Now the plot was to wait until dawn on 4 November, giving the United States time to establish a strong naval presence off both coasts, before the pro forma arrest of Governor Obaldía in bed. All other government officials of any consequence would be jailed at the same time, with the exception of General Esteban Huertas, commander of the Panama City garrison and a willing, if expensive, recruit. Huertas’s battalion, plus two thousand veterans of earlier revolutions, three hundred railroad workers, and a like number of firemen, should establish order without much difficulty. A rocket would signal their success, and summon the liberated people of Panama City to the Plaza de Santa Ana. Then a declaration of independence (not Bunau-Varilla’s) would be read, and a new flag (not Bunau-Varilla’s) raised above the palm trees. Meanwhile, in Colón, the chief of police, Porfilio Meléndez, would proclaim the revolution there. By nightfall, all or most of Colombia’s three hundred thousand Istmusenos should be celebrating their new identities as Panamanians.
Two uncertainties, however, complicated this zarzuela scenario: Would the American gunboat arrive before the Colombian troopship? And could it be relied on to control events in Colón?
ROOSEVELT’S LAST TACTICAL move of the day was to approve a “secret and confidential” cable that addressed both questions. It ordered Commander John Hubbard of the Nashville to “maintain free and uninterrupted transit” across the Isthmus. If the transit seemed threatened by “any armed force with hostile intent,” he was to “occupy” the railroad line. Then, with repetitive emphasis:
PREVENT LANDING OF ANY ARMED FORCE WITH HOSTILE INTENT, EITHER GOVERNMENT OR INSURGENT.… GOVERNMENT FORCE REPORTED APPROACHING COLóN IN VESSELS. PREVENT THEIR LANDING IF IN YOUR JUDGMENT THIS WOULD PRECIPITATE A CONFLICT.
A similar order went out to Hubbard’s fellow commanders on the Pacific side.
Darkness settled over Washington. Two thousand miles south, in a warmer twilight, the Nashville dropped anchor off Colón.
INSTEAD OF RETIRING with Edith after dinner, Roosevelt boarded a special sleeper to New York. It was his habit every election eve to head homeward to vote. He enjoyed the ritual. If Panama chose to revolt now, it would have to do it without him.
He was awakened at 6:00 to prepare for transfer across Manhattan. At the same hour in Colón, first light disclosed another overnight arrival in the harbor: the Colombian troopship Cartagena. While the President bathed and breakfasted, Commander Hubbard sent an inspector aboard the Cartagena and found her to be swarming with tiradores, select sharpshooters of the Colombian Army. None of them seemed to have a clear idea of why they had been sent to the Isthmus—only that they had been ordered by General Juan Tovar to debark quickly.
On shore, Chief Meléndez and other junta agents braced for trouble. Colonel James Shaler, the sympathetic superintendent of the Panama Railroad, agreed that at all costs the tiradores must be kept from crossing over to Panama City. Yet Commander Hubbard, inexplicably, raised no objection to the debarkation.
Hubbard’s problem was that he had not yet received his secret orders from Washington. He had no more clue than the captain of the Cartagena as to why he had been ordered back to Colón. At 8:20 A.M., therefore, the troopship nosed up to the Panama Railroad dock, and five hundred tiradores came ashore, bristling with weaponry.
Simultaneously, Roosevelt crossed the East River in bright fall sunshine. Behind him, the towers of Manhattan scintillated. Electoral bunting flapped in the streets, and huge crowds—too huge for Republican comfort—lined up to vote. At 8:30 he reached the Long Island Rail Road pier, settled into a waiting “special,” and its whistle blew for Oyster Bay.
Another, very short private train prepared to depart Colón for Panama City. Colonel Shaler had rigged it to accommodate the Colombian battalion’s sixteen senior officers. As he seated them, he explained that Governor Obaldía was anxious to see General Tovar as soon as possible. The tiradores would follow later in the day, as soon as more rolling stock could be procured. Shaler’s courtly urgency overcame Tovar’s doubts, and the train pulled out of the depot, leaving behind five hundred puzzled soldiers. The wooden houses of Colón slipped by at increasing speed. Jungle crowded in, and vegetation slapped at the sides of the car. Tovar and his aides rode over the saddle of hills Roosevelt wanted to divide, swaying in chlorophyllous gloom, suspended between two oceans.
THE PRESIDENT VOTED above Yee Lee’s Laundry in Oyster Bay at five minutes before ten. Then he drove out along Cove Neck for a quick look at Sagamore Hill. The big house was shuttered and dark, ghostly with sheeted furniture. A heavy fume of camphor balls discouraged entry. He walked around the estate, and noticed that the old barn, where he had romped with so many of his children, was beginning to give way. Two dogs greeted him; a third stared indifferently. Japanese maples trembled in full, scarlet leaf, but most other trees were bare, exposing a wider panorama of Long Island Sound than he had seen all summer.
“THE BIG HOUSE WAS SHUTTERED AND DARK.”
Sagamore Hill in winter (photo credit 18.1)
After about a half hour fighting desolate emotions, he returned to his carriage and was driven back to Oyster Bay station.
AS ROOSEVELT DID SO, Commander Hubbard agonized over yesterday’s orders, which had at last come through to the Nashville. He did not quite understand them, still having no knowledge of the prerevolutionary situation in Panama. The tiradores did not look like a “force with hostile intent,” now that they had lost their leaders. They squatted under the arcades of Colón, chatting with women. Nor was there any sign, as far as Hubbard could see, of the “insurgent” threat Washington seemed to anticipate. He went ashore to interrogate Colonel Shaler about it, and quickly lost his innocence. Returning to the Nashville, he sent a cable to Washington:
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT MOVEMENT MAY BE MADE TONIGHT AT PANAMA TO DECLARE INDEPENDENCE, IN WHICH CASE I WILL PROTEST AGAINST TRANSIT OF TROOPS NOW HERE.
A certain lack of urgency at the railroad yard in collecting the cars necessary for such transit suggested that Hubbard would not have to do much protesting. Around 11:30, Shaler received a call confirming that General Tovar’s party had arrived in Panama City. It had been welcomed by an impressive delegation of civic leaders, headed by Governor Obaldía, and by General Huertas and the garrison guard, glittering in full dress uniform. The first order of business, of course, was to have the Governor’s office arrange for delivery of the tiradores—but while this was being done, Tovar and his staff were invited to join Obaldía for lunch and a siesta.
AT 2:34 P.M., ROOSEVELT’S special train pulled out of Jersey City for Washington. Facing six hours of travel, he remembered that Nicholas Murray Butler had asked him for a list of recommended books. It seemed like a strange request, coming from the President of Columbia University, yet deserving of a full answer. He cast his mind back over what he had read since taking the oath of office, and began to scribble.
Parts of Herodotus; the first and seventh books of Thucydides; all of Polybius; a little of Plutarch; Aeschylus’ Orestean Trilogy; Sophocles’ Seven Against Thebes; Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae; and Aristophanes’ Frogs. Parts of The Politics of Aristotle.
All these had been in translation. However, he had read, in French, the biographies of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, Henri Turenne, and John Sobieski. He had also browsed, if not deeply studied, Froissart on French history, Maspero on the early Syrian, Chaldean, and Egyptian civilizations, “and some six volumes of Mahaffey’s Studies of the Greek World.” What else?
The Memoirs of Marbot; Bain’s Life of Charles the Twelfth; Mahan’s Types of Naval Officers; some of Macaulay’s Essays; three or four volumes of Gibbon and three or four chapters of Motley. The battles in Carlyle’s Frederick the Great; Hay and Nicolay’s Lincoln, and the two volumes of Lincoln’s Speeches and Writings—these I have not only read through, but have read parts of them again and again; Bacon’s Essays … Macbeth; Twelfth Night; Henry the Fourth; Henry the Fifth; Richard the Second; the first two
cantos of Milton’s Paradise Lost; some of Michael Drayton’s Poems—there are only three or four I care for; portions of the Nibelungenlied.…
ROOSEVELT HAD BARELY settled in his seat before the first hint of trouble in Panama reached the State Department. Hubbard’s early-morning dispatch from Colón had gone astray; this one came from Oscar Malmros, the United States Consul in Colón.
REVOLUTION IMMINENT … GOVERNMENT VESSEL CARTAGENA, WITH ABOUT 400 MEN, ARRIVED EARLY TODAY, WITH NEW COMMANDER IN CHIEF, TOVAR … NOT PROBABLE TO STOP REVOLUTION.
Washington was ill prepared to deal with such sudden news, since most of its top officials, including Root, Moody, and the President himself, were out of town on election trips. Assistant Secretary Loomis cabled Felix Ehrman, the United States Vice Consul in Panama City, ordering him to keep the State Department apprised of the situation in Panama City. Ehrman could reply only that it was “critical,” but not yet violent. Some sort of uprising was expected “in the night.”
Had the Vice Consul been better informed, he might have noticed the curious frequency with which deadlines of “five o’clock” recurred in local communications. Governor Obaldía had promised the increasingly desperate Tovar that his battalion would be delivered at that hour. The fire brigade was on notice to be ready for action then, and a freelance scribe assigned to write an important public proclamation had his contract amended accordingly. Word spread that there would be “a great mass meeting” in Plaza de Santa Ana at 5:00 P.M., and certain key citizens were told to bring guns.
… Church’s Beowulf; Morris’ translation of the Heimskringla, and Dasent’s translation of the sagas of Gisli and Burnt Njal; Lady Gregory’s and Miss Hull’s Cuchulain Saga together with The Children of Lir, The Children of Turin, The Tale of Deirdre, etc.; Les Précieuses Ridicules, Le Barbier de Séville; most of Jusserand’s books, of which I was most interested in his studies of the Kingis Quhair; Holmes’ Over the Teacups; Lounsbury’s Shakespeare and Voltaire; various numbers of the Edinburgh Review from 1803 to 1850; Tolstoi’s Sebastopol and The Cossacks; Sienkiewicz’s Fire and Sword, and parts of his other volumes; Guy Mannering; The Antiquary; Rob Roy; Waverley; Quentin Durward; parts of Marmion and the Lay of the Last Minstrel; Cooper’s Pilot; some of the earlier stories and poems of Bret Harte; Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer; Pickwick Papers; Nicholas Nickelby; Vanity Fair; Pendennis; The Newcomes; Adventures of Philip; Conan Doyle’s White Company.…
WHEN ELISEO TORRES, the young colonel whom General Tovar had left in command of the tiradores, asked Colonel Shaler when his men might expect to cross the Isthmus, he received a variety of answers. At first Shaler repeated Obaldía’s promise of delivery by five, but when that hour drew near, the railroad suddenly demanded advance payment of all fares. Torres, who had no money, was quick-thinking enough to insist on the government of Colombia’s right to transport troops on credit. Consul Malmros, overhearing, confirmed that such a right was written into the railroad’s concession. Shaler did not contest this, but noted that the concession also called for the Governor of Panama’s signature on all military travel requisitions. Also there was still the question of a shortage of available cars, most of the railroad’s rolling stock unfortunately being on the other side of the Isthmus.
Torres waxed more and more angry. Shaler had to admit, quietly to Chief Meléndez, that the railroad could not stall much longer without jeopardizing its treaty privileges. Torres could probably be held off until sunset, when trains stopped running anyway. But some cars were going to have to be laid on in the morning, unless Shaler received “written orders of the United States Government to refuse the transportation.”
ROOSEVELT RECALLED PLOWING through Charles Lever’s Charles O’Malley and some Brockden Brown novels with little real enjoyment, during the period when he was confined by his leg injury. Keats, Browning, Poe, Tennyson, Longfellow, Kipling, Bliss Carmen, Lowell, Stevenson, Allingham, and Leopold Wagner were more to his taste, and he had spent many enjoyable hours in their literary company. He had read aloud to his children (“and often finished afterwards to myself”) the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Howard Pyle. As for Joel Chandler Harris, “I would be willing to rest all I have done in the South as regards the negro in his story ‘Free Joe.’ ”
FIVE O’CLOCK CAME and went in Colón without any word of a disturbance in Panama City. The cable and railroad offices prepared to shut down for the night. Commander Hubbard came ashore again from the Nashville, and heard with concern that Shaler was resigned to transporting the government battalion in the morning. But before he could object, at 5:49 P.M., a call came through from Herbert G. Prescott, Shaler’s deputy at the Pacific terminus. Strangely, Prescott wanted to speak to Chief Meléndez. His message was a coded one—indicating that Prescott, too, was an agent of the junta, and saying that the revolution was “about to begin.”
Subsequent calls made clear that General Tovar and his senior staff had already been arrested at the order of General Huertas. Governor Obaldía was next (surrendering with the utmost equanimity), and by 6:00 P.M. the junta had started reorganizing itself as a “Provisional Government.” Its official documents and proclamations showed that the elderly Dr. Amador held little real power. The executive signatures were always those of José Augustin Arango, Federico Boyd, and Tomas Arias.
One of their first official acts was to send Shaler a telegram warning him, in the strongest terms, “not to accede” to any request for transportation of the tiradores. “This act would be of grave consequences for the company you represent.”
KENNETH GRAHAME. Somerville and Ross. Conrad. Artemus Ward. Octave Thanet. Viljoen. Stevens. Peer. Burroughs. Swettenham. Gray. Janvier. London. Fox. Garland. Tarkington. Churchill. Remington. Wister. White. Trevelyan …
By the time Roosevelt tired of jotting, he had listed 114 author names. “Of course I have forgotten a great many.” His catalog did not strike him as impressive. “About as interesting,” he concluded, “as Homer’s Catalogue of the Ships.”
He dozed off several times as the train raced south. Night fell. The weather was still mild and clear. Democratic weather. Faceless stations whizzed by in the dark. Sooner than expected, Washington loomed ahead. At 8:14 he alighted at Sixth Street Station. A reporter pushed an election dispatch into his hand. He stopped and read it under the bright platform lights. The Republican Party had suffered a landslide defeat in New York.
Refusing comment, Roosevelt shook hands with the locomotive crew, then climbed into a waiting White House carriage. It rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue past the Evening Star and Post buildings, only half noticed by crowds peering up at giant, illuminated stereopticon screens. Preliminary polling figures alternated with celebrity portraits and comic “moving pictures.” By 9:00, Roosevelt had arrived in the West Wing telegraph room to check on further results. But Loomis was there with a cable that drove all thoughts of the election from his mind. It was Vice Consul Ehrman’s nervous message of five hours before. Now, Ehrman cabled again:
UPRISING OCCURRED TONIGHT, SIX. NO BLOODSHED. ARMY AND NAVY OFFICIALS TAKEN PRISONERS. GOVERNMENT WILL BE ORGANIZED TONIGHT, CONSISTING OF THREE CONSULS, ALSO CABINET. SUPPOSED SAME MOVEMENT WILL BE EFFECTED IN COLóN. ORDER PREVAILS SO FAR. SITUATION SERIOUS. FOUR HUNDRED SOLDIERS LANDED TODAY. BARRANQUILLA.
Roosevelt sent at once for his top State and Navy Department aides. Hay arrived within minutes, accompanied by Loomis. Moody was still out of town, so his second in command, Charles H. Darling, came instead, followed by Admiral Taylor, Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, and two assistant officers. A crisis conference began in the President’s office.
Ehrman’s “no bloodshed” was good news, and Arango, Boyd, and Arias seemed to be going about their business efficiently so far. But the presence of those soldiers in Colón was indeed “serious” (and would look even more so when Roosevelt found out there were five hundred, not four). The Nashville was so far the only American presence on either side of the Isthmus. Hubbard’s gu
ns and Marines might, or might not, be enough to stop the government battalion from crossing over and quashing the revolution.
All the more reason, therefore, to keep Tovar’s troops on the Caribbean side. But “reason” of a legal nature must be found in the treaty of 1846. Roosevelt was aware that early in his own presidency, the State Department had blocked a shipment of rebel arms along the railroad, on the ground that they might be used to prevent further transport of anything. Could the same scruple now justify blocking a shipment of government soldiers, whose only mission was to maintain the integrity of the Colombian federation?
Apparently, it could. Roosevelt authorized a draft set of instructions for the Navy Department to set in cipher, and cable immediately:
For NASHVILLE. In the interests of peace do everything possible to prevent government troops from proceeding to Panama [City]. The transit must be kept open and order maintained.
Direct the ATLANTA to proceed with all speed to Colón.
Also the BOSTON [to Panama City].
Repeat all of yesterday’s orders.
Remarkable in this document was its lack of any reference to the “strict neutrality” imposed upon American commanders in earlier Isthmian crises.
By 10:30 P.M., the specific order to Commander Hubbard was ready for transmission and signed by Hay. Further cables went to the other ships involved, although their urgency was largely symbolic. The Atlanta had to finish stoking up in Kingston before it could join the Nashville; the Boston had not yet cleared Honduras; the rest of the Pacific Squadron would need three more days to get to Panama City. At least the Dixie was nearing Colón, where Hubbard could doubtless use it.
Theodore Rex Page 38
