1858 (48 page)

Buchanan had long thirsted for American expansionism in Central and South America. Upon hearing the news, he dispatched the twenty-one-ship squadron that included the USS
Harriet Lane
, named after his niece and White House hostess. The ships rendezvoused in Buenos Aires harbor. They were to wait until a U.S. diplomat went upriver to meet with the president of Paraguay. The commissioner was going to demand an apology for the firing on the
Water Witch
, compensation to the manufacturers of the vessel, compensation to American property owners in Paraguay who claimed their assets had been seized by the Paraguayan government in recent months, the signing of a treaty negotiated with the United States in 1853 that had never been finalized, and the inking of a new treaty that granted access to all the rivers of Paraguay for American vessels. If the Paraguayan president did not agree to all of the demands, the ships were to proceed to the mouth of the Paraguay River and blockade it, crippling Paraguay’s commerce. Understandably, the Paraguayans called the threatened blockade an act of war.
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James Buchanan, who had spent years in the diplomatic corps, not only believed in the Monroe Doctrine, in which all foreign nations were warned about undue influence in either North or South America, but was convinced that America had to annex parts of nations, entire republics, and Caribbean islands to fulfill its manifest destiny. Just as Polk had seen the war in Mexico, and its huge land acquisitions for the United States, as necessary for America, Buchanan saw action to acquire nations as part of the American dream. Buchanan wanted to be the president who brought new states into the Union and made the United States one whole country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, connected by a transcontinental railroad. Moreover, he wanted to be known as the American president who acquired other countries’ states and entire republics. He warned all nations that they risked war if they tried to stop the United States from its imperialistic course.

He was blunt about it, too, telling the world in his inaugural address that “no nation will have a right to interfere or to complain if…we shall still further extend our possession.” And what would those possessions be? Everything the president could lay his hands on. “It is beyond question the destiny of our race to spread themselves over the continent of North America and this at no distant day… the tide of [U.S.] emigrants will flow to the South…if permitted to go there, peacefully, Central America will soon contain an American population which…will preserve the domestic peace, while the different transit routes across the Isthmus [of Panama]…will have assured protection.”
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No other president would envision an American empire spreading through Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean until the twentieth century, but James Buchanan was certain that he could establish one. His grand scheme had several components: 1. dislodging European governments that controlled Central and South America and the Caribbean islands, especially England, in return for U.S. protection of their citizens still living there; 2. the annexation of one or more of the northern states of Mexico; 3. new treaties with countries such as Paraguay and Brazil to make U.S. shipping more prosperous, to be enforced militarily; 4. the planning of some kind of waterway that could cut across the narrower sections of Central America in Honduras, Nicaragua, or Panama and save U.S. ships months on the dangerous trip around the southern tip of South America; 5. the purchase of Cuba and its annexation as a slave state; and 6. the rapid development of Honduras and Nicaragua as U.S. protectorates after, at his urging, thousands of Americans moved to those countries and peacefully took over their political and economic systems.

The president was careful in all of his public declarations and private correspondence to insist that all of this would be done through monetary purchase and political persuasion, not military might. He argued, too, that few American presidents had his long experience in foreign affairs as a congressman and ambassador to England. He selected Lewis Cass as secretary of state because Cass shared his imperialistic schemes. As soon as he was sworn in, the president set up a second presidential office at the State Department so he could work with Cass on his expansionist plans.

Under new treaties, the British, at his urging, had agreed to pull out of their Central American and Caribbean possessions, ceding their lands and forts to the local governments. They would not give up the Bay Islands, off the coast of Honduras and close to where Buchanan envisioned his cross-continent waterway. The president became enraged. He refused to honor the old treaty, and negotiations with England fell apart. A few months later talks resumed, and while the British did not formally agree with Buchanan’s demands, they told him that they would not object to any interpretation of the treaties that he took. Buchanan, however, had to promise that he would not use any military action against the countries they had abandoned.

The president did so, certain that American immigration to these countries and islands would soon make the residents see that American business and governmental supervision were good for them. He also planned to ask Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up Mexican states and Caribbean islands. The president continually assured everyone that there would be no military invasions of these countries.

His promises fell apart in 1857 when, against his wishes, an American soldier of fortune, William Walker, took an expeditionary force to Nicaragua, intent on overthrowing the government there and setting up an independent, but pro-American, state. Following a congressional and media outcry, Buchanan dispatched a naval force to arrest Walker and his men. They did so, but Walker was not imprisoned. He returned to Central America on another jingoistic expedition later and was killed in an attempt to overthrow the government of Honduras.

Buchanan’s actions in the Walker affair were questionable at best. Walker insisted that he had the secret blessing of the White House on his campaigns in Central America. Some scholars have suggested that while Buchanan publicly condemned Walker, he privately hoped that the adventurer would satisfy a dream of his by bringing Nicaragua under U.S. protection, thus permitting him to build a canal through it to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Many diplomats dismissed the president’s criticism of Walker and viewed Buchanan’s dreams about Nicaragua as sinister. British diplomat Charles Wyke wrote, “President Buchanan by word of mouth always condemned Walker’s expeditions, and yet his government imbued with Southern ideas, took no effectual means to prevent vessel after vessel crowded with armed men from leaving their ports.”
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The president had an opportunity to use the army to seize large sections of northern Mexico in January 1858, when he was urged to do so by John Forsyth, the U.S. minister there. Several Americans had been killed in Mexico, including three doctors, as Mexico’s government changed hands that month. Then the new head of state, General Felix Zuloaga, who had ousted the elected president, announced that he was taxing all of America’s property and assets in Mexico.

Forsyth urged the president to attack Mexico and seize and annex one of its large northern states, Sonora, using the deaths of the Americans and the new taxes as a pretext. Wrote Forsyth, “You want Sonora? The American blood spilled near its line would justify you in seizing it…”
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Buchanan wanted to do just that, but for another reason, one that he thought the Congress and people would applaud. The legitimate government of Mexico, forced out by Zuloaga, had reconstituted itself at the city of Vera Cruz, with General Juarez, the former chief justice and second in line for the presidency under the Mexican Constitution, as its head. Buchanan told Congress that the two governments had made Mexico weak. He said the country was “a wreck upon the ocean, drifting about as she is impelled by different factions.” That made her ripe for takeover by a foreign power, probably France, and that foreign power would pose a threat to the United States. Buchanan asked the Senate for permission to not only send the army to support the Juarez government, but take over northern Mexico. He told the senators that it was America’s responsibility “to assume a temporary protectorate over the northern portions of Chihuahua and Sonora, and to establish military posts within the same.” The Senate rejected his plea and would reject another suggestion in 1859 to send troops to Mexico to protect Americans living there and his 1860 plan to station troops in that country permanently to assist the government, whose officials claimed they faced a revolution.
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The president’s actions to stop Walker upheld his direct military noninterference policy, but his naval action against Paraguay in December 1858 sent a signal to the nation and the world that perhaps he had changed his mind. The president certainly talked tough about his intentions in Paraguay. He told Congress, “Should our commissioner prove unsuccessful, after a sincere and earnest effort to accomplish the object of his mission, then no alternative will remain but the employment of force to obtain ‘just satisfaction’ from Paraguay.”
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The Paraguayans understood the full meaning of his words in Washington and his warships in Buenos Aires. The Americans received everything they wanted in the ensuing talks with the government and the U.S. warships sailed home. The president used the incident to send several messages to his own country and the world. First, he wanted to gobble up as much of the world as he could; second, he would defend the Monroe Doctrine against any nation, ensuring American rights, and, third, he hoped his buccaneering in foreign affairs would somehow distract the attention of Americans at home from the slavery issue.

It did not.

Cuba was a lush tropical island that sat just ninety miles off the southeastern tip of Florida and was, in 1858, a prosperous nation whose most successful industry was the raising of sugar cane—by tens of thousands of slave laborers. It was owned and governed by the Spanish crown and had been for years. The island enjoyed hot, tropical weather that was ideal for the production of sugar cane. It was a large island with several small cities, such as Havana, with harbors for seagoing ships. Sugar cane grown far from cities could also be loaded on to smaller boats that carried the crop out to ships anchored off the coast; those ships would then carry the cargo all over the world. Cuba was conveniently located geographically so its merchant ships could travel quickly to American ports, such as New Orleans, and ports in Mexico and South America.

James Buchanan had wanted to annex Cuba and make it another American state since 1848, when he worked in the State Department under President James Polk. He urged annexation of the island again in 1854, when he was minister to England and represented America in the talks that produced the Ostend Manifesto, a document that called for the purchase or annexation of Cuba by the United States and the outright seizure of it if Spain refused to sell the island. Cuba’s sugar cane crop would add to the overall American economy and its slave status would make it another Southern slave state and one more state under the Democratic Party’s control.

Buchanan publicly insisted on peaceful takeovers, but justified the use of force. Nowhere was that clearer than in an addendum to the Ostend Manifesto in 1854 when he wrote, “Our past history forbids that we should acquire the island of Cuba without the consent of Spain, unless justified by the great law of self-preservation.” He added in a bizarre note that if Spain refused a fair monetary offer for Cuba, America could simply seize it, “upon the very same principle that would justify an individual in tearing down the burning house of his neighbor, if there were no other means of preventing the flames from destroying his own home.”
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President Pierce had tried to purchase the island that year, at the suggestion of Buchanan and others, but failed. Pierce’s secretary of state, William Marcy, wrote to the president, and to Buchanan in England, that he was certain the British government, which was opposed to slavery, would somehow send thousands of Africans to flood Cuba to disrupt the government there. They would then free the slaves on the island, who would turn on the Spaniards, butchering them. The United States would then have to send the Navy to Cuba to help put down the uprising, since the Spanish Navy was three thousand miles away. To avoid that bloodshed and gain Cuba, Marcy wanted to buy the island from Spain for $100 million. He engaged a French businessman from Louisiana, Pierre Soule, to negotiate a deal, but the Spanish government was still not interested and it fell through.
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A pro-U.S. rebel group had tried to recruit Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States Army to lead an insurrectionist cabal against the Spanish government there that same year, but Lee declined after consulting his boss, then–Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Numerous Southern politicians in office in 1858 lusted after Cuba. The Caribbean nation would be good for the country, good for the Democrats, and very good for President Buchanan. He knew there would be objections because of slavery in Cuba, but the country had annexed Texas, a slave territory, in 1845. What was the difference? Besides, if Buchanan could add Cuba to the United States, it would set a precedent for his plans to annex the northern states of Mexico and perhaps add the Central American countries of Nicaragua and Honduras, too. He needed some precedent to take over those countries after his previous efforts had failed; Cuba was the key.