Speaking before the New York State legislature, William Henry Seward, one of the younger eulogists to whom Adams had entrusted the future, would remember Adams as someone who “knew that the only danger incident to political reform, was the danger of delaying it too long.”
On that point, Adams had been tragically and presciently correct: reform had been delayed far too long.
THE COUNTRY HAD been founded in compromise, and to compromise it was dedicated. The Constitution had been composed by men hammering together a new government, bargaining and conceding and settling their differences to do so, or thinking that they had, especially when it came to the thorny issue of slavery: they did not call for its abolition; they just omitted the word “slave” from the document.
Compromise was therefore a strategy and not necessarily a capitulation. The discovery of a common ground, or the creation of one, on which men and women could meet and maneuver, compromise was art; it was statesmanship. But this conception of compromise was in trouble, and the word would, in the next years, become an epithet. It would be said that compromise was acceptance, cowardice, a series of piecemeal concessions. Compromise was wholesale surrender, inch by shameful inch, to expedience, a surrender that sacrificed the very ideal on which the country rested: a more perfect union in which the blessings of freedom were secured. And yet, as the historian David Brion Davis noted, “all idealism is compromised by tactical expediency, and all opportunism, no matter how ruthless, is compromised by idealism.”
The year of Adams’s death was a year of exuberance, exultation, and promise: a women’s rights convention in New York, revolutions across Europe, the acquisition of 525,000 square miles of land from Mexico, a new political party (Free Soil), the discovery of gold in California. It was a time of optimism and energy, revivalism and great hope—even frenzied belief—a time to turn at last against tyranny in all forms, especially slavery, so that the great sin of the country could be eradicated and the nation could fulfill its promise of liberty: for the immigrants flooding to America; for the enslaved, brought unwillingly; for women and men committed to equality. “America is the country of the Future,” Ralph Waldo Emerson had already said. “It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.”
But the present was and the future would also be a time of delirium, failure, greed, violence, and refusal: refusal to listen and to find—or create—that hard common ground of compromise; refusal to bend, so great was the fear of breaking; refusal to change and refusal to imagine what it might be like to be someone else. John Quincy Adams knew how to say “no,” but that negative could be inflexible, ideological, fanatical, particularly when some considered refusal a better tool than compromise or when compromise itself was so flaccid and unjust as to be meaningless, particularly if it evaded matters of human rights and dignity. In short, America was an ecstatic nation: smitten with itself and prosperity and invention and in love with the land from which it drew its riches—a land, grand and fertile, extending from one sea to another and to which its citizens felt entitled. Yet there was a problem—a hitch, a blot, a stain. The stain was slavery. That John Quincy Adams knew, and because of it, he forecast with doom the price the country would have to pay.
SOME OF THE people and many of the events in this book are so familiar they seem ready-made: Lincoln and his grief-stricken face, the Confederate general George Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the elegant and battle-weary Robert E. Lee meeting the scruffy, cigar-smoking, and oddly gentle Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. But the richness and variety of American life during this time of confidence and crisis and putative consolidation bring into focus other events, other characters: the impounding of the schooner Pearl as it tried to flee Washington, D.C., with a group of fugitive slaves; a shoot-out in Christiana, Pennsylvania; the day hungry women ran through the streets of Richmond begging for bread; Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton riding on wagons without springs through Kansas to secure the ballot for women; exuberant men such as Walt Whitman—and P. T. Barnum—embracing multitudes; the anguished honesty of Herman Melville; the powerful editor Horace Greeley changing his political stripes; the execution of the Lincoln conspirators and the head of the Andersonville prison, and then the impeachment of a president; Anna (not Emily) Dickinson on the stump; Chief Red Cloud at New York’s Cooper Union; the saga of the antislavery general Rufus Saxton, fired from the Freedmen’s Bureau by a soon-to-be-disgraced chief executive; and the grandeur and allure and promise of freedom, whether to the Mormons, or to men such as Clarence King, who possessed nature in the wild, or so he thought. And there was the war, that terrible war, and all the while, before, during, and after it, the idea of compromise, which was being bandied about, debated, and often held responsible for the country’s failure to face its fatal flaws, for its selfishness and shortsightedness, and for the reconciliation, at the end of Reconstruction, that opened a new era (beyond the scope of this book) of Jim Crow.
I don’t presume to say what people should or should not have done, which is not to suggest I am without judgment, sorrow, or at certain times astonishment. Still, by placing persons, events, contradictions, principles, and, yes, compromises next to one another, perhaps we can empathize with the choices people may or may not have felt they had, given the exigencies within which they lived and the very mixed motives we come to understand, if we do, but through a glass darkly. For in the roiling middle of the nineteenth century, when Americans looked within, not without, there was an unassailable intensity and imagination and exuberance, inspirited and nutty and frequently cruel or brutal. There was also a seemingly insatiable and almost frenetic quest for freedom, expressed in several competing ways, for the possession of things, of land, and—alas—of persons. And in many instances there was a passion, sometimes self-righteous, sometimes self-abnegating, for doing good, even if that good included, for its sake and in its name, acts of murder.
PART ONE
{ 1848–1861 }
(1)
HIGHER LAWS
New Orleans, 1851
It is the third of August. Just before daybreak, bands of men and women, hats and handkerchiefs waving, gather at the dock at the end of St. Mary’s Street in a New Orleans suburb. Before them looms the Pampero, the 500-ton ship soon to head to Cuba. “Cuba, Cuba, Cuba,” the men and women chant from the wharf. They’ve been chanting for days, milling around street corners and meeting halls and talking endlessly of Cuba, Cuba, Cuba, and emblazoning the newly drawn Cuban flag on posters and handbills and banners. Now, finally, at any minute, the Pampero will pull out of the slip, General Narciso López at the helm. There in fact he stands—he boarded around 1 A.M.—the stocky fifty-four-year-old Venezuelan eager to export American freedom to Cuba and annex the island to the United States, as if it were a jeweled brooch destined for the lapel of Uncle Sam. The crowd (some estimated it was ten thousand strong) cheers. López bows.
The expedition is a matter of some urgency. Less than two decades ago, when the British abolished slavery in 1833 in the West Indies, many Southern slaveholders feared the Spanish might free the slaves of Cuba, which would mean that Cuba could become, according to John A. Quitman, the brash governor of Mississippi, a “strong negro or mongrel empire.” Even old John Quincy Adams had warned before he died that if the United States seized Texas—which it just had—and permitted slavery there, England might retaliate by invading Cuba and emancipating Cuban slaves. (An Anglophobe, Adams calculated that Cuba was better left to the Spanish than to the British.) Besides, any talk of abolition in the Caribbean from any quarter could spark a series of slave insurrections: after all, that was what had happened in Haiti, setting the slaves free; the fire next time might sweep across the South, razing everything and everyone in its path.
Unless, that is, the United States annexed Cuba. The South could then carve out of the island at least two more slave states for itself. That would preserve the peace and be good for the Creole planters and sugar producers who craved dir
ect access to the U.S. market; it would be good for the American speculators invested in Cuban sugar plantations and very good for those American citizens—Southerners—who were riled by the recent admission of California to the Union as a free state, which had cost the South its parity in the Senate.
Sighing in relief when the Pampero departed, Laurent J. Sigur lit his cigar. A wealthy slave owner in the greatest slave-trading center of the South, Sigur had recently purchased the Pampero solely for the purpose of López’s expedition. Committed to the country’s expansion southward, he also assumed that after López and his men landed on the Cuban coast, they would be joined by enough disgruntled Cubans to overthrow the Spanish once and for all. Open arms and loving crowds would then greet the liberators: that was Sigur’s dream and that was López’s dream, as it seems to be the dream of all besotted redeemers.
Besides, who could resist the call to freedom? Hadn’t all of Europe convulsed in 1848? Wasn’t the United States founded in liberty for—almost—all? In his newspaper, the New Orleans Daily Delta, Sigur had been running engravings of López on the front page and publishing letters from Cuba that told of ongoing revolution there. He had also issued and sold Cuban bonds signed by López himself to finance the invasion. Still, as one skeptical correspondent noted, “every fool declared his determination to go over to Cuba, to exterminate the odious Spaniards, and to give freedom to the Cubans; whilst, not a single fool or knave, expressed this determination, without calculating how much he could make by the speculation.” Sigur was a smart businessman.
And López was the perfect figurehead and foil. Silver-haired, dark-eyed, and spoiling for a crusade, the mustachioed López looked the part of the liberating hero, although now, from this distance, it’s difficult to piece together who he was, where he was, when or what exactly he wanted from his quixotic mission. Formerly a general in the Spanish army but the son of a former Venezuelan landowner, López seems less a revolutionary than a gold-plated opportunist, part idealist, part fanatic, and part capitalist with a penchant for grandiosity. Yet dogged of purpose, he was perfectly suited to do the dirty work for those Americans who supported a self-serving Cuban revolution.
He was also a shrewd survivor, or so it seemed. As a boy of fifteen he had fought on the side of the Spanish against Simón Bolívar, but after the Spanish defeat in Caracas in 1813, he retired from the Spanish army and headed to Cuba to avoid execution. By 1824, he was a Cuban citizen; he had married into the Creole aristocracy, taken up cockfighting and philandering, dabbled in iron and coal and copper mines, and squandered his wife’s inheritance, although some say he amassed a small fortune that he deposited in New York banks.
He left Cuba in 1827, at age thirty, and sailed to Spain in search of further advancement. As aide-de-camp to General Jerónimo Valdés, he fought on the side of Queen Maria Cristina during the war between the liberals and the Carlists. The Spanish queen draped him in medals, but after she was deposed, “we find him in hostile array against Christina [sic],” drily noted one of his chroniclers, “and in command still, under her enemies.” López had the ability, remarked a historian without irony, to make friends.
López remained in Spain until Valdés was transferred to Cuba in 1841, where he served as lieutenant governor of Matanzas and head of the Military Commission. Two years later, after Valdés was replaced as captain-general of Cuba, López joined or founded a group called the “Conspiracy of the Cuban Rose Mines.” The organization was a cover, for López was plotting against the Spanish. But, a boastful, self-deceived man unable to keep a secret, in 1848 he confided his revolutionary plans to Robert Campbell, the U.S. consul in Havana. Campbell promptly leaked the information to Secretary of State James Buchanan. Though an expansionist, Buchanan didn’t want trouble, so he in his turn tipped off the Spanish minister in Washington about López.
López’s men were arrested, but the slippery López had already hopped aboard the Neptune, a brig bound for Bristol, Rhode Island, and then made his way to New York, where he immediately met the members of the Club de la Habana, a group of wealthy sugar planters, bankers, merchants, and intellectuals. “The annexation of Cuba holds out temptations to the commercial, navigating and manufacturing interests of New York and New England that no anti-slavery feeling can withstand,” the Charleston Courier tartly observed.
To most of these annexationists—López included—a liberated Cuba meant freedom to conduct business unencumbered by Spanish governmental regulations and taxation but not, obviously, freedom for the slaves. “López was not particularly interested in the emancipation of the slaves,” one of his followers blithely explained. “He thought that they were necessary for the successful cultivation of the island, and he could not successfully visualize a free black population. He felt that a Cuba unbound by any ties to any other nation meant free blacks. He therefore favored annexation to the United States.”
The Cuban junta had selected López as its leader, but since he didn’t speak a word of English, he needed an interpreter, and in this he was ably, if not craftily, assisted by the Cuban-born Ambrosio José Gonzales, an expert marksman and fine linguist who happened to be a boyhood friend of the future Confederate general Pierre Beauregard, at whose dashing side Gonzales would stand when Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter. Educated in the United States and steeped in the ideology of expansionism, Gonzales had good contacts, so in 1849 he had been able to secure a meeting for López with four senators, including John Calhoun. Calhoun had already crossed swords over Cuba with John Quincy Adams years earlier, during the administration of James Monroe.
Though he might have liked to annex Cuba sooner rather than later, Calhoun was evasive. States’ rights and the matter of regional sovereignty had been keeping the tubercular senator awake at night, and he didn’t want Cuba to distract him or his fellow Southerners from these issues. Yet according to Gonzales, Calhoun had not discouraged López. “You have my best wishes,” the senator had allegedly said, “but whatever the result, as the pear, when ripe, falls by the law of gravitation into the lap of the husbandman, so will Cuba eventually drop into the lap of the Union.”
Calhoun shrewdly introduced López to senators Henry S. Foote of Mississippi, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, and Daniel S. Dickinson of New York—each man from a different region, each of whom had his eye on the prosperous island. López also met with the newly elected senator from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis, who cordially turned down his offer to command the expedition and receive $100,000 up front for his trouble. In his stead, Davis suggested a West Pointer from Virginia, Robert E. Lee. Lee too turned López down.
So López and Gonzales took up sewing. They designed a new Cuban flag with a five-pointed white star—similar to the one on the flag of Texas—set against a red background and, on the right, four blue and white stripes. In New Orleans, Laurent Sigur immediately hoisted it over his office at the Delta, and before the Pampero expedition, a representative of the Mexican Gulf Railroad Company presented López with a finely wrought rendition in silk.
Today it may seem that only a fool would have believed that a mere handful of men, without the sanction of their own or any other government, could land in Cuba and bring the Spanish government to its knees. Still, the cockamamie plan to incite a revolution was not all that different from John Brown’s ill-conceived raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, a few years later, even if their goals were decidedly dissimilar: Brown and his tiny band of revolutionaries were perfervid abolitionists, intent on freeing slaves. Yet like Brown—at least initially—Narciso López was able to entice young men to join him, men who might be adventurers or freedom lovers or land grabbers. His company eventually included a former state senator, the attorney general’s nephew, and a large number of Mexican War veterans lured by the promise of $4,000 on signing up and a parcel of land after one year. “We should remember that we are sons of Washington and had come to free a people,” López said, wrapping his cash offer in the flag of liberation.
But unlike Brown, Ló
pez could raise lots of money. Speculators in the North as well as the South were backing him: speculators in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia recognized the commercial significance of Cuban sugar and turned a blind eye to the increased numbers of slaves brought to Cuba from Africa—as many as 8,700 in 1849, with the number growing each year. The slaves worked about eighteen hours a day under a blazing sun; they were stuffed into small quarters at night and fed salt fish and a few vegetables if lucky; they were beaten, humiliated, and on occasion murdered. But López handily won the approval of such Democratic Party organs as John O’Sullivan’s United States Magazine and Democratic Review, which published a sixteen-page biography of the general, no doubt written by O’Sullivan himself. As the man who presumably coined the phrase “manifest destiny” in reference to the American West, O’Sullivan considered the destiny of Cuba just as manifest: annexation via an armed expedition, known as a filibuster.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the term “filibuster” referred not to long-winded speeches in Congress aimed at delaying or railroading the passage of legislation but rather the invasion of a country by force. (The term derives from the Dutch vrijbuiter, or “freebooter,” and Spanish filibustero, which referred to the pirates of the seventeenth century who sacked colonies in the West Indies and Yucatán.) President Polk and, in particular, Secretary of State Buchanan had looked kindly on the annexation of Cuba, but they were cautious and politically prudent men. They had hoped to purchase the island from Spain, not to invade it. Buchanan had offered the Spanish $100 million. The Spanish replied that they’d sooner see Cuba sunk in the ocean than sold to the Americans. Buchanan had dropped the matter but snappishly promised that the United States would seize that damned Caribbean island in a coup d’état someday. “I feel it in my finger ends,” he said.
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