daughter, Elsie, kept her own record of those days in Paris, a diary full of youthful innocence as it details the mood of the capital and of her father. Shock and suspicion dominated. “It seems a dreadful thing, not only the uselessness of wasting [so] many lives, but also that it should have occurred in the port held by Spain, who at present is quite hostile,” she wrote on February 21. A boiler explosion seemed unlikely, as did sabotage, and “it is very unlikely the Spaniards would dare do such a thing as blow up a United States vessel. But somehow in my mind I am afraid of foul play.”7

  Many Americans, both in the United States and in Paris, similarly suspected the Spanish, and as the diplomatic corps—including Spanish ambassador Fernando Leon y Castillo—delivered notes of condolence, tensions in Paris ratcheted up. Porter encountered a Spaniard at a reception who warned that “Spain won’t stand it” if America blamed the explosion on them. Porter demurred, saying that Spain and the United States remained on good terms. “We have 300,000 men in our prisons who would be glad to be let out to fight America,” the man said. “They would just go over and take New York in a twinkling and pillage and plunder it.” Stepping around the arguments of logistics—how would Spain move that many men unimpeded?—and the unlikelihood that prisoners would be so willing to fight for the regime that had imprisoned them, Porter told the man that the New York police would be sufficient to keep the city safe.

  As the public furor over the Maine grew, Elsie noted in her diary that her father feared the Spanish were behind it and that war was possible. “Things look worse and worse,” she wrote. “Nothing has been decided [on the cause] but a great deal points to treachery.” Much of the pointing was being done by pro-war elected officials and in the yellow papers of Hearst and Pulitzer. For two years Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World had been publi
shing sensationalized stories of the rebellion in Cuba, and in the aftermath of the tragedy in Havana, they competed to see who could publish the most inflammatory stories. The Journal’s first-day headline read DESTRUCTION OF THE WAR SHIP MAINE WAS THE WORK OF AN ENEMY. The World had MAINE EXPLOSION CAUSED BY BOMB OR TORPEDO? McKinley sought to dampen the outrage while naval officials sorted out what had happened, but there was no controlling the yellow press—or public sentiment.8

  In the midst of the march to war, Elsie Porter underwent her own personal transition. With her mother sick more often than not and regularly gone to the Swiss Alps for recovery, Elsie left the convent and ended her studies. “I am not sorry,” she wrote in her diary. “I am much happier than stuffing my head till it aches and being with girls I care very little about. I learned to jabber French at the convent, to find out I wasn’t any worse than most people.”

  For the daughter of a diplomat, Elsie was, as her father told her, “something of a snob,” and her derision toward French women, and toward Catholics, is jarring, even if they are the private words of a teenager. She wrote that the young French women studying at the convent were uninterested in education and sought primarily to marry well. “If they were brought up on wholesome ideas, good books, a free out-of-door life, wouldn’t there be nobler, better women in France? … When will they learn that the greatest education lies in observation of everything around you, the study of people, traveling and reading, and above all cleanliness and open air.”9 With the convent behind her, Elsie became her father’s diplomatic companion, joining him on visits to other embassies, for dinners in the family residence, and at formal dinners given across Paris. She listened to the war talk. She had young male friends who were either in the military or likely to sign up should war come, which she—and many others—began to see as inevitable. And Elsie feared that if it did break out, she would miss it. “I know war is a very dreadful thing but I should be tremendously put out if war recurred in America and I wasn’t there to see ‘the wheels go round,’” she wrote. “And besides, it makes me mad to hear Mother say, ‘Oh, my dear child, you don’t know what war is. If you only knew how frightful the slaughter was at Chickamauga.’” Elsie wrote that she understood how bloody war was, yet still ached to touch it, writing with a jingoistic and romanticized fervor. “I like my own glorious country … and a war rouses patriotism, and just a short one, of course, [would be] very exciting, very emotional, very sad, and very glorious.”10