Texas: Lone Star (Slave) State

There was for a long time a tendency to downplay the significance of slavery in the history of Texas. The Lone Star State, it was said, was “more western than southern.” But, in fact, the institution of bonded labor was central to the story of the state. By the time of annexation in 1846, slavery “was as strongly established in Texas, the newest slave state, as it was in the oldest slave state in the Union.” As Texas patriarch Stephen F. Austin declared in 1833, “Texas must be a slave country. Circumstances and unavoidable necessity compels it. It is the wish of the people there, and it is my duty to do all I can, prudently, in favor of it. I will do so.” If this quote evinces something less than a passion for the institution—something of a resigned acceptance—on Austin’s part, it nevertheless indicates the deep roots of slavery in the state’s proverbial soil. Indeed, slavery may have been the deciding factor that led Texans to fight their war of independence against Mexico. But even here, there is nuance: slavery “was one of the differences separating Mexicans and Texians [sic], but it was not THE cause of the rebellion.”⁴

The implication was, nevertheless, clear: if the Lone Star Republic were to join the United States, it would do so as a slave state. When Texas would join the Union proved to be the more vexing question. In March 1836, the Texans meeting at Washington-on-the-Brazos had declared independence from Mexico, and the interim government sought diplomatic recognition from the United States. President Andrew Jackson, however, was reluctant to move precipitously on the matter. For starters, he told the Texans delegated to negotiate with the United States government that the entity that now declared itself the government of Texas had not yet demonstrated that it was the de facto sovereign of its territory. Recognition from Washington, DC, would have to wait until the following year. Finally, on his last full day in office, Jackson announced the nomination of Louisianan Alcée La Branche as America’s chargé in Texas.⁵

In the matter of Texas recognition, Jackson had acted with “uncharacteristic restraint.” He did so with reason. There was the risk of war with Mexico to be considered, since that country refused to view Texas as anything other than a federal state in rebellion. Then, too, there was the issue of slavery; neither Jackson nor his immediate successor, Martin Van Buren, wanted to exacerbate the sectional differences in the nation, or divisions in the Democratic Party, over the issue of adding this newly minted slaveholding republic to the United States. Washington rebuffed Texas’s request for annexation in 1837.⁶ The Texans would have to wait nearly a decade.

Hope for annexationists on both sides of the Sabine River came from an unexpected source. In 1840 William Henry Harrison, a Whig, was elected to the presidency. The Whigs, unlike the Democrats, were hesitant about expansion at a time when party loyalties were still strong across sections. Proannexation Democrats thus now had “no reason to hope for anything better than the four frustrating years under Van Buren.”⁷ But fate would not prove kind to Whigs elected to the White House. A month into his administration, Harrison died, and Vice President John Tyler, a Virginian, was sworn into the presidency on April 6, 1841. The new president, “an ardent expansionist,” found himself forsaken by his own party early that autumn.⁸ This helped free him up to pursue his goal of annexation. For the expansionists, it was so far, so good.

Tyler did not, however, move immediately on annexation. The domestic situation in the United States served to slow the drive toward expansion: “antislavery feeling, together with a widespread disinclination to aggravate the slavery controversy, was impeding the extension of American sovereignty over Texas, and it continued for a time to do so.” Any expansion would thus have to be presented by the administration as being in the interest of the entire nation, and not just one section of it. Additionally, Tyler had initially decided to keep on Harrison’s cabinet, which included New Englander Daniel Webster as secretary of state. When Tyler broached the subject of annexation to Webster in October 1841, the secretary gave the enthusiastic president’s overture a “cool reception.”⁹ The fruit, it would appear, was not yet ripe.

Yet patience was increasingly not seen as a virtue by annexationists, and especially not by southerners who looked at British policy toward the Southwest with increasing alarm. The fear that London sought to prevent American acquisition of Texas was borne out by the facts. But the anxiety over British plans to force abolition on an independent Texas was not. Proslavery southerners “radically overestimated the depth of Britain’s commitment to antislavery action in the Gulf of Mexico.” In fact, the primary foreign policy goal of the government of Prime Minister Robert Peel was “to avoid an Anglo-American clash in the region.”¹⁰ The British early on “understood that the American acquisition of Texas faced serious obstacles in the United States itself.”¹¹ Certainly, Britain sought to convince the Texas leadership to promise abolition in exchange for Mexican recognition of their independence. But keeping Texas out of American hands took precedence.

This was, however, decidedly not the perception in Tyler’s Washington. As David Pletcher has summarized the situation, “The menace of effective British intrigue for abolishing slavery among the Texan slaveholders does not seem alarming, with the perspective of time, but rumors about [the British foreign secretary, Lord] Aberdeen’s devious policy lent themselves admirably to exaggeration and propaganda in 1843.”¹² The year was key. Concerns had been mounting about British efforts in Texas over the course of the previous two years of Tyler’s presidency. Then, in July 1843, Abel P. Upshur took the reins of the State Department, after the departure of Webster in May and the subsequent death of acting secretary Hugh S. Legaré of South Carolina. Upshur, a Virginian, had largely kept his counsel on Texas while serving as Tyler’s navy secretary. Now, however, he was in the pivotal position to affect a shift in policy. His accession “brought into the State Department the driving force of slavery extremism in the South. Annexation of Texas became the passion of the Tyler Administration.”¹³

In a letter dated September 28, 1843, Upshur expressed his concerns to America’s minister in London, Edward Everett, noting that the “movements of Great Britain, with respect to African slavery, have at length assumed a character which demands the serious attention of this Government.” The secretary had been gravely disturbed by an exchange in the House of Lords that had transpired between Lord Brougham and the Earl of Aberdeen. Brougham had expressed his hope that a British diplomatic initiative on the Texas question would produce sweeping results: “He knew that the Texian’s [sic] would do much as regarded the abolition of slavery, if Mexico could be induced to recognize their independence. If, therefore, by our good offices, we could get the Mexican Government to acknowledge the independence of Texas, he would suggest a hope that it might terminate in the abolition of slavery in Texas, and ultimately in the whole of the Southern States of America.” In response, Aberdeen said that the government was doing all it could to achieve “that result which was contemplated by his noble friend,” and adding that “he need hardly say that no one was more anxious than himself to see the abolition of slavery in Texas.”¹⁴

Aberdeen’s response was polite, in the context of the House of Lords, yet highly inflammatory to the proslavery makers of America’s foreign policy. Brougham’s wish was, in fact, their worst fear: that British intervention in the Texas matter would lead to abolition in that country, thus presenting an existential threat to the institution in the neighboring American South. Aberdeen had significantly exacerbated those fears by trying to reassure his colleague, for in so doing he appeared to associate the policies of the British government with Brougham’s scenario. While the foreign secretary’s words were vague, they “did convey the impression that if Mexico and Texas signed a peace treaty, the abolition of slavery would be part of it.”¹⁵ Upshur, for one, was willing to entertain the most menacing reading of Aberdeen’s statement and to extrapolate from there. Admitting that the foreign secretary’s remarks “may perhaps admit of doubt,” he nevertheless added that they might be “fairly susceptible of a more extended construction.” After all, it was “quite clear that the abolition of slavery in the United States was the most important ‘result’ contemplated by Lord Brougham, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that it was then most prominent in the mind of Lord Aberdeen.… It does no violence to the rules of fair construction, to understand his language as an avowal of designs which, whether so intended or not, threaten very serious consequences to the United States.” Upshur’s lawyerly reading of Aberdeen’s words may be questioned, since, in context, the “result” of which the latter spoke most likely referred to a Mexico-Texas armistice. But Upshur was willing to take a more expansive interpretation of the remarks. So, too, he suggested, was Tyler, who “attaches the more importance to those declarations, because they are perfectly consistent with information received from other sources, all tending to the conclusion that the policy of England, in regard to the abolition of negro slavery, is not limited to Texas alone.”¹⁶ Yet again, Britain was constructed by American policymakers as a threat to the survival of slavery within the United States itself.

Ten days after writing the note, Upshur was back at it, instructing Everett as to the motives behind British abolitionist designs. “It is impossible to suppose,” the secretary declared, “that England is actuated in this matter by a mere feeling of philanthropy.” Rather, a quest for economic hegemony was at work: “Her objects undoubtedly are to revive the industry of her East and West India Colonies, to find new markets for her surplus manufactures, and to destroy, as far as possible, the rivalry and competition of the manufactures of the United States.” It was, he added, “altogether probable” that abolition of slavery would achieve these results. Upshur went on to emphasize to the New Englander Everett that Britain was not, by its actions toward Texas, threatening the South alone: “The question is not sectional. Although the first and most disastrous effects of such a state of things would be felt in the slave-holding States, they would extend to and embrace important interests in every other part of the country. We must contemplate it, therefore, as a national question.”¹⁷ Indeed, this would become a mantra for slave-holding southerners: a threat to slavery in the South was, in fact, a threat to the existence of the entire nation.¹⁸

Aberdeen’s words had come as a shock to the Tyler administration, but not as a surprise. Upshur and company had been primed for a “revelation” of this sort. Duff Green, sent to London as a special agent of the administration, had been sending back word of a British plot to end slavery in Texas.¹⁹ On August 8, 1843, Upshur wrote to William S. Murphy, US chargé in Austin, to advise him of the perilous situation. A “citizen of Maryland then in London,” in whom Upshur had full confidence, had written that the British had a plan afoot to extend a loan to the Texas government, the price of which was to be the abolition of slavery in their country. In the secretary’s estimation, there seemed to be “no doubt as to the object in view, and none that the English government has offered its coöperation.” Any such attempt “upon any neighboring country would necessarily be viewed by this government with very deep concern; but when it is made upon a nation whose territories join the slave-holding States of our Union, it awakens still more solemn interest. It cannot be permitted to succeed without the most strenuous efforts on our part to arrest a calamity so serious to every part of our country.” Upshur was, by this point, convinced that Britain’s goal was “to abolish domestic slavery throughout the entire continent and islands of America” in order to find new markets and destroy competition for its goods. This represented a grave threat to the United States: “The establishment in the very midst of our slave-holding States of an independent government forbidding the existence of slavery; and by a people born for the most part among us; reared up in our habits and speaking our language, could not fail to produce the most unhappy effects upon both parties.” Texas without slavery would provide an immediate draw for runaway slaves from Arkansas and Louisiana, which in turn would bring conflict with Texas, as well as within the Union itself. “Few calamities,” Upshur concluded, “could befall this country more to be deplored than the establishment of a predominant British influence and the abolition of domestic slavery in Texas.”²⁰ Having taken Green’s report as fact, it is no surprise that Tyler and his advisers responded to the Aberdeen-Brougham exchange as they did: as interpreted by Upshur, the foreign secretary’s words confirmed that the danger was both real and imminent.

This raises the question of why Upshur accepted Green’s summary of British policy, and acted upon it, without first seeking to verify that it had a basis in fact. The United States, after all, had a minister in London. One would assume that Everett could have provided germane commentary on the matter. The reason, according to Frederick Merk, was twofold. First, the secretary of state distrusted his envoy to Britain, confiding to a friend upon Everett’s appointment by Tyler to the Court of St. James’s, “The present condition of the country imperiously requires that a Southern man & a slaveholder should represent us in that court. How could a politician reared and living in lower Virginia fail to see this? And yet a Boston man is appointed, half school-master, half priest, & whole abolitionist! I see no excuse for this, it is abominable.”²¹ Additionally, “Upshur considered the annexation of Texas indispensable to the protection of Southern slavery, which in turn was indispensable to the South.”²² Taking Green’s warnings seriously thus confirmed the correctness of the course which Upshur had wanted to pursue even before the Aberdeen-Brougham exchange. He desired to move ahead on annexation. Now, with the intelligence that the administration had received from London, there was no time to lose.

And Upshur lost no time. In October he told Texas’s chargé in Washington, Isaac Van Zandt, that Tyler stood ready to support a treaty of annexation. He hastened to add that the Senate might prove to be a problem, since he could not “offer any positive assurance that the measure would be acceptable to all branches of this government.” He could, however, pledge that he would present such a treaty “in the strongest manner, to the consideration of Congress.” The Texan communicated Upshur’s offer to Texas president Sam Houston in Austin. Van Zandt, lacking authorization from Houston, nevertheless began negotiations with Upshur on a treaty of annexation.²³

There was, however, a problem. Although Upshur had assured Van Zandt that President Tyler was on board, this assessment appears to have been, at best, premature. For his part, Tyler was not yet convinced of the perfidious nature of Britain’s Texas policy, and later recalled giving the go-ahead for treaty negotiations with the Texans in November, not October. Aberdeen was, at the time, doing what he could to cool things down in the Tyler administration. Toward the end of 1843, he wrote a dispatch to Richard Pakenham, Britain’s minister in Washington, and instructed him to share its contents with Upshur. In the note he forthrightly acknowledged that Britain was eager to see Mexican recognition of Texas’s independence. But he denied that London was motivated by “ambition or self-interest, beyond that interest, at least, which attaches to the general extension of our commercial dealings with other countries.” As to secret plans to influence Texas, there were none: Britain had “no occult design, either with reference to any peculiar influence which we might seek to establish in Mexico or Texas, or even with reference to the slavery which now exists, and which we desire to see abolished in Texas.” Freely admitting that Britain wished to see an end to slavery “throughout the world,” he insisted that British methods in achieving this end were “open and undisguised.” As such, in regard to Texas, “we avow that we wish to see slavery abolished there, as elsewhere, and we should rejoice if the recognition of that country by the Mexican Government should be accompanied by an engagement on the part of Texas to abolish slavery eventually, and under proper conditions, throughout the Republic.… [But] we shall not interfere unduly, nor with an improper assumption of authority, with either party, in order to ensure the adoption of such a course. We shall counsel, but we shall not seek to compel or unduly control either party.” Aberdeen went on categorically to deny any attempt on the part of Britain to “act, directly or indirectly, in a political sense, on The United States though Texas,” adding that the British “have never sought in any way to stir up disaffection or excitement of any kind in the slave-holding States of the American Union.” Southerners could thus rest assured that Britain would “neither openly nor secretly resort to any measures which can tend to disturb their internal tranquility, or thereby to affect the prosperity of the American Union.”²⁴ Aberdeen had, in his note, provided a point-by-point response to Upshur: Britain was hatching no secret plans, either for global economic domination or for undermining slavery in the American South. Yet such assurances were unlikely to have convinced the secretary of state, and thus to have changed the course of the Tyler administration’s policy.

Here, however, one can only extrapolate. On February 28, 1844, in a freak accident aboard USS Princeton, the explosion of a bow gun killed nine of the ship’s passengers. The president and other dignitaries were aboard the ship on the Potomac River for a demonstration of the new vessel and its guns. Tyler had gone belowdecks and was spared; neither Upshur nor Secretary of the Navy Thomas Walker Gilmer was as fortunate. Tyler lost two cabinet members on what had promised to be an enjoyable, if uneventful, cruise; their deaths were a personal blow to the president, but he had to move on. Above all, he needed a new secretary of state—and soon. As he wrote his daughter, “What a loss I have sustained in Upshur and Gilmer. They were truly my friends.… But it is all over now, and I must look for new cabinet ministers. My greatest desire will be to bring in as able men as the country can afford.”²⁵

Calhoun and the Annexation Debate

Apparently the most able man that the nation could provide was John C. Calhoun, who assumed the office of secretary of state on April 1, 1844. It was in some ways an odd choice, since Tyler “was not an admirer of Calhoun’s.” More significantly, Tyler saw in Calhoun’s approach to Texas a threat to his own attempt to frame annexation as a matter that was in the interest of the all sections of the United States, not just the South. As Norma Lois Peterson observes, “Annexation required the support of the entire nation. Calhoun tended to emphasize the sectional and slavery aspect.”²⁶ It would be wrong to say that the South Carolinian’s ardor for Texas was based solely on sectional interests. The strategic interests of the broader nation also played a role in his thinking, and he viewed Texas “as a bastion of defense for the Union against the possible incursion of strong foreign powers.”²⁷ But Tyler’s concerns regarding Calhoun were, nevertheless, borne out by events. The new secretary of state could not restrain himself when it came to, as he saw it, the great benefits of the slave system as it existed in the United States. Upshur, to be fair, had also held to the “positive good” interpretation of slavery. But he had been wise enough to keep his thoughts contained to private letters.

Not so Calhoun. On April 18, 1844, the secretary penned the infamous Pakenham Letter to the British minister in Washington. The thrust of the letter should have been—and likely would have been if Upshur had written it—the Tyler administration’s response to Britain’s frank admission that it hoped to eradicate slavery globally. Calhoun did, in fact, begin his letter by addressing this admission. The president, he noted, regarded Britain’s avowal “with deep concern.” British abolitionism was all well and good when confined to British “possessions and colonies”; no nation could complain about London’s policy within its own realm. But “when she goes beyond, and avows it her settled policy, and the object of her constant exertions, to abolish it throughout the world, she makes it the duty of all other countries, whose safety or prosperity may be endangered by her policy, to adopt such measures as they may deem necessary for their protection.” The president evinced even “deeper concern” regarding Britain’s perceived desire to see slavery eradicated in Texas and its efforts “through … diplomacy to accomplish it, by making abolition of slavery one of the conditions on which Mexico should acknowledge [Texas’s] independence.” Tyler would have to consider “what would be its effects on the prosperity and safety of The United States, should [Britain] succeed in her endeavors.” Given the threat that Britain’s design posed to “both the safety and prosperity of the Union,” the US government was forced “to adopt in self-defence the most effectual measures to defeat it.” Raising the specter of a Texas “under the influence and control of Great Britain,” Calhoun foresaw that this situation would “place in the power of Great Britain the most efficient means of effecting in the neighboring States of this Union what she avows to be her desire to do in all countries where slavery exists.” Thus, Calhoun informed Pakenham, Texas and the United States had concluded a treaty of annexation that would be sent to the Senate for ratification.²⁸

Up to this point, Calhoun had explicated the need for annexation in terms of American national security and sovereignty. There was nothing surprising in this. But Calhoun had warmed to the topic of slavery, and now could not constrain his impulse to defend the institution on the international stage. This set him apart from Tyler, who had “never, at least publicly, attempted to justify the peculiar institution.”²⁹ For Calhoun it was not enough to say that the United States had slavery and Britain should mind its own business. He had to tell the British why slavery was the best of all possible systems. As a result, Calhoun treated Pakenham to an eccentric disquisition on the great benefits of slavery to the slaves, as borne out by census data. He was led by his own logic to conclude that, could Great Britain “succeed in accomplishing in The United States, what she avows it to be her desire and the object of her constant exertions to effect throughout the world, so far from being wise or humane, she would involve in the greatest calamity the whole country, and especially the race which it is the avowed object of her exertions to benefit.”³⁰ Southern slavery was a blessing for the slave. For this reason, Britain should stay out of it.

There is no scholarly consensus concerning Calhoun’s reasons for penning the second part of the Pakenham Letter. If he had been hoping, however, “to provoke a British counterattack on both slavery and annexation,” and thus to rally Americans around both the flag and the treaty, then he was to be disappointed. Pakenham’s April 19 response to the secretary was a study in measured, if disappointed, diplomacy. With regard to annexation, the Briton limited himself to an expression of dismay that the Tyler administration was “assigning to the British Government some share in the responsibility of a transaction which can hardly fail to be viewed in many quarters with the most serious objection.” On the matter of slavery, he refused to be baited, saying only that Britain “is not conscious of having acted in a sense to cause alarm to The United States.”³¹ William W. Freehling, however, is probably correct in concluding that the letter’s impact on the prospects for treaty ratification was not significant. Both Whigs and some northern Democrats had come out against the treaty prior to the Pakenham Letter. Calhoun had given Tyler’s opponents a talking point for their speeches against annexation; he had not altered their votes.³²

They did, nevertheless, pounce on Calhoun’s words. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri—at the time a slaveholder himself—was a strong advocate of Texas annexation. Yet he considered the Texas treaty “a wrong and criminal way of doing the right thing” and came out forcefully against it. “The difficulty now,” he said, “was in the aspect that has been put upon it as a sectional, political, and slave question; as a movement of the South against the North, and of the slaveholding States for political supremacy.” From what Benton could tell, the administration had been “endeavoring to pick a quarrel with England, and upon the slave question.”³³ The Missourian continued on, and for some time. The upshot of his remarks was clear: the Tyler administration was using the slavery issue to sell the annexation of Texas, and, in so doing, exacerbating sectional divisions in the nation. Texas should, no doubt, join the Union. But not at this price.

Granted, not all who opposed the treaty were as explicit concerning the connection between expansion and proslavery rhetoric. There were, indeed, other reasons to oppose the Treaty of Annexation. But it was difficult to avoid the issue. Writing in the Whig organ National Intelligencer in April, the redoubtable Henry Clay came out against ratification. Clay did not perceive a great desire on the part of the American people to acquire Texas at this point. Nor did he relish the idea that the United States, in taking on Texas, would also be acquiring the on-and-off war simmering between that republic and Mexico. This could well result in European intervention on the side of Mexico, with Britain, France, or both now claiming that they were motivated in part by a desire “to prevent the further propagation of slavery from the United States.” Like Benton, Clay also worried about the potential for the addition of new slave territory to exacerbate sectional divisions. Nothing could be “pregnant with more fatal consequences than acquiring territory for the purpose of strengthening one part against another part of the common Confederacy.” Such a development “would menace the existence, if it did not certainly sow the seeds of a dissolution of the Union.” As to the administration’s anxiety regarding British designs on abolition in Texas, Clay was dismissive. As he noted, London had “formally and solemnly disavowed any such aims or purposes—has declared that she is desirous only of the independence of Texas—and that she has no intention to interfere in her domestic institutions.” Clay puckishly added that he presumed the Tyler administration already had this information at hand.³⁴

The lengthy and contentious Senate debate over the treaty is ably summarized by Merk. Supporters, and especially Robert Walker of Mississippi, played upon traditional American Anglophobia. The ratification of the treaty would, Walker claimed, recall to the British minds the results of the Battles of Yorktown and New Orleans. Virginian Whig William S. Archer saw in all this rhetoric evidence of a “fixed purpose that the English government was not to be allowed to shake off the imputation of dangerous practices or purposes in regard to slavery in Texas which had been fastened upon its forehead.” When the vote was taken on June 8, the treaty went down to resounding defeat, losing by a lopsided margin of thirty-five to sixteen.³⁵ Tyler could count on it: he could not get to the required two-thirds majority of senators necessary to ratify.

But the cause of annexation was not to be set back for long. Nor was the Senate vote a reliable barometer of its chances. Many of the negative votes were due more to “hostility to the president and his annexationist strategy than to annexation itself.”³⁶ Denied the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for a term in his own right under their banner, Tyler would not be refused the victory that would guarantee him a spot in the history books. Pivoting quickly, the president conceived the idea of submitting the treaty to both houses of Congress, and eventually hit upon the plan of a joint resolution, which would require only a simple majority. In the House, furthermore, Democrats held a majority after the 1842 election, thus giving additional hope to annexation’s advocates. One of the eight southern Whigs who voted in favor of the resolution, Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, seemed to distance himself from the Pakenham Letter in justifying his decision. “I am no defender of slavery in the abstract,” he said. If annexation “were for the sole purpose of extending slavery where it does not now and would not otherwise exist, I should oppose it.” But since this caveat did not apply to Texas, his vote was forthcoming.³⁷ Stephens was not a voice in the Whig wilderness; motivated both by “popular sentiment and a sincere concern felt for southern safety,” a number Whigs in the South broke with their party’s, and thus their leader’s, traditional skepticism regarding expansion.³⁸

On January 25, 1845, as Tyler’s presidency entered its final weeks, the House passed the joint resolution by a vote of 120–98. It would take another month, but at the end of February, the Senate also approved an amended joint resolution by a vote of twenty-seven to twenty-five. On his last full day in office, Tyler was able to send the resolution to Austin.³⁹ Texas would formally join the Union as a state—and not as a territory—under the administration of James K. Polk, the Tennessean who succeeded Tyler. But the outgoing president had achieved his most significant policy goal, and another slave state was added to the slaveholding republic.

Don E. Fehrenbacher begins his treatment of slavery and expansion with something of a warning for future scholars who would analyze “the influence of slavery on American expansion and expansionism in the antebellum era. The presence of such influence can scarcely be doubted, but the difficulty lies in determining its weight at each juncture and whether or not it was ever predominant.” In the case of Texas, Fehrenbacher concludes that the influence was, indeed, significant: slavery “remains the heart of the matter, … [S]olicitude for slavery, particularly the fear of a British plot to make Texas an entering wedge for abolitionism, was primarily what inspired the aggressive annexation movement launched by the Tyler administration.”⁴⁰ Matthew Karp has come to a similar conclusion, stating that bringing Texas into the Union as a slave state “was perhaps the quintessential achievement of the foreign policy of slavery.”⁴¹

The case of Texas demonstrates the extent to which slavery was, at this time, a central element in the foreign policy thinking of America’s political elite. The goal of protecting slavery in the South, and indeed adding to its realm, was a powerful determinant of the policy of those who held both southern slaves and federal power. Try as they might to portray the acquisition of the Lone Star State as being in the interest of the entire nation, expansionist policy toward the Southwest spoke, during the Tyler administration, with a southern accent.

Spain and Cuba

Cuba provides an at least equally clear case of a proslavery foreign policy. For a time it had been Washington’s stated policy that the island must remain in Spain’s possession. But southern slaveholders and their allies increasingly came to see Spain’s most valuable colony as an alluring target for American expansion. When the institution of slavery appeared to be threatened on the island, Spain’s continued dominion over Cuba became, for them, more of a menace to than a guarantee of security. Repeated attempts to acquire the island followed. Although unsuccessful, these bids for further expansion had a significant impact upon American foreign relations, involving, as they did, provocations not just of Spain but also of Britain and France. But the Democrats who held the reigns of the American federal government in the 1840s and 1850s saw their attempts at expansion as worth the risks, the threat of an abolition in Cuba being infinitely greater.

The prehistory of Cuban annexation dates back to 1810 and was connected, from the very beginning, with a desire to preserve the institution of slavery on that island. Cuban planters had, in that year, approached the American consul in Havana with a proposal for an annexationist conspiracy. Their goal was to safeguard slavery. The plot went nowhere. Nor did a similar scheme broached by a planters’ agent in Washington in 1821 meet with any success. Overall, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, America sought “to let Cuba remain in the possession of Spain, to block independence movements in the island and plans to transfer it to a foreign power, while refusing to commit the United States to any future self-denial.”⁴² Washington was willing to bide its time during these years. Though the Americans were still quite solicitous toward the maintenance of slavery in Cuba, the threat to bonded labor did not seem acute enough to warrant drastic action at this time.

This inclination to leave things as they were was in evidence as late as 1838. In February of that year the Spanish foreign minister, Count de Ofalia, wrote to John Eaton, the American minister in Madrid, concerning the dangers that American and English abolitionist organizations posed to Spanish slaveholders in Cuba. “It is publicly notorious,” Ofalia complained, “that those Societies do not actually circumscribe the propagation of their doctrines to those countries whence they originated, but they likewise extend them through the Antilles contiguous to the American continent.” These agents of abolition “openly excite sedition” and were responsible for slave rebellions on the island. Eaton’s response was rambling, but aimed to be reassuring. The United States wanted its citizens abroad to obey the laws of the countries in which they resided. The American government would thus never “interfere in behalf of those who shall wantonly infract those laws.” While the foreign minister had not raised the issue, Eaton tried to put the Spaniard’s mind at rest about the idea that “the U States desire to possess Cuba. No idea can be more rediculous [sic].” The United States wanted Cuba to remain in Spanish hands, and not to “come to the possession of some grasping, & aspiring power.” The transfer of Cuba to any other power, on the other hand, would be regarded by the United States as “a departure from the subsisting friendship which now binds them to Spain” and as evidence “of intended hostility on the part of that government which should obtain it.”⁴³ In his own bumbling way, Eaton had, in fact, articulated to Madrid the central elements of American Cuban policy as the 1830s drew to a close. Key to these was Washington’s nontransfer policy with regard to Cuba: as long as the island was in Spanish hands, American interests were protected.

For Washington, one of the great attractions of Spanish rule over the economically vibrant and strategically vital island was the very weakness of Spain as an Atlantic power. Spain was neither likely to exclude American commerce from Cuba nor strong enough to use Cuba’s geographic position to bottle up American sea power in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet it was a delicate balance: Spain’s relative lack of power could also result in an inability to sufficiently control Cuba’s internal affairs or to resist pressure from other European powers—especially Britain. The former left open the possibility of a successful insurrection on the island; the latter would put at risk American commercial and strategic interests in the Gulf. This Washington could not tolerate.

Moving toward Annexation

There was one additional threat that could emanate from the intervention in Cuban affairs of a nation more powerful than Spain. American policymakers were determined that Cuba should retain the institution of slavery. The danger that a general emancipation of Cuba’s slave population would pose to slavery in the American South was taken as an article of faith, and thus as an eventuality that had to be prevented, by whatever means necessary. By the early 1840s, the “most serious threat to Cuban slavery … came from the imperial and abolitionist power of Great Britain.”⁴⁴ The Tyler administration took the danger seriously, especially against the background of “several abortive slave uprisings on the island, including one in which a British consul was almost certainly involved.”⁴⁵ In this context, annexation of Cuba to the United States became, for many, a more attractive option than the island’s continued connection with Spain.

Many Cuban slaveholders likewise were driven by events in the colony to look to the same solution. According to Philip S. Foner, “It took the slave uprisings of 1842–1844 to frighten enough planters to make the annexation movement a significant force. The fear that the Spanish government would continue weak under British abolitionist pressure roused such alarm in Cuba, that a large percentage of the slave-owners looked toward junction with the slaveholding power in the United States as the only safeguard for the continuance of the institution.”⁴⁶ The anxiety among the slaveholders in Cuba was, at this time, palpable. They now feared a bloody catastrophe—another Haiti, it was said—provoked by the English, by the slaves themselves, “or by a combination of the interests of both … The fear made them cry out [clamar hasta] for annexation to the United States.”⁴⁷

Anxiety was rife in the slaveholding republic as well; as Karp observes, “Between 1841 and 1844, the barest wisps of a rumor triggered the most frenzied reactions.”⁴⁸ At the beginning of 1843, official Washington was shaken by the allegation that Britain had decided to achieve its abolitionist ends in Cuba through “the total ruin of the Island.” According to word received by Webster from “a highly respectable source,” British agents were now in Cuba “in great numbers, offering independence to the Creoles, on condition that they will unite with the colored people in effecting a general emancipation of the slaves, and in converting the Government into a black Military Republic, under British protection.” The threat to slavery extended, according to Webster’s information, well past the beaches of Cuba, for if “this scheme should succeed, the influence of Britain in this quarter, it is remarked, will be unlimited.… [S]he will, it is said, strike a death blow to the existence of slavery in the United States.” The Spanish officials in Cuba, explained Webster’s informant, had some knowledge of the plot, but were so “torpid” that they were unable to grasp the significance of the British policy. The informant, Webster continued, “does not hesitate to express the opinion that the most [sic] of the white population of Cuba, in easy circumstances, including the Spaniards, prefer, and will always prefer, the flag of the United States to that of England.” Madrid had been informed that the United States “never would permit the occupation of that Island by British agents or forces, upon any pretext whatsoever.” The administration had, in fact, promised the Spanish government that the United States would intervene militarily to keep Cuba in Spanish hands. Given the alarming nature of the report from Cuba, the secretary instructed his consul in Havana promptly to investigate and report on the matter.⁴⁹

The Tyler administration’s willingness to pledge even war with Britain to preserve Spanish rule, and thus slavery, in Cuba indicates the degree to which American policymakers viewed continuation of slavery in the Caribbean as imperative to the security of the nation itself. Still, the “crisis” ended anticlimactically. Reports from American officials in Havana and Madrid that spring helped the storm blow over. It seemed that Domingo del Monte, Webster’s Cuban source, “had overstated his case.” The Spanish government, for its part, felt confident in its hold on Cuba, and “gratefully refused Webster’s offer of military aid.”⁵⁰

But the idea that slavery, and thus America itself, would be more secure if Spain were to cede Cuba to the United States was hardly extinguished with the end of the “black military republic” scare. After the Tyler administration gave way to that of Polk, American attempts to acquire the island would intensify rather than diminish. Polk’s commitment to American expansion requires little comment, since “just as President Tyler made the annexation of Texas the principal objective of his administration, his successor Mr. Polk dreamed of imitating such conduct with respect to Cuba.”⁵¹ Dream of it he did, confiding to his diary in May 1848 that “I am decidedly in favour of purchasing Cuba & making it one of the States of [the] Union.”⁵² Indeed, Polk was willing to offer Spain up to $100 million for a colony that the Spaniards would not sell—at that price or any other.⁵³ Undaunted, Secretary of State James Buchanan—a committed expansionist himself—as late as the summer of 1848 declared to the US consul in Havana, “We believe that in the natural course of events the time is not very distant when [Cuba] will become a part of our Union by peaceful negotiation.”⁵⁴ The Polk administration’s attempts to convince Spain to relinquish Cuba served, however, to exacerbate relations between Madrid and Washington. The Spanish minister of state, perhaps exasperated by American importuning, remarked that his nation, “before seeing the Island of Cuba in the power [poder] of another Power, would prefer it submerged in the depths of the Ocean.” Although this “very Spanish locution” accurately expressed opinion in Madrid, it “did not resolve the difficulties that were daily raised between the two countries.”⁵⁵

Relations between the two capitals improved only when the expansionistic Democrats in the Polk administration were replaced by the far less strident Whigs after the 1848 elections. Under Presidents Zachary Taylor and then Millard Fillmore, the emphasis of American diplomacy with regard to Cuba swung away from purchase and toward assurance that Spain would remain in possession of the island. At the end of May 1849 the newly installed secretary of state, Delaware’s John Clayton, assured the Spanish minister in Washington that the United States wanted Spain to continue in possession of Cuba. Relations could only be improved by proclamations from—and actions by—Washington against filibusters who used American bases to launch attacks on Cuba.

The most significant of these attempts to “liberate” Cuba from Spain between 1849 and 1851 were led by Narciso López. The Venezuela native and erstwhile general in the Spanish Army sought three times in that period to lead filibustering expeditions against Cuba, assuming that the people of that island would rise up and greet his forces as liberators. These filibusters used the United States as their base of operations. Not surprisingly, the episodes brought the United States significant diplomatic difficulties, not just with Spain but also with Britain and France. Again, slavery was one—though not the only—contributor to this extended period of transatlantic crisis. Numerous southerners joined with López, seeing in his designs “a means of expanding slavery or otherwise advantaging their ‘peculiar institution.’ ”⁵⁶ López himself called on southerners to take Cuba “while the present condition of her slaves is untouched.”⁵⁷ Granted, many northerners also supported and encouraged López. Nevertheless, “slavery cast a lengthy shadow over the expeditions.”⁵⁸

Given recent history, the Taylor administration’s attitude toward Spain seemed to be not only diplomatically correct “but truly friendly.”⁵⁹ Yet not all was wine and roses in Spanish-American relations under the Whigs. After Taylor’s untimely death, the Spaniards found President Millard Fillmore’s policies to be less reassuring.⁶⁰ Fillmore and Edward Everett, now secretary of state, refused to sign on to a tripartite agreement with Britain and France that would have required the parties to renounce “now and hereafter” any desire to take possession of Cuba, and thus, for practical purposes, to end filibustering. The Whigs were not itching to take Cuba at the present, but supposed that it would eventually fall into American hands. Thus Everett would not forswear its acquisition forever. Since Spain had been the instigator of this 1852 diplomatic initiative, it could not have taken the American decision as reassuring.⁶¹

The Spaniards had already been worrying, and the final López expedition exacerbated that anxiety. In September 1851 Madrid had thus circulated a royal decree to its representatives abroad, addressing the sense that a potential crisis was brewing with Washington over the Cuban question. Spain wanted to maintain peaceful relations with the Americans, of course. Even so, the decree noted, “the impotence or tolerance of the [US] federal government joined to the persistence of the wanton [desenfrenda] and insolent democracy of the South of the Union in its desperate efforts against the Island of Cuba, can from one moment to another bring complications of such a nature as may make war inevitable, a war that by its nature, would affect, perhaps deeply, the European commercial interests.”⁶² The Spanish government had clearly identified the culprits in all of this: southern Democrats were pushing the annexationist agenda, and the New Yorker in the White House was, they concluded, unable or unwilling to rein them in.

The Expansionist Impulse at High Tide

The election of 1852 returned the Democrats to power, when New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce trounced the aging General Winfield Scott in the Electoral College. In what was to be their last national election, the Whigs had run on—among other planks—a proannexation platform. But it was the Democrat Pierce, “whose desire for Cuba was blatant,” who would move ahead on the attempted acquisition of Cuba.⁶³ When this strong desire on the part of the president coincided with the fear of an end to slavery in Cuba—the “Africanization” scare—the administration plunged boldly into efforts to acquire the island before it was too late.

In his classic study of southern expansionist designs on the Caribbean in the 1850s, Robert E. May asserts that, by this time, “one can safely assert that some southerners had become possessed by a dream of Caribbean empire.” He adds, “Vital to this dream of empire was the expectation that slavery would be intrinsic to its realization.”⁶⁴ Karp agrees, noting that in regard to Cuba, the key issue for southerners was “the safety of Cuba’s slave system.”⁶⁵ The Yankee Pierce would, indeed, seek to acquire Cuba. The driving force behind this policy was southern slaveholders, and their interest in Cuba was now, more than before, determined by their interest in slavery.

The risks inherent in pursuing expansion at Spain’s expense were, however, significant. Pierce was made aware of this even prior to taking office. In January 1853, the secretary of the US legation in Madrid had bumptiously written a lengthy letter to the president-elect in order to apprise him of the situation: “Spain will defend the Island of Cuba to the last effort of her power—France is her ally, and in case of War will enter the contest with her against the Government of the United States. There is no doubt that communications to this effect have taken place, and Emperor Napoleon III has guaranteed possession of Cuba to Spain with the offer of the whole power of France to sustain her against the supposed aggressive policy of the American Republic.”⁶⁶ Pierce’s correspondent, Horatio J. Perry, then went on to anticipate the issue that would soon lead to the Africanization scare. While his sources of intelligence are unclear, Perry confidently predicted that Spain, in a Samson-like, last-ditch effort to deny the island to the United States, would bring the walls tumbling down on Cuba. Spain, he assured Pierce, “is resolved, in the last resort—if all the ordinary resources of War should fail her—to emancipate the black population of Cuba and to give them arms.” In case of war with the United States, “this great blow of negro emancipation may be looked upon as certain,” and “its bearing upon the interior as well as exterior aspects of this question for us ought therefore to be considered.”⁶⁷ Spain was, of course, well aware that an emancipated Cuba was of no attraction to the United States, whose southern policy elite would have been horrified by the prospect of taking into the republic a host of free and armed Blacks.⁶⁸ Furthermore, while Perry did not elaborate on the “interior aspects” of the question to which he alluded, it is safe to assume that he would have been understood as referring to the ruinous impact that such a development could have on the institution of slavery within the southern states. It was an ominous warning, and events would soon demonstrate that the administration took such threats very seriously.

Had Pierce been looking to provoke a crisis with Spain over Cuba, he could hardly have chosen his foreign policy team with greater diligence. New York’s William L. Marcy was named secretary of state only after a Virginian had declined the post. Marcy had not entered his new office as a rabid annexationist, and initially viewed any offer of purchase as inherently offensive to Spain. Yet his preferred result—that Cuba “release itself or be released” from Spanish rule to become an independent republic—was hardly more attractive to Madrid than acquisition by the United States.⁶⁹ The president sent Buchanan to London. A northerner, like Marcy, Buchanan nevertheless had a long history of advocating annexation and was understood to be sympathetic to the interests of southern slaveholders. For all other relevant posts, Pierce turned to southern slaveholders.⁷⁰ The new American minister to Paris was Virginia’s John Y. Mason, who, while serving as Polk’s secretary of the navy, had been “an ardent advocate [partidario] of the annexation of Cuba.”⁷¹ In Madrid, the United States was to be represented by arch-annexationist Pierre Soulé of Louisiana. In public life, Soulé had “stoutly defended slavery as an economic and social system that he saw as key to southern interests.”⁷² The secretary of war—should it come to that—was Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis. With the barest nod to northern sensibilities, Pierce had stacked the deck with proslavery expansionists; he had “formed his administration for expansion.”⁷³

The dominance of a proslavery elite in the making of US foreign policy at this point was impressive. One might well be struck with the confidence of these men in their exercise of the power of the federal government and with their intent “to advance their theoretical reflections with the material power of the U.S. government.”⁷⁴ Yet alongside confidence, these powerful men harbored great anxiety. Cuba provides the most salient example of this pervasive fear. Because as these men looked at the institution that they were determined to protect—indeed, to expand—they saw threats both at home and abroad. The dangers faced by slavery abroad, furthermore, threatened to menace the domestic institution of slavery. In so doing, these threats put at risk the men’s power, their region, and, in their minds, the nation itself, for America’s slaveholding policymakers “could not envision a global future without the fundamental institution of African slavery.”⁷⁵ National security policy must take into account threats, opportunities, and resources. For those men making policy in Washington during the 1850s, Cuba presented both threat and opportunity. The question was whether they had at their disposal the resources necessary to ward off the threat and take advantage of the opportunity.

Southerners were certainly conscious of the threat. In domestic terms, the peril was to be found in Congress. The addition of new free states meant new free state senators. As May observes, for the South “to maintain the sectional balance of power, new slave territory would have to be acquired to counterbalance free states regularly being admitted to the Union.” New slave states meant new representatives in Washington, who would “enable the South to protect the institution of slavery and ‘Southern rights.’ ” Above all, the balance in the Senate had to be preserved.⁷⁶ Cuba thus presented an opportunity to southern policymakers and their northern allies. If added to the Union, it would certainly come in as a slave state. The fact that it might even be carved into as many as three new states, bringing the South six additional senators, made it that much more attractive. Jefferson Davis was blunt about the matter. In supporting the acquisition of Cuba later in the decade, he gave as a reason that Cuba’s addition would “increase the number of slave-holding constituencies.”⁷⁷

The British government was following matters closely, and was well aware of American motivations. It was, furthermore, eager to do what could be done diplomatically to quash American expansion at Spain’s expense. The British secretary of state for foreign affairs, Lord Palmerston, thus instructed his ambassador to Madrid in 1851 to “point out to the Spanish government that the great actuating motive which seems to impel the people of the Southern States of North America to repeat their attempts upon Cuba, is the desire to increase the weight and influence of the Southern States in Congress by adding another slave state to the Union. And it is evident that if the Spanish government were to take a bold and decided step, and to abolish the condition of slavery in Cuba, this actuating motive would cease to exist, and with it would cease the danger to which it gives rise.” Or, as Amos Aschbach Ettinger colorfully puts it, “the slaveocracy turned with yearning eyes toward Cuba as the nearest possibility” for adding slave states to the United States.⁷⁸ Southern anxiety, as well as southern confidence, helped to determine America’s policy toward Cuba during the decade before secession.

Yet the perceived menace to the slaveholders’ world was not confined to the internal American political balance; slaveholders saw threats abroad as well as at home. In fact, they did not draw a distinction between foreign and domestic policies of slavery: a threat to slavery anywhere in the hemisphere was a threat everywhere, including America’s southern states. As Karp notes, “The specter of freedom in the West Indies, southern elites feared, would come to haunt slavery in the United States.” The very presence of large numbers of freed slaves in the region “represented an intrinsic threat to the American system of bondage.”⁷⁹ Cuba thus represented both the best hope and the greatest danger. Adding it to the Union would help balance out the geographic and demographic growth of the free states. On the other side of the coin, any further threat to slavery in the Greater Antilles could only be taken as an existential threat by those who held power in Washington. Thus, “the focus of slaveholding attention in the 1850s remained Cuba.”⁸⁰ The question for the Pierce administration was whether it could use the power of the US federal government, concentrated in the hands of slaveholders and their allies, to remove the threat—and to remove it through the acquisition of Cuba.

The Pierce team certainly had some reason to think that the answer to this question would be a resounding yes. As May sees it, “it is remarkable that Cuba never became United States property” in the 1840s or 1850s, despite the successive efforts of the Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan administrations.⁸¹ The slaveholding policy elite expressed confidence that Cuba would, in good time, be theirs. Virginia senator James Mason had expressed this assurance. Who could doubt, he asked in November 1852, that “the acquisition of Cuba by The United States is a question of time only—purely a question of time? … [I]t is of little moment to us whether we acquire Cuba in this generation or in the next: but come to us it will, just as certain as that the world revolves upon its axis.”⁸² Yet the transfer of Cuba was not a matter of letting the law of nature take its course. It would have to be achieved by means of policy or not at all.

It was, of course, not achieved. Despite the concentration of power in the hands of a unified foreign policy elite sharing a clearly defined worldview, Cuba proved beyond America’s grasp in the mid-nineteenth century. This was not because the Pierce administration bungled its foreign policy—although it did. And it did not fail because Soulé was shockingly unfit to conduct the necessary diplomacy—although he was. After all, Polk had failed as well. Yet the Polk administration had the advantages of competence, discipline, and the fraught Anglo-Spanish relations of the 1840s. While it is true that the Pierce administration had none of these things going for it, the most significant obstacles to American acquisition of Cuba in the 1850s were not of the administration’s making. The central problem for the Pierce policy was that Spain absolutely refused to transfer Cuba to any other power, and that this refusal had the support of Britain and France. Americans, north and south, had assumed since the administration of President James Monroe that Cuba would eventually come to them. But in fact, if they wanted it, they would have to take it. Faced with the opposition of the maritime powers of Europe, the American republic lacked the power to do so.

Much has already been written about Soulé’s disastrous mission to Madrid. His appointment was incredible—in the literal sense of the word. Rarely in the history of diplomacy could an envoy have been appointed to a nation that would have been justified in declaring him persona non grata before his arrival on its shores. An unabashed expansionist, Senator Soulé had given a lengthy speech on the floor of the Upper House in January 1853, during which, among other matters, he had suggested the possibility of armed conquest of Cuba by the United States.⁸³ Though it was a hugely provocative declaration, it nevertheless failed, in Pierce’s mind, to disqualify Soulé for the Madrid post. Soulé’s biographer, Catherine Chancerel, has stated—without citing her source, however—that southerners actually had wanted John Y. Mason sent to Madrid, because they “thought he was more likely to be active on the Cuba question” than Soulé.⁸⁴ It is hard to imagine how this would have been possible.

The choice did not go over well in Spain. The naming of the Louisiana senator as minister to Spain was met with “disgust in Madrid, as was natural.” It was as if Pierce wanted to accentuate the provocatively expansionist comments in his own inaugural address by appointing to key diplomatic posts two men with the strongest ideas on annexation—namely, Mason and Soulé.⁸⁵ In fact, the Spanish government was inclined toward refusing to accept the latter’s credentials. But this would have been a significant step, and would have risked a breach with the new administration in Washington. So serious was the matter that Madrid took the issue to London and Paris. The British foreign secretary responded that “Spain would certainly make a mistake in not receiving him.” To fail to admit the emissary chosen by Pierce would play right into the hands of those in the United States who wanted to provoke a conflict with Spain “to justify the attempts against Cuba.” He added that the French had the same concern. Having been thus advised, Madrid was in no position to refuse.⁸⁶

Soulé’s tenure in Madrid was eventful, and certainly colorful: engaging in conspiracies and fighting duels tends to get diplomats noticed. No doubt, he was a very poor choice for the job, both in terms of temperament and prudence. Yet, as has been perceptively noted, he was not an aberration. Despite the controversy and hostility which he engendered at home and abroad, Soulé “was in truth far from a peripheral outlier.” Quite the contrary, the Louisianan “accurately represent[ed] antebellum expansionist thought and Democratic political culture,” and as such “was merely the leading edge of a wider cross-regional Democratic expansionist push.”⁸⁷ This interpretation has much to recommend it, especially when one considers that Soulé’s attempts to “detach” Cuba from Spain were urged on him by a secretary of state hailing from a state that had officially abolished slavery a full half century before the Africanization scare seized official Washington. Soulé should thus be viewed as being at the center of Pierce administration policy, despite the personal excesses that might make him seem a fringe character.

The Africanization Scare

As minister to Madrid, Soulé would play a key role in the Pierce administration’s response to the alleged Africanization scheme that Spain was hatching in Cuba. The causes of the scare were complex, rooted as they were in the four-cornered relations among London, Madrid, Washington, and Havana itself. Complicating matters was the pervasive Anglophobia of the mid-nineteenth-century American policy elite and the relationship that this fear bore to the issue of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Spain had agreed in 1817 to abolish the slave trade in its possessions. But the Cuban trade in fact, as opposed to law, continued on four decades later, abetted by, among other things, an incredibly corrupt Spanish administration in Havana. Legitimately desiring an end to the trade, the government in London also feared that the continued importation of Africans into Cuba gave both incentive and pretext for American intervention in the affairs of the island. The British thus responded, throughout the 1840s and into the early 1850s, by putting diplomatic pressure on Madrid to live up to its obligations.⁸⁸

As British frustration with Madrid’s temporizing grew in the early 1850s, so, too, did the pressure on the Spanish government. By the end of January 1853, British patience was at an end. In a remarkable dispatch sent by the foreign minister, Lord Russell, to Lord Howden in Madrid, Russell speaks of the “strong feeling which prevails in this country on the subject of the Cuban Slave Trade.” Cuba had signed the 1817 slave trade suppression treaty. Yet, in 1853, the “Slave Trade is flourishing in Cuba, and I have the pain of receiving the vain excuses and empty promises which are transmitted to you by the Government of Spain.” This situation could not continue: As Russell explained,

Your Lordship may be assured, that however friendly the councils of her Majesty may be to Spain; whatever may be the interest of this country not to see Cuba in the hands of any other Power than Spain; yet, in the eyes of the people of this country, the destruction of a trade which conveys the natives of Africa to become slaves in Cuba, will furnish a large compensation for such a transfer.… I must instruct your Lordship, therefore, to express, courteously but decidedly, the entire disbelief of Her Majesty’s Government that the destruction of the African Slave Trade is beyond the power of the Government of Spain.⁸⁹

Madrid now lacked options, other than the obvious: institute reforms in Cuba sufficient to placate the British government. By early May, Russell expressed satisfaction with the promises made by Madrid, though “there was no concrete explanation of the nature and scope of the measures that were expected.”⁹⁰ In partial fulfillment of Spain’s pledges, Madrid sent Juan de la Pezuela to Havana as the new captain general that September. Incorruptible and generally hostile to slavery, Pezuela was “explicitly charged … with suppressing the slave trade.”⁹¹ Foner provides a quite useful summary of the new captain general’s policies, noting that there was “nothing actually revolutionary about these decrees, which simply sought to enforce existing treaty provisions.”⁹²

That the reforms were relatively moderate was, however, lost on both Cuban planters and American policymakers. On the island, Pezuela’s “precipitate action” caused “genuine alarm in influential Cuban circles over the implied threat to abolish slavery.”⁹³ This could hardly have come as surprise: Cuban slaveholders now thought themselves faced with the possibility, however remote, of complete loss of their bonded laborers, with all the consequences that this would entail. Given the fear among the island’s white population of “another Haiti,” general emancipation was unthinkable. The fear of looming disaster made its way quickly across the Florida Straits. On October 25, 1853, the New York Times was already reporting the “English scheme for the Africanization of Cuba” as an established fact, its correspondent reporting with certainty “of the union of England, France, and Spain in the scheme.”⁹⁴

Pierce administration officials shared elite Cuba’s alarm and the Times’s certitude. From their man in Madrid they learned of the seriousness of the situation in Cuba. The Spanish choice of Pezuela as captain general “announced a settled determination on the part of the Spanish cabinet to bring matters in Cuba to a decisive crisis,” wrote Soulé to Marcy. “He had been selected mostly on account of the violent prejudices he was supposed, and with truth, to entertain against us (the yankees).” Behind Pezuela, however, one saw lurking the hand of the British: “The slave trade is to be stopped. England has succeeded in forcing the Spanish government to the admission that all Africans imported into the Island since 1821 are to be considered as libertados, enfranchized. If the admission is acted upon rigidly, Cuba has ceased to have a slave and the dream of Lord Palmerston has become a reality. This however was effected without any formal stipulation being entered into on the part of either government. But that England holds a recognition of the state of things implied in the admission can not be the subject of doubt.” Under such circumstances, Cuba “may well be considered as lost to Spain in a proximate future; and even so to the civilized world.”⁹⁵

The following January, Soulé reported to Marcy concerning a conversation that he had recently had with the Spanish minister to Washington, Ángel Calderon. The American minister took the opportunity, he declared, to let Calderon know, “frankly, that the Government of the U. States would … sternly and unbendingly oppose & combat any & every arrangement by which Spain with France or Spain with England or with them both & with the world in arms should attempt in the slightest degree to render the Island an injury or danger to us.”⁹⁶ The impact of the Africanization scare, moreover, reached beyond the slaveholding policy elites and their northern allies. Around this same time, the New York Times was informing its readers of the rumored plot to introduce African laborers to the island as “apprentices,” with the end goal of “the emancipation of the present slave labor in Cuba.”⁹⁷ Fear for the security of slavery in America’s neighborhood, exacerbated by a persistent undercurrent of Anglophobia, had precipitated a full-blown foreign policy crisis.

Buchanan took up the case with the British government itself. The American minister in London wrote to Marcy on November 1, 1853, informing him of a conversation that he had had with British foreign secretary Lord Clarendon. As Buchanan reported the conversation, he was rather forthright with Clarendon about American concerns regarding Cuba, telling him that “should a black government like that of Hayti be established there, it would endanger the peace and domestic security of a large and important portion of our people. To come then to the point:—it has been publicly stated and reiterated over and over again in the United States, that Spain, should she find it impossible to retain the Island, will emancipate the slaves upon it; and that the British Government is endeavoring to persuade her to pursue this course.” Buchanan’s reference to the security of a certain portion of the US population indicates the extent to which American policymakers saw the institution of slavery in the South as intrinsically linked with the continuation of slavery in Cuba. Clarendon sought to reassure, telling Buchanan that the British “certainly have no wish, very far from it, to see a Black Government established in Cuba.” Aside from abolishing the slave trade to Cuba, and locating those slaves who should have by now been emancipated under Spanish law, the British “have never had any negotiation of any kind with Spain, or attempted to exercise any influence over her respecting the condition of the slaves in Cuba. We have not the most remote idea, in any event, of ever attempting to acquire Cuba for ourselves. We have, already, too many colonies,—far more than are profitable to us.”⁹⁸ Although Buchanan “seemed satisfied with the assertions made by Clarendon,” the same could not be said of his colleagues in Washington.⁹⁹

The minds of Pierce and his foreign policy team moved quickly to thoughts of acquiring Cuba as the best means of forestalling Africanization. By early April 1854 the administration in Washington had resurrected Polk’s policy of seeking to purchase the colony from Spain.¹⁰⁰ On April 3, Marcy wrote his “detach letter” to Soulé, instructing him to pursue this end. Given, he asserted, the volatile political situation in Madrid and the “troubles which may arise in the Island of Cuba from the experiment now making to introduce a new system of labor,” a way might now be open to the “accomplishment of the object so much desired by the United States.” The president had thus decided that Soulé was to “be furnished with full power to enter into a convention or treaty for the purchase of Cuba.” Marcy added that Pierce was hopeful that the minister could “overcome the national prejudices” that had led Spain to think Cuba was a valuable possession. After all, the “natural connection of Cuba is with the United States.”¹⁰¹

To that end, Soulé was authorized to offer Madrid $100 million for the island, with an extra $20–$30 million thrown in if that amount of money could make or break the deal. The time was right, given the Africanization scare: “The change of policy in Cuba, particularly in regard to supplying the demand for agricultural labor, has increased discontent and created alarm among people of that Island, and made them more averse to the continuance of Spanish rule, and more willing to come under the protection of the United States.” After thus assessing the internal political situation in Cuba, Marcy gave further instructions which, in the hands of Soulé, could only prove incendiary:

Should you, however, become convinced that Spain will not, for any consideration you are authorized to offer, entertain the proposition for a transfer of the sovereignty of Cuba to the United States, you will then direct your efforts to the next most desirable object, which is to detach the Island from the Spanish dominion and from all dependence on any European power. If Cuba were relieved from all transatlantic connection and at liberty to dispose of herself as her present interest and prospective welfare would indicate, she would undoubtedly relieve this government from all anxiety in regard to her future condition.

So that Soulé did not miss the import of his instructions, Marcy put a fine point on it, adding that any assistance the United States might “give to the people of Cuba to enable them to induce Spain to consent to their independence might be fully compensated by advantages which they would be able to secure to the United States.”¹⁰² So significant was the threat of abolition of slavery in Cuba, that Pierce—who was “as much concerned about possible emancipation as most Southerners”—was willing to aid slaveholding Cubans in an effort to “detach” the island from Spain.¹⁰³

Not that the administration lacked reliable information that the Africanization of Cuba was being overblown. The previous year Pierce had sent a special agent, Delaware’s Alexander Clayton, to Cuba to investigate the reports of, among other matters, a tripartite British-French-Spanish agreement on Africanization. When Clayton found nothing incriminating, Pierce was “unconvinced,” and sent a second agent, one Charles W. Davis, who returned the information that the president, seemingly, wanted to hear.¹⁰⁴ Meanwhile, Marcy sought all the information he could get on the affair through more formal channels. Writing to the US acting consul in Havana on April 8, the secretary noted, “The public mind of this country has been for some time excited by rumors, currently circulated that the emancipation of all the Africans imported into Cuba since 1820, had been commenced and was steadily progressing in that Island under the supervision of the British Consul General.” The State Department was “anxious to learn from an authentic source whether those rumors have any foundation or truth,” and Marcy thus instructed the consul, William H. Robertson, to investigate the matter yet again.¹⁰⁵ The fact that Marcy asked Robertson to collect information five days after sending his “detach letter” to Soulé would appear to indicate two things: first, that Marcy was not yet sure that Africanization was taking place, and, second, that it did not matter very much.

Yet the Pierce team, at this point, was still undecided as to how to proceed. As May notes, “Despite Marcy’s aggressive language, the administration pondered for weeks about what further action should be taken if Spain would not accept Soulé’s offer.” The administration’s plans, Marcy told Buchanan in late May, were “unsettled.”¹⁰⁶ It is worth noting that indecision was the word of the day in Madrid as well. Spain could not, at this time, count on the support of Britain and France to ward off threats from the United States; the Crimean War had broken out the previous October, and both powers were distinctly distracted by the so-called Eastern Question. Under these circumstances, the Spanish government considered negotiations with the United States “to try to gain time.”¹⁰⁷ It also tried its hand at diplomacy in Paris. The Spanish ambassador to France, the Marqués de Viluma, approached the French foreign minister with a proposal for a “guarantee among the maritime Powers of Europe against all aggression on the part of the Americans against any colony that belongs to those Powers.” The Frenchman, Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys, did not respond favorably; France had little to protect overseas, and had to consider how costly war with the United States would be.¹⁰⁸ Unfortunately, Spain had little to offer to a Paris already preoccupied with a major European war, especially after refusing the French suggestion that Spanish troops might be usefully employed in the East.¹⁰⁹

Anglo-French preoccupation with Russia did, indeed, appear to offer an opportunity to the Pierce administration. The fact that London and Paris “were becoming embroiled in the Eastern war would undoubtedly help insure Spain’s isolation in any conflict, and the influence of this calculation in Washington was apparent.”¹¹⁰ Indeed it was. John J. Seibels, American minister to Brussels, expressed this understanding of the situation well in a letter to Marcy at the end of 1854. If the administration did not take advantage of the Crimean War to secure Cuba, then “adieu to all idea of the acquisition of Cuba for a long, long time to come. So if anything can be done in this line, it ought to be done quickly.”¹¹¹ One problem with acting “in this line,” however, was American uncertainty about the extent of London’s distraction. As Alan Dowty observes, “The British position appeared to be one of maintaining a watchful eye on the new world and keeping the United States uncertain as to its intentions.”¹¹² If its goal was to keep the United States guessing, Britain succeeded. Robertson, reporting from Havana in June, told Marcy of a letter from a “Spanish gentleman” that he had recently seen. The Spaniard, Robertson noted, “remarks, that the U. States will find it no easy job to take the Island as both England and France are Pledged to sustain Spain in that Event.”¹¹³ In light of such reports, the administration could not reliably count on Spanish isolation in the face of American pressure.

In fact, there was little working in Pierce’s favor. War with Spain had seemed a possibility for a time, especially in light of a perceived, if overblown, insult to the American flag on the part of officials in Havana. But the so-called Black Warrior Affair proved a dead end.¹¹⁴ Nor did Soulé’s ham-handed attempts to intervene in the Spanish Revolution of July 1854 bring the desired results.¹¹⁵ After the failure of the liberal revolution the following month, the US chargé in Madrid wrote Marcy to inform the secretary that “the peaceable cession of the Island of Cuba by Spain is at this time impossible,” adding that Soulé’s policy had proved “a complete and utter failure.”¹¹⁶

Marcy believed, however, that he had one more card up his sleeve. On August 16, Marcy called on Buchanan, Mason, and Soulé to meet “at some central point” to discuss the best means of helping Soulé in his efforts to acquire Cuba.¹¹⁷ The result was the infamous Ostend Manifesto of October 1854, a document “as belligerent as it was useless.”¹¹⁸ In the manifesto, the three diplomats called for the United States government to make “an immediate attempt” to purchase Cuba. The sale of Cuba to the United States, they noted, “would essentially promote the highest and best interests of the Spanish people.” The sale would also be in the interest of the United States, of course, since “the Union can never enjoy repose, nor possess reliable security, as long as Cuba is not embraced within its boundaries.” Thus, if Spain proved unwilling to sell, “then, by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain if we possess the power.”¹¹⁹ The Ostend conspirators had thus produced a bellicose call for the United States to take the island, if Spain were not willing to part with it, and to do so even in the most threatening manner.

The manifesto may well have helped Buchanan gain southern support for his planned candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.¹²⁰ But it did not move administration policy any closer to its goal, and it ignited a firestorm of protest outside the slaveholding South.¹²¹ After Ostend, any serious attempts by Pierce to gain Cuba for the United States were at an end. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in any event, had led the administration to focus on the growing sectional rift in the United States. Under these circumstances, it seemed wise to avoid unnecessary conflicts abroad. It was not the time to provoke Spain.¹²² Additionally, the passage of the act “hardened the northern Whigs’ opposition to the acquisition of the island,” thus creating another hurdle to annexation.¹²³ Then, too, the removal of Pezuela by Spain helped diffuse the fears of Africanization. His replacement, José Gutiérrez de la Concha, had already served a term as colonial governor and had hardly established a reputation for reform: he was greeted, on his arrival in Havana, as “a savior of reaction.” While Concha, like Pezuela, showed himself willing to utilize Black troops in case of an invasion—a development that caused great consternation in the United States—the “crisis” was at an end.¹²⁴

It cannot be known if Britain would have intervened militarily if the United States had sought to take Cuba by force during this period. But it was unlikely. London “would have been most reluctant” to take on a conflict with the Americans while it was still fighting the Crimean War. Thus, this situation “created an opening for Washington.” But Pierce could not grasp the opportunity “because the battle over the Kansas-Nebraska bill crippled his freedom of action.”¹²⁵ If this analysis is correct, then the expansionists’ reach far exceeded their grasp. In pursuing expansion of slavery westward, they thwarted their best chance for American expansion to the south, and with it the addition of one or more slave states in the Caribbean. This golden opportunity would not present itself again.

Buchanan Perseveres

Pierce’s successor, Ostend conspirator James Buchanan, did not give up easily on the dream of acquiring Cuba. As he proclaimed at the end of 1858, “Expansion is in the future the policy of our country, and only cowards fear and oppose it.”¹²⁶ But domestic division and a surging Republican Party guaranteed that there would be a sufficient number of “cowards” to block the president’s plans. His allies were not much help either. Buchanan sought to acquire from Congress funds to “facilitate the acquisition of the island of Cuba, by negotiation.”¹²⁷ His point person in advocating for the bill was Senator John Slidell of Louisiana. Buchanan had sought to portray the benefits of acquiring Cuba as national, and not sectional. Yet Slidell, in advocating the proposal on January 24, 1859, used language that appeared to give the lie to Buchanan’s reassurances. The senator, in his remarks, decried the “closet philanthropists of England and France,” who would, in offering Spain their protection, “insist upon introducing their schemes of emancipation.” As a result, “Civil and servile war would soon follow, and Cuba would present, as Hayti now does, no traces of its former prosperity, but the ruins of its once noble mansions. Its uncontrolled possession by either France or England would be less dangerous and offensive to our southern states than a pretended independent black empire or republic.” Slidell had succeeded in framing the issue of purchase as a sectional matter of the preservation of slavery on the island and, by extension, in the South. In the political climate of 1859, the results were predictable. His remarks “aroused a storm of protests in the North,” and became “the cause of passionate [ardientes] debates in Congress.”¹²⁸

Slidell’s close connection with the Buchanan administration convinced Republicans that the senator’s words expressed the true thinking of the White House. Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire, a former Free Soiler, expressed his conviction that Slidell “spoke the views of Mr. Buchanan” and had done so “semi-officially.” In Hale’s estimation, it was clear what had transpired: “There has been a Cabinet council got together, and they recommend now a strong dose of Cuba as the only thing by which the [Democratic] party can possibly survive another presidential election. [Laughter.]”¹²⁹ New York Senator William Henry Seward proclaimed the proposal “the most atrocious act of legislation which the Senate could possibly adopt.”¹³⁰ The sinister nature of the proposition was laid out by Senator James Rood Doolittle of Wisconsin: “It can only be looked upon as a proposition to put $30,000,000 into the hands of the President, to be used as secret-service money to bribe the officials of Spain to go into a treaty which, in their legislative capacity, they have absolutely and unanimously rejected.”¹³¹ On this last point, Doolittle had the advantage of being absolutely correct. Just weeks earlier, the Spanish minister in Washington had made the matter clear to Secretary of State Lewis Cass; Gabriel García Tassara had “read the remarks of the President on the acquisition of Cuba by purchase and … he was bound to say that no government (no administration) in Spain could ever be found to consent to the sale of the island: And lastly that any proposition to that effect, made to Spain, would not be received as one made in a friendly spirit.”¹³² With Spain resolutely opposed even to discussing the sale of Cuba, and the Senate refusing to appropriate funds to add a new slave state that might join the Union just in time to secede, the last attempt by southern slaveholders and their northern allies to acquire the island in the antebellum era had reached a dead end.

Conclusion: Buttressing Slavery

The important role played by slavery in America’s policy toward Cuba in the antebellum period is clear. As Lester D. Langley notes, “In these years, the American Democracy, dominated by Southerners, urged the anexation [sic] of Cuba in order to buttress the institution of slavery in the South.”¹³³ Slavery was also key to the international context in which Texas joined the Union. Southern slaveholders were eager to add the twenty-eighth state, in large measure to protect and extend the institution. In both cases, American policymakers were willing to take risks on the international stage, including the possibility of conflict with the maritime powers of Europe. They did so because the dangers of inaction seemed to them even more serious than those of aggressive expansionism. Cuba thus presented southern slaveholders with both a dream and a nightmare. Though they were especially fearful of the possibility of abolition in Cuba, slavery on that island actually outlasted slavery in their own states. In the end, the dreaded armed Blacks invading the South came not in the rags of Caribbean slaves but in the crisp blue uniforms of the Union Army.