Although these trends alarmed some southerners, most expressed rapture over the dizzying prosperity brought by the cotton boom. The advocates of King Commerce faded; King Cotton reigned supreme. "Our Cotton is the most wonderful talisman in the world," declared a planter in 1853. "By its power we are transmuting whatever we choose into whatever we want." Southerners were "unquestionably the most prosperous people on earth, realizing ten to twenty per cent on their capital with every prospect of doing as well for a long time to come," boasted James Hammond. "The slaveholding South is now the controlling power of the world," he told the Senate in 1858. "Cotton, rice, tobacco, and naval stores command the world. . . . No power on earth dares . . . to make war on cotton. Cotton is king."49
By the later 1850s southern commercial conventions had reached the same conclusion. The merger of this commercial convention movement with a parallel series of planters' conventions in 1854 reflected the
48. The production of corn, sweet potatoes, and hogs in the slave states decreased on a per capita basis by 3, 15, and 22 percent respectively from 1850 to 1860. The possibility that southerners were becoming a beef-eating people does not seem a satisfactory explanation for the per capita decrease of hogs. The number of cattle per capita in the South increased only 3 percent during the decade, and according to Robert R. Russel virtually all of this increase was in dairy cows, not beef cattle. Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 203. The data in this paragraph, compiled mainly from the published census returns of 1850 and 1860, are conveniently available in tabular form in Schlesinger, ed., History of American Presidential Elections, II, 1128 ff.
49. Planter quoted in John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York, 1979), 134; Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, April 22, 1859, quoted in Nevins, Emergence, I, 5; CG, 35 Cong., 1 Sess., 961–62.
trend. Thereafter slave agriculture and its defense became the dominant theme of the conventions. Even De Bow's Review moved in this direction. Though De Bow continued to give lip service to industrialization, his Review devoted more and more space to agriculture, proslavery polemics, and southern nationalism. By 1857 the politicians had pretty well taken over these "commercial" conventions. And the main form of commerce they now advocated was a reopening of the African slave trade.50
Federal law had banned this trade since the end of 1807. Smuggling continued on a small scale after that date; in the 1850s the rising price of slaves produced an increase in this illicit traffic and built up pressure for a repeal of the ban. Political motives also actuated proponents of repeal. Agitation of the question, said one, would give "a sort of spite to the North and defiance of their opinions." A delegate to the 1856 commercial convention insisted that "we are entitled to demand the opening of this trade from an industrial, political, and constitutional consideration. . . . With cheap negroes we could set the hostile legislation of Congress at defiance. The slave population after supplying the states would overflow into the territories, and nothing could control its natural expansion." For some defenders of slavery, logical consistency required a defense of the slave trade as well. "Slavery is right," said a delegate to the 1858 convention, "and being right there can be no wrong in the natural means of its formation." Or as William L. Yancey put it: "If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Africa and carry them there?"51
Why not indeed? But most southerners failed to see the logic of this argument. In addition to moral repugnance toward the horrors of the "middle passage" of slaves across the Atlantic, many slaveowners in the upper South had economic reasons to oppose reopening of the African trade. Their own prosperity benefitted from the rising demand for slaves; a growing stream of bondsmen flowed from the upper South to the cotton states. Nevertheless, the commercial convention at Vicksburg in 1859 (attended by delegates from only the lower South) called for repeal
50. McCardell, Idea of a Southern Nation, 129–40; Otis Clark Skipper, J. D. B. De Bow: Magazinist of the Old South (Athens, Ga., 1958), 81–97; Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions, 207, 225.
51. Potter, Impending Crisis, 398–99; Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions, 178, 213.
of the ban on slave imports. Proponents knew that they had no chance of success in Congress. But they cared little, for most of them were secessionists who favored a southern nation that could pass its own laws. In the meantime they could try to circumvent federal law by bringing in "apprentices" from Africa. De Bow became president of an African Labor Supply Association formed for that purpose. In 1858 the lower house of the Louisiana legislature authorized the importation of such apprentices. But the senate defeated the measure.52
Frustrated in their attempts to change the law, fire-eaters turned their efforts to breaking it. The most famous example of the illicit slave trade in the 1850s was the schooner Wanderer, owned by Charles A. L. La-mar, member of a famous and powerful southern family. Lamar organized a syndicate that sent several ships to Africa for slaves. One of these was the Wanderer, a fast yacht that took on a cargo of five hundred Africans in 1858. The four hundred survivors of the voyage to Georgia earned Lamar a large profit. But federal officials had got wind of the affair and arrested Lamar along with several crew members. Savannah juries acquitted all of them. The grand jurors who had indicted Lamar suffered so much vilification from the local press as dupes of Yankee agitators that they published a bizarre recantation of their action and advocated repeal of the 1807 law prohibiting the slave trade. "Longer to yield to a sickly sentiment of pretended philanthropy and diseased mental aberration of 'higher law' fanatics," said the jurors in reference to opponents of the trade, "is weak and unwise." When northerners criticized the acquittal of Lamar, a southern newspaper denounced Yankee hypocrisy: "What is the difference between a Yankee violating the fugitive slave law in the North, and a Southern man violating . . . the law against the African slave trade in the South?" Lamar repurchased the Wanderer at public auction and went on with his slave-trading ventures until the Civil War, in which he was killed at the head of his regiment.53
III
Those who wanted to import more slaves also wanted to acquire more slave territory. For this purpose a good many southerners looked not to
52. For a study of the movement to reopen the African slave trade, see Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York, 1971).
53. Quotations from Nevins, Emergence, I, 436; and Takaki, Pro-Slavery Crusade, 220. See also Tom Henderson Wells, The Slave Ship Wanderer (Athens, Ga., 1967).
the rather unpromising regions already part of the United States but to lands south of the border. At the 1856 commercial convention a delegate from Texas proposed a toast that was drunk with enthusiasm: "To the Southern republic bounded on the north by the Mason and Dixon line and on the south by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, including Cuba and all other lands on our southern shore."54
This version of Manifest Destiny was not new in 1856. Eight years earlier, just after the Senate had approved the treaty acquiring California and New Mexico, President Polk had outlined his next goal: "I am decidedly in favour of purchasing Cuba & making it one of the States of [the] Union."55 This idea appealed particularly to southerners as a way to expand their political power. "The Pearl of the West Indies," proclaimed one annexationist pamphlet, "with her thirteen or fifteen representatives in Congress, would be a powerful auxiliary to the South." Believing that the Gulf of Mexico was "a basin of water belonging to the United States," Senator Jefferson Davis declared in 1848 that "Cuba must be ours" in order to "increase the number of slaveholding constituencies."56
Polk authorized his minister to Spain to offer $100 million for the island. But this effort died stillborn. The American minister's clumsy efforts both amused and angered Spanish officials. A North Carolina politician with the implausible name of Romulus M. Saunders, the minister knew no language but English "& even
this he sometimes murders," commented Secretary of State Buchanan. The Spanish foreign minister informed Saunders that sooner than sell Cuba, Spain "would prefer seeing it sunk in the ocean." In any case it was unlikely that Congress, with its Whig and Wilmot Proviso majority in the House, would have appropriated funds to buy a territory containing nearly half a million slaves. Whig victory in the 1848 presidential election ended official efforts to acquire Cuba—for the time being.57
Annexationists were not surprised by this failure. After all Texas, California, and New Mexico had been won only by revolution and war; they were willing to apply the same methods in Cuba. Their champion
54. Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions, 168.
55. Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Diary of James K. Polk during His Presidency, 1845 to 1849, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1910), III, 446.
56. Basil Rauch, American Interest in Cuba: 1848–1855 (New York, 1948), 111; CG, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 599; Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1973), 11.
57. Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 48–100; quotations from 97–98.
was a handsome, charismatic Cuban soldier of fortune named Narciso Lopez who had fled to New York in 1848 after Spanish officials foiled his attempt to foment an uprising of Cuban planters. Lopez recruited an army of several hundred adventurers, Mexican War veterans, and Cuban exiles for an invasion of the island. He asked Jefferson Davis to lead the expedition. The senator demurred and recommended his friend Robert E. Lee, who considered it but politely declined. Lopez thereupon took command himself, but the Taylor administration got wind of the enterprise and sent a naval force to seize Lopez's ships and block his departure in September 1849.
Undaunted, Lopez began to organize a new expedition of "filibusters" (from the Spanish filibustero, meaning freebooter or pirate). Believing northerners too "timid and dilatory" for this venture, Lopez left New York for New Orleans, where he planned to "rest his hopes on the men of the bold West and chivalric South."58 On the way he stopped in Mississippi to ask Governor John Quitman to command the invasion force. Quitman was a veteran of the Mexican War, in which he had risen to major general and commanded the assault that took Mexico City. A fire-eater who scattered threats of secession during the crisis of 1850, Quitman was tempted by the offer but turned it down because he felt compelled to remain at his post in Mississippi. He did help Lopez recruit men and raise money to buy weapons. Lopez obtained arms and volunteers from similar sources in Louisiana. In May 1850 his army of six hundred men sailed from New Orleans to the accompaniment of cheering crowds and the "winking encouragement" of public officials. Lopez landed on the northwest coast of Cuba, captured the town of Cardenas, and burned the governor's mansion. But the expected uprising of Cuban revolutionaries failed to materialize. When Spanish troops closed in on Cardenas the filibusters retreated to their ship, which barely outraced a pursuing Spanish warship to Key West, where the expeditionary force ingloriously dissolved.59
Nevertheless, Lopez received a hero's welcome in the lower South. Dozens of towns and organizations offered him salutes, parades, toasts,
58. Quoted in John Hope Franklin, The Militant South 1800–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 105.
59. Chester Stanley Urban, "New Orleans and the Cuban Question during the Lopez Expeditions of 1849–1851: A Local Study in 'Manifest Destiny,' " Louisiana Historical Quarterly, 22 (1939), 1125; Robert E. May, John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (Baton Rouge, 1985), 236–39.
and banquets. Southern senators demanded American action to punish Spain. "I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it," declared Jefferson Davis's fellow senator from Mississippi, Albert Gallatin Brown. But Brown would not stop there. "I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery." The Southern Standard had an even larger vision. "With Cuba and St. Domingo, we could control the productions of the tropics, and, with them, the commerce of the world, and with that, the power of the world." Indeed, pronounced De Bow's Review, "we have a destiny to perform, 'a manifest destiny' over all Mexico, over South America, over the West Indies."60
Zachary Taylor's administration, then trying to bring in California and New Mexico as free states, was unmoved by this rhetoric. The government indicted Lopez, Quitman, and several other southerners for violation of the neutrality laws. Quitman threatened to use the Mississippi militia to defend the state's sovereignty against federal marshals. But he finally calmed down, resigned the governorship, and agreed to be arrested. Three trials in New Orleans of one defendant (a Mississippi planter) ended in hung juries, whereupon the federal government dropped the remaining indictments. Wild celebrations marked this denouement. "If the evidence against Lopez were a thousand fold stronger," commented a New Orleans newspaper, "no jury could be impaneled to convict him because public opinion makes a law."61
Thus vindicated, the filibusters tried again in 1851. William J. Crittenden of Kentucky, nephew of the attorney general, commanded a "regiment" of southern volunteers in the invasion force of 420 men. Once again port officials in New Orleans colluded with the filibusters to allow their departure on August 3, 1851, in a ship loaded to the gunwales. But this time Spanish troops were ready and waiting. They had already suppressed a premature local uprising intended to cooperate with the invaders. In several engagements the Spaniards killed two hundred of the filibusters and captured the rest. Cuban officials sent 160 of the prisoners to Spain, garroted Lopez in front of a large crowd
60. May, Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 9; Jesse T. Carpenter, The South as a Conscious Minority, 1789–1861 (New York, 1930), 179; De Bow's Review, 9 (1850), 167.
61. Orleanian, June 8, 1850, quoted in Urban, "New Orleans and the Cuban Question," loc. cit., 1132. See also May, Quitman, 240–52.
in Havana, and lined up fifty American prisoners including Crittenden in the public square and executed them by firing squad.62
When this news reached New Orleans, mobs rioted out of control. They destroyed the Spanish consulate and sacked shops owned by Spaniards. "Blood for Blood!" blazoned the New Orleans Courier. "Our brethren must be avenged! Cuba must be seized!"63 But the Fillmore administration, embarrassed by its negligent failure to stop the filibusters before they reached Cuba, confined its activities to a successful diplomatic effort to release the remaining American prisoners from Spain.
Filibustering died down for a time while expansionists concentrated on winning a friendly administration in the election of 1852. The spread-eagle nationalism of the "Young America" element in the Democratic party made Cuba an important issue in this election.64 The Young Americans were by no means all southerners. Stephen Douglas of Illinois was their foremost champion. But expansion remained preeminently a southern priority. "The desire that Cuba should be acquired as a Southern conquest, is almost unanimous among Southern men," commented one observer. "The safety of the South is to be found only in the extension of its peculiar institutions," said another. The election of Franklin Pierce as president caused Young Americans to celebrate with bonfires and torchlight parades brandishing such banners as "The Fruits of the Late Democratic Victory—Pierce and Cuba."65
Pierce's first actions pleased these partisans. "The policy of my Administration will not be controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion," the new president promised in his inaugural address. "Our position on the globe, render[s] the acquisition of certain possessions . . . eminently important for our protection. . . . [The] future is boundless."66 Pierce filled his cabinet and the diplomatic corps with votaries of Manifest Destiny. Of all these appointments, that of Pierre Soulé as minister to Spain offered the clearest signal of the administration's intentions. A native of France whose republicanism had forced
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
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