Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (23 page)

Frustrated in their attempts to change the law, fire-eaters turned their efforts to breaking it. The most famous example of the illicit slave trade in the 1850s was the schooner
Wanderer
, owned by Charles A. L. La-mar, member of a famous and powerful southern family. Lamar organized a syndicate that sent several ships to Africa for slaves. One of these was the
Wanderer
, a fast yacht that took on a cargo of five hundred Africans in 1858. The four hundred survivors of the voyage to Georgia earned Lamar a large profit. But federal officials had got wind of the affair and arrested Lamar along with several crew members. Savannah juries acquitted all of them. The grand jurors who had indicted Lamar suffered so much vilification from the local press as dupes of Yankee agitators that they published a bizarre recantation of their action and advocated repeal of the 1807 law prohibiting the slave trade. "Longer to yield to a sickly sentiment of pretended philanthropy and diseased mental aberration of 'higher law' fanatics," said the jurors in reference to opponents of the trade, "is weak and unwise." When northerners criticized the acquittal of Lamar, a southern newspaper denounced Yankee hypocrisy: "What is the difference between a Yankee violating the fugitive slave law in the North, and a Southern man violating . . . the law against the African slave trade in the South?" Lamar repurchased the
Wanderer
at public auction and went on with his slave-trading ventures until the Civil War, in which he was killed at the head of his regiment.
⁵³

III

Those who wanted to import more slaves also wanted to acquire more slave territory. For this purpose a good many southerners looked not to

52
. For a study of the movement to reopen the African slave trade, see Ronald T. Takaki, A
Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade
(New York, 1971).

53
. Quotations from Nevins,
Emergence
, I, 436; and Takaki,
Pro-Slavery Crusade
, 220. See also Tom Henderson Wells,
The Slave Ship
Wanderer (Athens, Ga., 1967).

the rather unpromising regions already part of the United States but to lands south of the border. At the 1856 commercial convention a delegate from Texas proposed a toast that was drunk with enthusiasm: "To the Southern republic bounded on the north by the Mason and Dixon line and on the south by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, including Cuba and all other lands on our southern shore."
⁵⁴

This version of Manifest Destiny was not new in 1856. Eight years earlier, just after the Senate had approved the treaty acquiring California and New Mexico, President Polk had outlined his next goal: "I am decidedly in favour of purchasing Cuba & making it one of the States of [the] Union."
⁵⁵
This idea appealed particularly to southerners as a way to expand their political power. "The Pearl of the West Indies," proclaimed one annexationist pamphlet, "with her thirteen or fifteen representatives in Congress, would be a powerful auxiliary to the South." Believing that the Gulf of Mexico was "a basin of water belonging to the United States," Senator Jefferson Davis declared in 1848 that "Cuba must be ours" in order to "increase the number of slaveholding constituencies."
⁵⁶

Polk authorized his minister to Spain to offer $100 million for the island. But this effort died stillborn. The American minister's clumsy efforts both amused and angered Spanish officials. A North Carolina politician with the implausible name of Romulus M. Saunders, the minister knew no language but English "& even this he sometimes murders," commented Secretary of State Buchanan. The Spanish foreign minister informed Saunders that sooner than sell Cuba, Spain "would prefer seeing it sunk in the ocean." In any case it was unlikely that Congress, with its Whig and Wilmot Proviso majority in the House, would have appropriated funds to buy a territory containing nearly half a million slaves. Whig victory in the 1848 presidential election ended official efforts to acquire Cuba—for the time being.
⁵⁷

Annexationists were not surprised by this failure. After all Texas, California, and New Mexico had been won only by revolution and war; they were willing to apply the same methods in Cuba. Their champion

54
. Wender,
Southern Commercial Conventions
, 168.

55
. Milo Milton Quaife, ed.,
The Diary of James K. Polk during His Presidency
, 1845 to 1849, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1910), III, 446.

56
. Basil Rauch,
American Interest in Cuba: 1848–1855
(New York, 1948), 111;
CG
, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 599; Robert E. May,
The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire
1854–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1973), 11.

57
. Rauch,
American Interest in Cuba
, 48–100; quotations from 97–98.

was a handsome, charismatic Cuban soldier of fortune named Narciso Lopez who had fled to New York in 1848 after Spanish officials foiled his attempt to foment an uprising of Cuban planters. Lopez recruited an army of several hundred adventurers, Mexican War veterans, and Cuban exiles for an invasion of the island. He asked Jefferson Davis to lead the expedition. The senator demurred and recommended his friend Robert E. Lee, who considered it but politely declined. Lopez thereupon took command himself, but the Taylor administration got wind of the enterprise and sent a naval force to seize Lopez's ships and block his departure in September 1849.

Undaunted, Lopez began to organize a new expedition of "filibusters" (from the Spanish
filibustero
, meaning freebooter or pirate). Believing northerners too "timid and dilatory" for this venture, Lopez left New York for New Orleans, where he planned to "rest his hopes on the men of the bold West and chivalric South."
⁵⁸
On the way he stopped in Mississippi to ask Governor John Quitman to command the invasion force. Quitman was a veteran of the Mexican War, in which he had risen to major general and commanded the assault that took Mexico City. A fire-eater who scattered threats of secession during the crisis of 1850, Quitman was tempted by the offer but turned it down because he felt compelled to remain at his post in Mississippi. He did help Lopez recruit men and raise money to buy weapons. Lopez obtained arms and volunteers from similar sources in Louisiana. In May 1850 his army of six hundred men sailed from New Orleans to the accompaniment of cheering crowds and the "winking encouragement" of public officials. Lopez landed on the northwest coast of Cuba, captured the town of Cardenas, and burned the governor's mansion. But the expected uprising of Cuban revolutionaries failed to materialize. When Spanish troops closed in on Cardenas the filibusters retreated to their ship, which barely outraced a pursuing Spanish warship to Key West, where the expeditionary force ingloriously dissolved.
⁵⁹

Nevertheless, Lopez received a hero's welcome in the lower South. Dozens of towns and organizations offered him salutes, parades, toasts,

58
. Quoted in John Hope Franklin,
The Militant South
1800–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 105.

59
. Chester Stanley Urban, "New Orleans and the Cuban Question during the Lopez Expeditions of 1849–1851: A Local Study in 'Manifest Destiny,' "
Louisiana Historical Quarterly
, 22 (1939), 1125; Robert E. May,
John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader
(Baton Rouge, 1985), 236–39.

and banquets. Southern senators demanded American action to punish Spain. "I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it," declared Jefferson Davis's fellow senator from Mississippi, Albert Gallatin Brown. But Brown would not stop there. "I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery." The
Southern Standard
had an even larger vision. "With Cuba and St. Domingo, we could control the productions of the tropics, and, with them, the commerce of the world, and with that, the power of the world." Indeed, pronounced
De Bow's Review
, "we have a destiny to perform, 'a manifest destiny' over all Mexico, over South America, over the West Indies."
⁶⁰

Zachary Taylor's administration, then trying to bring in California and New Mexico as free states, was unmoved by this rhetoric. The government indicted Lopez, Quitman, and several other southerners for violation of the neutrality laws. Quitman threatened to use the Mississippi militia to defend the state's sovereignty against federal marshals. But he finally calmed down, resigned the governorship, and agreed to be arrested. Three trials in New Orleans of one defendant (a Mississippi planter) ended in hung juries, whereupon the federal government dropped the remaining indictments. Wild celebrations marked this denouement. "If the evidence against Lopez were a thousand fold stronger," commented a New Orleans newspaper, "no jury could be impaneled to convict him because public opinion makes a law."
⁶¹

Thus vindicated, the filibusters tried again in 1851. William J. Crittenden of Kentucky, nephew of the attorney general, commanded a "regiment" of southern volunteers in the invasion force of 420 men. Once again port officials in New Orleans colluded with the filibusters to allow their departure on August 3, 1851, in a ship loaded to the gunwales. But this time Spanish troops were ready and waiting. They had already suppressed a premature local uprising intended to cooperate with the invaders. In several engagements the Spaniards killed two hundred of the filibusters and captured the rest. Cuban officials sent 160 of the prisoners to Spain, garroted Lopez in front of a large crowd

60
. May,
Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire
, 9; Jesse T. Carpenter,
The South as a Conscious Minority
, 1789–1861 (New York, 1930), 179;
De Bow's Review
, 9 (1850), 167.

61
.
Orleanian
, June 8, 1850, quoted in Urban, "New Orleans and the Cuban Question,"
loc. cit.
, 1132. See also May,
Quitman
, 240–52.

in Havana, and lined up fifty American prisoners including Crittenden in the public square and executed them by firing squad.
⁶²

When this news reached New Orleans, mobs rioted out of control. They destroyed the Spanish consulate and sacked shops owned by Spaniards. "Blood for Blood!" blazoned the
New Orleans Courier
. "Our brethren must be avenged! Cuba must be seized!"
⁶³
But the Fillmore administration, embarrassed by its negligent failure to stop the filibusters before they reached Cuba, confined its activities to a successful diplomatic effort to release the remaining American prisoners from Spain.

Filibustering died down for a time while expansionists concentrated on winning a friendly administration in the election of 1852. The spread-eagle nationalism of the "Young America" element in the Democratic party made Cuba an important issue in this election.
⁶⁴
The Young Americans were by no means all southerners. Stephen Douglas of Illinois was their foremost champion. But expansion remained preeminently a southern priority. "The desire that Cuba should be acquired as a Southern conquest, is almost unanimous among Southern men," commented one observer. "The safety of the South is to be found only in the extension of its peculiar institutions," said another. The election of Franklin Pierce as president caused Young Americans to celebrate with bonfires and torchlight parades brandishing such banners as "The Fruits of the Late Democratic Victory—Pierce and Cuba."
⁶⁵

Pierce's first actions pleased these partisans. "The policy of my Administration will not be controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion," the new president promised in his inaugural address. "Our position on the globe, render[s] the acquisition of certain possessions . . . eminently important for our protection. . . . [The] future is boundless."
⁶⁶
Pierce filled his cabinet and the diplomatic corps with votaries of Manifest Destiny. Of all these appointments, that of Pierre Soulé as minister to Spain offered the clearest signal of the administration's intentions. A native of France whose republicanism had forced