General Zachary Taylor, the Whig who had succeeded Polk to the presidency, condemned the Cuban filibusters. He did not want a war with Spain, and he did not want to violate the 1818 Neutrality Act. In the fall of 1849, working hard to thwart López and his network, the federal government had impounded their ships, weaponry, and ammunition. But stopping them completely was not easy, what with several newspapers in New Orleans and New York clamoring for Cuban annexation to the point where the New York Sun jumped the gun with the headline “Cuba Is Free!”
Having relocated his base of operations from New York and Washington to New Orleans, López canvassed the South. Soon he stood in the governor’s mansion of John Quitman, the recently elected straight-in-the-saddle slavery zealot of Mississippi who during his military stint in Mexico had been briefly appointed governor of Mexico City. “I possess absolute power,” Quitman had bragged to his wife at the time. Quitman suited López to a T. He was a rich slave owner with a plantation that boasted over 450 slaves, and, as an unshakable advocate of slavery, he hoped to see the institution spread into as many new territories as possible. Cuba was just the place for the extension of his and the country’s commerce.
With a map of Cuba spread on the table, he and López discussed the invasion. López offered Quitman a million dollars and promised an army of four thousand for him to lead. After the revolution, Quitman could then command the entire Cuban army (before the island’s annexation to the United States, that is). Tempted, the silver-haired Quitman nonetheless turned López down but provided him with contacts. And with the help of O’Sullivan, by May 1850, López had secured three ships. Volunteers for the expedition had been rounded up in New Orleans, and it’s likely that John Henderson, a former U.S. senator from Mississippi, helped underwrite the expedition along with the Cuban émigrés and New Orleans merchants still involved.
López left New Orleans on May 7, 1850, and by May 18 he was bound for Cárdenas on Cuba’s northwest coast on one of his ships, which were disguised as emigrant vessels. Planning to capture the railroad, he was quickly routed by the Spanish infantry (Gonzales was wounded soon after they landed), and though he and his men managed to burn the governor’s mansion, they were forced to retreat to Key West, where the people in the street did hail them as liberating heroes. Not so the U.S. government, which called them outlaws and pirates. Secretary of State John M. Clayton said that “the honor of the Government requires that no just effort be spared to bring him [López] to trial and punishment.”
Now under federal investigation, Quitman resigned the Mississippi governorship and surrendered himself to federal officials. López was arrested in New Orleans on the charge of violating the Neutrality Act: leading a hostile expedition against a country with which the United States was at peace. López was unflappable. “If it be a crime to solicit the aid of freemen to achieve the liberation of oppressed and enslaved Cubans—men like themselves—and to place the Queen of the Antilles in the path of her magnificent destiny,” López said, “I am determined to be a criminal now and to the very last moment of my life—a pertinacious, unrepenting and open criminal—for I shall implore that assistance from noble and sympathizing men wherever I shall meet them—from my judges, from President Taylor, from his cabinet and from Congress—as I shall ever beseech it from God, with every pulsation of my heart.” López saw himself as battling for a just and transcendent cause.
Two trials ended in a hung jury, and when the jury deadlocked again, a third mistrial was declared and the charges were dropped. “If the evidence against López were a thousand-fold stronger,” a New Orleans paper editorialized in June 1850, “no jury could be impaneled against him because public opinion makes law.”
True to his vow, López would try again. In August 1851, financed with at least $50,000 from avid supporters—women were urged to contribute their jewels—and officially condemned by the federal government, López was ready to depart at dawn from New Orleans on the Pampero.
The expedition was doomed from the start. López was jittery: he had heard that U.S. marshals were going to seize the Pampero. And he was impatient: he had also heard that the rebellion in Cuba had already begun in Puerto Príncipe (what he hadn’t heard was that the Spanish had planted the rumor). Why wait for Gonzales, his lieutenant, who had not yet arrived in New Orleans, López wondered, or for more volunteers (hundreds would assemble in the Crescent City during the next week); why wait for more ships; and why sail to Jacksonville, Florida, as initially intended, where more than five hundred men were ready to join him? He didn’t want the revolution to begin without him. Ripeness was all.
López started up the Pampero’s engines. But with one engine dead, the ship had to be towed to the mouth of the Mississippi and then stop for repairs in Key West. And though Sigur had bought and outfitted the Pampero, his coal dealer had delivered only about half of the 160 tons needed to reach Puerto Príncipe, so when the Pampero finally left Key West, it chugged toward Bahía Honda, about fifty miles west of Havana. Because the current had pushed it off course, it passed within easy sight of the lighthouse at Havana harbor. Not until eight on the evening of August 11 did it approach Bahía Honda.
The Spanish had of course been watching. Unaware of this, López, on landing, divided his troops and left about a hundred men under the command of Colonel William Logan Crittenden, a nephew of the U.S. attorney general (and last in his class at West Point). He was instructed to guard the supplies and ammunition until López, marching inland with the rest of his men, could round up wagons and oxen. But left to themselves, Crittenden and his men were vulnerable. When, in a matter of hours, the Spanish attacked, the frantic Crittenden sent half of his troops to find López while he and the rest headed to the coast; but with their backs to the sea, they were captured, taken to Havana, and summarily shot in groups of ten the next morning in the public square—like dogs, growled one observer.
Writing to friends and family before his execution, young Crittenden denounced López. “When I was attacked, López was only three miles off,” he cried. “If he had not been deceiving us as to the state of things, he would have fallen back with his forces and made fight. Instead of which he marched immediately to the interior.”
It may be that López was unaware of what had happened; Crittenden might well have been a victim of López’s poor planning and boundless arrogance. In either case, a driving rain had destroyed what was left of López’s ammunition, most of his men were shoeless, the roads were thick with sucking mud, and López had lost his saddle and his sense of direction. Desperate, he killed his own horse to feed his troops before they trudged over the mountains, their feet bloody. On August 28, López was surrounded by seventeen Creoles. He was seated upon a rock, his pistols in his girdle. “He had not courage to put one to his head, and blow his brains out,” a former supporter remarked, “preferring to live a few hours longer, and die in the manner a traitor should.” In the early-morning hours of September 1, 1851, Narciso López stood atop a wooden tower in Havana and, clad in a white gown and white cap, was ignominiously garroted with an iron collar. The bulk of López’s men were sentenced to hard labor in a Spanish prison on the African coast.
The handkerchief-waving women and men of New Orleans erupted in anger. “Fifty-one Americans Captured and Butchered in Cold Blood,” raged the New Orleans Picayune. Rioters snatched the Spanish flag from the consulate, sliced it to ribbons, and set it afire in Lafayette Square. Another crowd wrecked the offices of the printing press of the Spanish newspaper, La Unión, and flung the presses into the street. In Philadelphia, in Independence Square, almost fifteen thousand outraged citizens stood in a drizzling rain to hear speeches demanding that the United States order the Spanish to withdraw from Cuba. It was reported that in Pittsburgh a rally to protest the “massacre” in Cuba was the largest such gathering ever held there. There were mass meetings in Memphis, Montgomery, and in Raymond, Mississippi. In Cincinnati, citizens once opposed to the Cuban expedition condemned the brutality of the Spa
nish. In Baltimore, the U.S. consul in Havana was burned in effigy.
Since such a diplomatic scuffle could have led to a war that no one wanted, the U.S. government decided to pay Spain a sum of $25,000 for the damages inflicted by the New Orleans mobs, and it publicly condemned López as a blackguard who had led gullible if idealistic American boys astray. In return the Spanish released the imprisoned Americans. The situation cooled.
But behind the fracas, the hubris, the loss of life, the lust for riches and power and property, behind the tangled motives that tied the extension of slavery to the name of freedom and knit them sentimentally together, poorly concealing the violence at its core—behind all that lay the tragic fragility and the folly of the Compromise of 1850.
THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 had been the brainchild of Henry Clay, the venerable, aging, and charismatic senator from the slave state of Kentucky who was widely admired for his ability to forge alliances—and for his unwavering loyalty to the Union. Born in 1777—“the infant nation and the infant child began the race of life together” said his faithful admirer, Abraham Lincoln—Clay had long served the Union. Now in this, his last grand senatorial stand, with the fluency for which he was known, he proposed a solution to the legislative impasse bitterly, even violently, racking the country.
That impasse (and the accompanying rancor) had been largely caused by the vast expanse of new territory the United States had acquired after the Mexican War. For by 1850 there were three million slaves in America, and North and South were at bitter odds over whether to exclude slavery from those more than 525,000 acres, which included land that would become part of the states of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Making matters worse, California was pressing for statehood. Flush with gold prospectors and gold seekers and immigrants, it had ratified a constitution that prohibited slavery, but its entrance into the Union would throw off the ticklish economic balance between South and North.
Soon to be known as the Compromise of 1850, Henry Clay’s solution would, he hoped, mollify both slaveholding and non-slaveholding states by dividing that territory, Solomon-like, into slave and free. California could be admitted to the Union as a free state. The territories of New Mexico and Utah would be organized without mention of slavery until, at a later time, the territorial legislatures could decide whether or not to permit it. (Who could argue with self-rule?) The huge slave trade, not slavery itself, would be abolished in Washington, D.C., yet Congress should not interfere with interstate slave trade. Plus, Clay proposed settling the Texas and New Mexico boundary dispute by stipulating that the federal government pay Texas $10 million if that state abandoned its claim to New Mexico east of the Rio Grande. Finally, he proposed a more stringent Fugitive Slave Act.
Of course, friction over territorial expansion and the extension of slavery had preceded the war with Mexico, and though dispelled temporarily by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, it stretched all the way back to the founding of the country—and the framing of its Constitution. Drafted during the muggy summer of 1787, the Constitution had annulled Thomas Jefferson’s charming notion that “all men are created equal.” “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever,” Jefferson admitted in his Notes on the State of Virginia, also published in 1787. It did not. In 1842, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Jeffersonian equivocation. The Constitution was a covenant with death, he said, cruelly struck to create a country.
Garrison knew—and didn’t much care—that without guarantees for their institution of slavery, the Southern states would have walked out of the Constitutional Convention. Moderate Southerners knew that too. Hugh Williamson of North Carolina said he was against slavery but, taking all circumstances into account, he thought it better in the long run to grant South Carolina and Georgia their way rather than exclude them from the Union. Hence the deal: the Constitution would protect the African slave trade until 1808, when, presumably, Congress would regulate it. (James Madison, a slaveholder, gloomily predicted, “twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves.” He was right.) Free states were prohibited from emancipating runaway slaves, who were to be returned to their owners. Those conditions more or less satisfied the South. But denied citizenship and the vote along with their freedom, would the slaves be represented in government at all? Northern delegates did not want to count slaves as persons since doing so would produce a huge imbalance in congressional representation—and the North wanted to maintain its edge. So North and South compromised again with the “three-fifths compromise”: for every five slaves, three would be added to the count determining representation in the House of Representatives.
Those uneasy about all this vaguely hoped that someday slavery would wither away. It did not. Who could foresee, for instance, the invention of the cotton gin, for one thing, which would make cotton easier to clean—and slavery wildly profitable.
And morally untenable, or so John Quincy Adams thought, although he believed that, to prevent a horrific war, practical politics had to override moral principle. “Great prudence and caution become indispensably necessary to me,” Adams had told the antislavery Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier in 1837. Before his death, though, he proposed gradual emancipation as well as financial recompense to slave owners. “I have abstained, perhaps too pertinaciously abstained from all participation in measures leading to that conflict for Life and Death between Freedom and Slavery,” he had earlier admitted, “through which I have yet not been able to see how this Union could ultimately be preserved from passing.” The forecast was very gloomy.
Adams and the so-called Conscience Whigs (the antislavery wing of the party) also opposed the extension of slavery into new territory; so would several Democrats and Free Soilers, the coalition of antislavery Democrats and former Whigs who very much wanted to keep western lands open and free. But in 1846, it was a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, who added a controversial amendment to an appropriations bill that prohibited slavery in the new territories. Of course, Wilmot insisted that his purpose was only to “preserve free white labor, a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with Negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
Familiarly known as the Wilmot Proviso, the amendment infuriated Southerners, especially the formidably articulate Senator John Calhoun, who predicted, “The day that balance between the two sections of the country—the slaveholding States and the non-slaveholding States—is destroyed, is a day that will not be far removed from political revolution, anarchy, civil war, and widespread disaster.” The Wilmot Proviso threatened that balance, and Calhoun did not take threats lightly. So he linked his position to the Constitution, which protected the South, he said. “I see my way in the Constitution,” he declared. “I cannot in a compromise. A compromise is but an act of Congress. It may be overruled at any time. It gives us no security. But the Constitution is stable. It is a rock. On it we can stand. It is a firm and stable ground, on which we can better stand in opposition to fanaticism, than on the shifting sands of compromise. Let us be done with compromises.” The proviso passed the House in a sectional vote and failed in the Senate.
Now, with the war over and Clay’s compromise being debated, Southern extremists were again angry. Robert Toombs of Georgia, who had made his fortune as a slave-holding planter, cried, “If you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people, and to abolish slavery in this district, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the States of this Confederacy, I am for disunion.” But disunion meant war, Clay warned, a war “so furious, so bloody, so implacable, so exterminating [that]—none—none, none of them raged with such violence, or was ever conducted with such bloodshed and enormities, as will that war which shall fol
low that disastrous event—if that event ever happens—of dissolution.”
To many Americans, Whig and Democrat alike, including the Whig from Illinois Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay epitomized civic wisdom, so when Clay proposed the eight resolutions that became known as the Compromise of 1850, the spectators crowding the gallery seemed to sigh with relief. Yet Clay’s notion of compromise offended many Northerners, who interpreted it as craven weakness and dire submission. The Conscience Whig Charles Francis Adams—certainly no radical—said that Clay’s compromise doomed the Wilmot Proviso, and, as far as he was concerned, “years of piecemeal concessions . . . had brought the country to its present plight.” Philip Hone, a former mayor of New York, complained, “The fever of party spirit is beyond reach of palliatives. The fanatics of North and the disunionists of the South have made a gulf so deep that no friendly foot can pass it. Compromise is at an end.” Thaddeus Stevens, a representative from Pennsylvania, said the nefarious compromise, with its fugitive slave rider, bartered away a black person’s freedom. “If it will save the Union,” Stevens sharply noted, “let these gentlemen introduce a ‘compromise,’ by which these races may change conditions.”
In the Deep South, the radicals commonly known as “fire-eaters” scorned the compromise’s braying assumption of the moral high ground, for they were irritated over and over again by the self-righteousness of the increasingly rich and populous industrial North. Slaves mistreated? Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis scoffed at the idea. “The slave trade, so far as the African was concerned, was a blessing,” he said. “It brought him from abject slavery and a barbarian master, and sold him into a Christian land.”
And John Calhoun was implacable. “The most majestic champion of error since Milton’s Satan,” as the historian David Potter called him, Calhoun was too ill to deliver his own denunciation of Clay’s compromise. His flesh loose, his long skeleton practically poking out of it, this shrunken, haggard man was swaddled in warm flannel to ward off the chill in the Senate chamber. But his ominous and obdurate message, read by his colleague James Mason of Virginia, was clear: the South, he said, “has no compromise to offer but the Constitution, and no concession or surrender to make.”
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