Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (24 page)

62
. Rauch,
American Interest in Cuba
, 151–63; Charles H. Brown,
Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters
(Chapel Hill, 1980), 67–88.

63
. Urban, "New Orleans and the Cuban Question,"
loc. cit.
, 1159.

64
. For a fuller treatment of this election, see the chapter following.

65
. Quotations from McCardell,
Idea of a Southern Nation
, 258–59, and Brown,
Agents of Manifest Destiny
, 105.

66
. James D. Richardson, comp.,
Messages and Papers of the Presidents
, 20 vols. (Washington, 1897–1917), VII, 2731–32.

him to emigrate to Louisiana in 1825, the firebrand Soule hailed the European revolutions of 1848 to free the Continent from monarchy even as he supported filibusters to Cuba to bring that island into the Union as a slave state. Within a year of his arrival at Madrid, Soule denounced the monarchy, wounded the French ambassador in a duel, presented a forty-eight hour ultimatum (which Spain ignored) over an incident involving an American ship at Havana, and began intriguing with Spanish revolutionaries.

Despite all this, the only expansionist achievement of the Pierce administration was the Gadsden Purchase. And even that came to less than southerners had hoped. A railroad promoter from South Carolina, James Gadsden became minister to Mexico with the purpose of buying additional territory for a railroad route from New Orleans to the Pacific. Antislavery Yankees suspected that he had another purpose in mind as well: to acquire territory suitable for future admission as slave states. They may have been right. Gadsden initially offered Santa Anna up to $50 million for nearly 250,000 square miles of northern Mexico. The canny Mexican leader needed the money, as always, but could not see his way clear to selling off almost one-third of what was left of his country. Santa Anna finally made a $15 million deal with Gadsden to sell 55,000 square miles, but northern senators cut out 9,000 of these before enough northern Democrats joined southern senators to approve the treaty in 1854.
⁶⁷

Gadsden's efforts were crowded out of the limelight by Cuba. Determined to acquire the island one way or another, Pierce knew that Spain was no more willing to sell in 1853 than five years earlier. Surviving evidence indicates that the administration therefore hoped to foster a Texas-style revolution in Cuba supported by another filibuster invasion. The secretary of state's instructions to Soulé in Madrid stated that, while a renewed effort to purchase Cuba was "inopportune," the United States expected the island to "release itself or be released from its present Colonial subjection."
⁶⁸
Pierce apparently met with John Quitman in July 1853 and encouraged him to go ahead with a filibuster expedition, this time with more men backed by more money than Lopez's ill-fated invasions. Quitman needed little encouragement. "We have been swindled . . . out of the public domain," he declared. "Even a portion

67
. Paul Neff Garber,
The Gadsden Treaty
(Philadelphia, 1923).

68
. William R. Manning, ed.,
Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs
, 1831–1860, 12 vols. (Washington, 1932–39), XI, 160–66.

of Texas, supposed to be secured as slaveholding, has been wrested from us [by settlement of the boundary dispute in favor of New Mexico]. . . . The golden shore of the Pacific . . . is denied to Southern labor. . . . We are now hemmed in on the west as well as the north." Thus it was time "to strike with effect" in Cuba "after the fashion of Texas."
⁶⁹

Prominent southerners endorsed Quitman's project. The governor of Alabama actively supported it. Numerous political leaders in Texas helped organize the expedition which was scheduled, like the others, to depart from New Orleans. "Now is the time to act," wrote Alexander Stephens from Georgia, "while England and France have their hands full" with the Crimean War and could not interfere.
⁷⁰
By the spring of 1854 Quit-man had recruited several thousand volunteers. Cuban exiles made contacts with revolutionary groups on the island to coordinate yet another uprising. Senator John Slidell of Louisiana, backed by other southern senators, introduced a resolution to suspend the neutrality law. The foreign relations committee was about to report this resolution favorably when, with apparent suddenness in May 1854, the administration turned negative and reined in Quitman.
⁷¹

What had happened? Apparently the administration, which had spent all of its political capital in obtaining passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, decided to back off from a second proslavery enterprise that might wreck the northern half of the party.
⁷²
"The Nebraska question has sadly shattered our party in all the free states," wrote Secretary of State William M. Marcy, "and deprived it of the strength which was needed & could have been much more profitably used for the acquisition of Cuba." On May 31, the day after he signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Pierce issued a proclamation enjoining filibustering at pain of suffering the full penalties of the neutrality law.
⁷³

But this did not end efforts to acquire Cuba. Deciding in 1854 to

69
. Rauch,
American Interest in Cuba
, 200–201; McCardell,
Idea of a Southern Nation
, 256.

70
. May,
Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire
, 39.

71
. This paragraph has drawn upon the accounts in Rauch,
American Interest in Cuba
, 262–86; Potter,
Impending Crisis
, 183–88; May,
Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire
, 46–60; and Brown,
Agents of Manifest Destiny
, 109–23.

72
. For the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its consequences, see the chapter following.

73
. May,
Quitman
, 270–95; May,
Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire
, 60–67; Brown,
Agents of Manifest Destiny
, 124–44; quotation from May,
Southern Dream
, 60.

exploit the sorry financial plight of the Spanish government, Pierce authorized Soulé to offer as much as $130 million for the island. If Spain turned this down, Soule was then to direct his effort "to the next desirable object, which is to detach that island from the Spanish dominion." Whatever this cryptic instruction may have meant, if the administration expected Soule to operate through the quiet channels of diplomacy they had mistaken their man. In October 1854 he met at Ostend in Belgium with his fellow ministers to Britain and France, James Buchanan and John Mason. The volatile Louisianian somehow persuaded the normally cautious Buchanan as well as the naive Mason to sign a memorandum that became known as the Ostend Manifesto. "Cuba is as necessary to the North American republic as any of its present . . . family of states," proclaimed this document. If the United States decided that its security required possession of the island, and Spain persisted in refusing to sell, then "by every law, human and Divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain."
⁷⁴

In his usual fashion, Soule had failed to keep the Ostend meeting secret from the European press. An American newspaper also picked up details of the "Manifesto" and broke the story in November 1854. Antislavery newspapers denounced the "shame and dishonor" of this "Manifesto of the Brigands," this "highwayman's plea" to "grasp, to rob, to murder, to grow rich on the spoils of provinces and toils of slaves."
⁷⁵
The House subpoenaed the diplomatic correspondence and published it. Already reeling from a Kansas-Nebraska backlash that had cost the Democrats sixty-six of their ninety-one northern congressmen in the 1854 elections, the shell-shocked administration forced Souleé's resignation and abandoned all schemes to obtain Cuba. Quitman nevertheless renewed plans for a filibustering expedition in the spring of 1855. Pierce finally persuaded him to desist—a task made easier when Spanish troops in January 1855 arrested and executed several Cuban revolutionaries, an unpleasant reminder of what might be in store for leaders of another invasion.

Meanwhile, public attention shifted a few hundred miles west by south of Havana where the most remarkable and successful filibuster leader was tracing his meteoric career. Born in Nashville in 1824, William Walker bore few outward signs of the ambition for power that burned within him. Shy and taciturn, ascetic, sandy-haired and freckled, five

74
. Manning, ed.,
Diplomatic Correspondence
, XI, 175–78, 193–94.

75
. Potter,
Impending Crisis
, 192; Nevins,
Ordeal
, II, 362.

feet five inches tall and weighing less than 120 pounds, his only distinctive feature was a pair of luminous, transfixing, grey-green eyes. After graduating
summa cum laude
from the University of Nashville at the age of fourteen, this restless prodigy studied medicine in Europe, earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania at the age of nineteen, but practiced for only a short time before moving to New Orleans to study law. After a brief career as a lawyer, Walker turned to journalism and became an editor of the
New Orleans Crescent
.
⁷⁶

In 1849 Walker joined the stream of humanity moving to California. But his restive soul found no repose in that golden state. As a journalist he attacked crime and helped inspire the vigilante movement in San Francisco. He fought three duels and was twice wounded. In 1853 Walker finally found his avocation. With forty-five heavily armed men he sailed from San Francisco to "colonize" Baja California and Sonora. His professed intent was to subdue the Apaches, bring the blessings of American civilization and Anglo-Saxon energy to these benighted Mexican provinces, and incidentally to exploit Sonora's gold and silver deposits.

This was neither the first nor last of many American filibustering expeditions south of the border during the unquiet years following the Mexican War. The chronic instability and frequent overthrows of the government in Mexico City created power vacuums filled by bandit chieftains and gringo invaders who kept the border in a constant state of upheaval. Walker's expedition enjoyed more initial success than most such enterprises. His filibusters captured La Paz, the sleepy capital of Baja California. Walker proclaimed himself president of this new republic and proceeded to annex Sonora without having set foot in that richer province. This bold action attracted more recruits from California. Walker's army of footloose Forty-niners, with few supplies and less military experience, marched through rugged mountains, rafted across the Colorado River, and invaded Sonora. Exhausted, starving, and mutinous, fifty of Walker's men deserted and the rest retreated in the face of a superior force that killed several of them. With thirty-four survivors Walker fled across the border and surrendered to American authorities

76
. This and following paragraphs on Walker's career are drawn mainly from William O. Scroggs,
Filibusters and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His Associates
(New York, 1916); Albert Z. Carr,
The World and William Walker
(New York, 1963); Frederic Rosengarten, Jr.,
Freebooters Must Die! The Life and Death of William Walker
(Wayne, Pa., 1976); and Brown,
Agents of Manifest Destiny
, 174 ff.

at San Diego in May 1854. Hailed as a hero by many San Franciscans, Walker stood trial for violating the neutrality law and was acquitted by a jury that took eight minutes to reach its verdict.

This Sonoran exercise was merely a warm-up for the real game. American attention in the early 1850s focused on the Central American isthmus as a land bridge between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. A canal through these jungles would shorten the passage between California and the rest of the United States by weeks. Nicaragua seemed to offer the best route for such a canal, but the difficulty and cost of construction would be great. Meanwhile the New York transportation tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt established the Accessory Transit Company to carry passengers and freight between New York and San Francisco via Nicaragua. Attracted by the tropical climate with its potential for the production of fruit, cotton, sugar, and coffee, other American investors began casting covetous eyes on the region. But the political climate discouraged investment; Nicaragua seemed in a constant state of revolution, having suffered through fifteen presidents in the six years before 1855. The temptation for filibustering there was almost irresistible; William Walker proved unable to resist it.