1858 (49 page)

The president considered himself an accomplished diplomat. He had contacts with governments all over the world. Yet so far his two years in office had resulted in nothing but foreign policy calamities. He had talked the British into vacating their positions of power in Central America, but his own government’s efforts to acquire those nations through immigration and persuasion had failed. The attempts to seize Nicaragua and Honduras by William Walker, although opposed by the White House, had been international disasters that reflected badly on the whole country. If Buchanan could purchase Cuba it would not only be the huge international coup he had been seeking but, as the year 1858 was drawing to an end, would serve as an event that, like the attack on Paraguay, would distract the attention of the public from the issue of slavery, that grew as the year 1858 was coming to an end.

When he worked in the State Department, Buchanan advised the government to simply buy the island outright. He was certain that the king of Spain would sell because his country needed the money; the powerful Catholic clergy in Spain and Cuba would support the sale to prevent the king from continuing to sell church lands to raise funds. American bankers would benefit from the purchase of bonds in Cuba. But a rather badly organized conference to arrange the sale of the Caribbean island at that time ended in confusion.

Now that he was president, Buchanan was determined to annex Cuba by one means or another. He appealed to Christopher Fallon, a friend and Pennsylvania businessman who represented the interests of the Spanish Queen Mother. He insisted on “silence and discretion” from Fallon. He wrote him in December 1857, “The government of the United States is as willing now to obtain the island by fair purchase as it was in 1848. You are well-acquainted with the efforts made in that year to accomplish the object and the cause of their failure. It is now, I think, manifest that a transfer of the island to the United States for a reasonable and fair price would greatly promote the interest of both countries.”
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Fallon warned Buchanan that convincing the Spanish crown to part with Cuba would prove very difficult politically, but he sailed off to Madrid in 1858 to attempt it. In Madrid, the intrepid Fallon worked behind the scenes toward his goal. He needed Buchanan to send a new Spanish minister over to facilitate the proceedings; the president agreed. The president also engaged his friend, Democrat Senator John Slidell, of Louisiana, to introduce a bill in Congress to provide $30 million to cover the costs of prepurchase negotiations and expenses to buy Cuba, a bill that would be introduced on New Year’s Day 1859. The president even came up with a political slogan to bring about the annexation of Cuba that he was proud of, “We must have Cuba!”
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Buchanan gave Congress what he considered numerous reasons to buy Cuba in his annual message on December 6, 1858, as the dismal year ended. He enumerated a long list of transgressions by the governments of Cuba and Spain, highlighted by Cuba’s refusal to pay back all of the debts it owed American businessmen and its role in the African slave trade. American citizens had suffered economic losses in Cuba that had not been addressed by the Cuban government, he said, and insisted that no real justice could be obtained because all claims had to go to Spain, not Havana, for resolution. After presenting an extended grievance list, Buchanan told Congress, “The truth is that Cuba, in its existing colonial condition, is a constant source of injury and annoyance to the American people.”

The president said with firmness that the only solution was to buy it. At that point he backed off his previous belief that America should simply attack the Caribbean island and seize it by force. “We would not, if we could, acquire Cuba by any other means,” the president told Congress, disregarding his jingoistic statements of earlier years. “This is due to our national character. All of the territory which we have acquired since the origin of the government has been by fair purchase from France, Spain, and Mexico or by the free and voluntary act of the independent state of Texas in blending her destinies with our own. This course we shall ever pursue unless circumstances should occur, which we do not now anticipate, rendering a departure from a clearly justifiable under the imperative and overruling law of self-preservation.”
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Buchanan’s insistence on the annexation of Cuba not only angered Northerners against slavery, but created yet another wave of speeches from Southerners calling for the reopening of the international slave trade, banned since 1808. This came about because, by putting the spotlight on Cuba, Buchanan inadvertently made people aware of the more than a dozen American ships that sailed out of Northern ports in the United States to Cuba and then engaged in the slave trade, carrying slaves between Cuba and Africa and Cuba and other Caribbean and South American countries. Some of these ships were stopped by U.S. Naval vessels, but many were not.

Angry Southerners accused Northerners of hypocrisy—on one hand they called for slavery’s elimination, but on the other they privately made large sums of money engaging in the transportation of slaves. The British consul charged that in the late 1850s half of the fifty ships a year that stopped in Cuba on slave-trade expeditions sailed secretly out of New York City. Stephen Douglas charged a year later, in 1859, that clandestine American ships were carrying more than fifteen thousand slaves a year from Africa to America; he swore that he had himself seen three hundred new arrivals in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
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The federal government had captured one slave ship trying to sneak into the United States through Carolina waters and detained the captain while the State Department decided whether he should be prosecuted by federal or state courts. Many Southern public officials used Cuba and the Northern slave ships in a new logic: if it was legal for a planter to buy slaves in Mississippi and transport them a thousand miles to his plantation in South Carolina, why was it illegal for a planter to buy slaves in Cuba and transport them ninety miles to Florida?
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Another group of Southerners argued that America’s annexation of Cuba would end international slave trading, a mainstay at the island. Northerners, of course, argued that the Southern scenario then made Cuba a Southern state and permitted Cubans to send their slaves to other Southern states. It also permitted Southern planters to send slaves who were discipline problems to Cuba and to threaten slave families with deportation to the much hotter climate of the island.

The president, as usual, had grossly underestimated the opposition of the Republican Party and antislavery members of his own party. The Republicans opposed the purchase or annexation of Cuba because it would add yet another state to the “slave power” and open up a quasi-slave trade between Cuba and planters in Southern states, the principle they had denounced for so long in their successful opposition to the African slave trade.

The Republicans were also against it because many of them, particularly former members of the American and Know-Nothing parties, were anti-Catholic. They were opposed to the rapid spread of newly arrived Catholic immigrants throughout the country and any and all proposals for state governments to fund parochial schools, an issue that had become heated in large cities such as Boston and New York. Spain was the heart of Roman Catholicism, they believed, and they would do anything to curtail the power of the Catholic Spanish government; they would do even more to prevent the Spanish king and his bishops from lining their pockets with American money from the sale of a slave republic.
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The Republicans expressed their opposition to the annexation of Cuba as soon as the president began to discuss it. They were against the $30 million negotiation fund, against the $100 million purchase, and were sure they could defeat the measure. The president had a slogan, “We Must Have Cuba!” Sarcastic Republicans came up with one too, “We Must Have Slavery!”
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The president did not understand that this single goal of annexing Cuba would open a Pandora’s box in Congress and that members would see it as an effort to open the door to the annexation of other islands and nations, the type of imperialistic land-grabbing that Congress, controlled by his own party, had turned down repeatedly during Buchanan’s two years in office. In fact, as soon as the proposal was made, one Southern congressman insisted that America had to annex nations “from Alaska to Cape Horn.” A congressman from Vermont joked that if the United States purchased Cuba, it should also purchase Jamaica, Santo Domingo, and the Bahamas.
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The proposal to purchase Cuba was debated extensively on the floor of the House of Representatives and at the same time the newspapers offered their opinions, positive in the South and negative in the North. It was soundly defeated. A nonplussed President Buchanan tried to convince Congress to approve it again in each of the years remaining in his term of office. Though he was determined to annex a nation, the Cuban idea never made it to the floor of the House for discussions again.

Buchanan was alternately criticized and lampooned for his failed efforts at international diplomacy, whether it was sending the navy, with the
Harriet Lane
, threatening to get tough with Paraguay, annex states in Mexico, or buy Cuba. The editor of Washington’s
National Intelligencer
was one of them.

He wrote at the end of 1858, “We must retrench the extravagant list of magnificent schemes which has received the sanction of the Executive… The great Napoleon himself, with all the resources of an empire at his sole command, never ventured the simultaneous accomplishment of so many daring projects. The acquisition of Cuba…the construction of a Pacific railroad…a Mexican protectorate; international preponderance in Central America, in spite of all the powers of Europe; the submission of distant South American states…the enlargement of the navy; a largely increased standing army…what government on earth could possibly meet all the exigencies of such a flood of innovation?”
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There were many others, though, who saw Buchanan’s international swashbuckling as a pathetic cover for his unwillingness to address the great domestic crisis of the age, slavery. The presidents of the United States did not have enormous direct power in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Congress controlled most legislation, but Buchanan, like his predecessors and successors in that era, enjoyed as president enormous powers of persuasion to convince people to do what he thought was best for the nation. Not once did he use those powers.

In fact, he used the considerable powers of the president to engage in petty disputes, turning members of his own party against him. He could have called on his prestige as president to help candidates get elected, but instead he used it to defeat candidates of his own party, some of them among the best public officials in the nation’s history, such as Stephen Douglas. He was unable to understand the thinking of anyone other than himself and did not realize that his feud with friend and newspaper editor John Forney would turn Forney against him and result in the defeat of numerous congressmen, including House Whip J. Glancy Jones, in the 1858 Pennsylvania elections. He made no effort as president and head of the Democratic Party to work with the party in the 1858 elections, which then turned into a disaster. He spent so much energy reviling William Seward that he spent no time studying other Republicans who might do harm to his party in the coming years, especially the relatively unknown Illinois legislator, Abraham Lincoln. In his efforts to destroy Douglas in Illinois he never considered that his efforts might accelerate the future rise of Lincoln.

The president dismissed the slavery issue in Kansas and elsewhere. He never understood the fury at the
Dred Scott
decision and the Fugitive Slave Act by millions of Americans, even though it was discussed daily in the newspapers in connection with the trial of the Oberlin rescuers, whom he continually tried to discredit. He underestimated the political strength of the abolitionists and did not see their growing influence with major figures, which he should have realized right away after William Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” speech. He ignored the threat of John Brown, dismissing him as a fanatic. He paid no attention to the important Southern office holders and newspaper editors he held so dear. He completely ignored the ever more outrageous and inflammatory views of key Southern newspapers, such as Robert Rhett’s
Charleston Mercury
. The national uproar over slavery, and talk of secession, was in the newspapers every day.

President James Buchanan began the year 1858 mingling with guests at a happy New Year’s Day reception at the White House, discussing everything but slavery. He ended the year the same way. His very last official act of 1858 did not involve slavery at all, but his never-ending love of international diplomacy. That very last message of the year concerned an unimportant trade agreement between the United States and China. He began the year 1859 the same way. His first official act of the new year did not concern slavery, either, but the sending of documents to the House involving steamships accused of playing a role in an invasion of Nicaragua.
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