All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Aboard the same ship with Amador was Gabriel Duque, supposedly on a routine business trip. Amador, for obvious reasons, attempted to keep a low profile in America. Duque, though, had better cover and also better entrée. In New York, he met with Cromwell, who, after discussing ways to finance the junta, placed a long-distance call to Hay to arrange an appointment for Duque. The Panamanian intriguer hurried to the capital and saw Hay on September 3.

  For two hours, Duque laid out the plot as it was taking shape in Panama and solicited the support of the administration. According to testimony later given to Congress by a correspondent for the New York World (a roundabout corroboration, to be sure), Hay told Duque that the government would not commit to direct assistance but assured him that the United States intended to build the Panama canal and “did not purpose to permit Colombia’s standing in the way.” Hay is also said to have pledged to Duque that, if the revolutionaries took control of Panama City on the Pacific and Colón on the Atlantic, then the United States would step in to prevent Colombian troops from disturbing the transit across the isthmus.

  Three days later, Hay wrote a newsy letter to Roosevelt, who was still at Oyster Bay, bringing him up to date on various foreign matters—a forthcoming treaty with China and a disagreement with the Sultan of Turkey that had put the Mediterranean squadron on alert. The letter also covered Colombia and the canal but said nothing of Hay’s meeting with Duque, other than to comment: “Just how much of an attempt at insurrection they will make in Panama can hardly be foreseen at this moment, but some sort of movement is clearly indicated.”

  Duque was less discreet. Calculating that Hay’s promise (if that was what it was) of support for the revolution might persuade Colombia to embrace the canal treaty at last, he blabbed his entire conversation with Hay to Tomás Herrán, the Colombian minister in Washington. The next day, Herrán cabled Bogotá: “Revolutionary agents of Panama here. . . . If treaty is not approved by September 22, it is probable there will be a revolution with American support.”

  Later that same day, Herrán wrote the Colombian consul in New York: “Yesterday Mr. J. G. Duque, editor and proprietor of the Star and Herald, had a long interview with the Secretary of State, and I understand that the plan for a revolution which he brought with him has been well received by the Government here.” Alerted by Duque of Amador’s presence in the country, Herrán hired private detectives to track Amador’s movements and wrote Cromwell to warn him that Colombia would hold him accountable for his role in any schemes of secession.

  Herrán also wanted to be sure that Bogotá understood the increasingly “hostile attitude” that Roosevelt bore toward Colombia. He called attention to “threatening statements which [Roosevelt] has uttered in private conversations, and which by indirect means have come to my knowledge. . . . President Roosevelt is a decided partisan of the Panama route, and hopes to begin excavation of the canal during his administration. Your Excellency [Secretary of Foreign Affairs Rico] already knows the vehement character of the President, and you are aware of the persistence and decision with which he pursues anything to which he may be committed.”

  EXPOSED BY DUQUE AND with detectives on his tail, Amador had trouble promoting the Panamanian cause. Cromwell welcomed him initially but then shunned him, once Herrán became wise to the doctor’s intent. Amador no longer had any chance of gaining an audience with the secretary of state or president.

  His prospects brightened, however, when Bunau-Varilla arrived from France on September 22. In Bunau-Varilla’s room at the Waldorf-Astoria, Amador filled the Frenchman in on the junta’s plan for Panamanian rebellion. He advised him that Panama’s new governor, José Domingo de Obaldía, favored secession; he also testified to the weakness of the Colombian garrison on the isthmus. “A revolution would today meet with no obstacle,” Amador vouched to Bunau-Varilla—but only if the rebels could keep additional Colombian troops from landing. The ever confident Bunau-Varilla told Amador that it had been a mistake to put his faith in Cromwell but not to despair. Bunau-Varilla, the one true apostle of the Panama canal, would turn their confluent dreams into reality. Amador took heart and sent a one-word telegram to the junta: “Esperanzas”—“Hopes.”

  Next Bunau-Varilla had a talk with John Bassett Moore in New York. The French engineer and the American professor were in complete agreement on “the right of transit” interpretation of the 1846 treaty. While Moore had been preparing his memorandum for Roosevelt and Hay, Bunau-Varilla had published a remarkably similar article in a newspaper he co-owned with his brother, Le Matin, declaring that “nobody could blame President Roosevelt . . . for employing force to obtain what is guaranteed by formal treaty and what he is unable to obtain by good-will.” Moore had recently dined with Roosevelt and was able to assure Bunau-Varilla of the president’s partiality to their line of reasoning. For Bunau-Varilla, all the pieces were falling into place. A week later he boarded a train for Washington.

  Though the deadline for the expiration of the Hay-Herrán Treaty had now come and gone, Hay and Roosevelt were still mulling their options. “It is altogether likely that there will be an insurrection on the Isthmus against that regime of folly and graft that now rules at Bogotá,” Hay advised Roosevelt. The choice was whether to wait out the revolution or to “take a hand in rescuing the Isthmus from anarchy.” Last, almost as an afterthought, he mentioned the Nicaragua option.

  By early October, Roosevelt was close to a decision. “I think it well worth considering whether we had not better warn these cat-rabbits [in Bogotá] that great though our patience has been, it can be exhausted,” he confided to Senator Hanna. “I feel we are certainly justified in morals, and therefore justified in law, under the treaty of 1846, in interfering summarily and saying that the canal is to be built and that they must not stop it.” Publicly, though, he still hedged. “As yet, the people of the United States are not willing to take the ground of building the canal by force,” he told Albert Shaw, editor of the Review of Reviews.

  On October 10, Bunau-Varilla, through his friendship with one of Hay’s assistant secretaries of state, Francis Loomis, gained a brief interview with Roosevelt. Both men recollected the conversation a decade later, with slight variations. Roosevelt had Bunau-Varilla broaching the subject of revolution in Panama; Bunau-Varilla said Roosevelt brought it up first. When Bunau-Varilla asked the president if the United States would prevent Colombian troops from landing, Roosevelt claimed he replied that he could not commit. When Bunau-Varilla pressed Roosevelt further, Roosevelt recalled stating, “All I can say is that Colombia by her action has forfeited any claim upon the U.S. and I have no use for a government that would do what that government has done.” According to Bunau-Varilla, Roosevelt then asked his visitor what made him so certain that a revolution was coming. Bunau-Varilla answered enigmatically, “General and special circumstances.”

  With knowing looks, the conversation concluded. Bunau-Varilla left the White House, believing that “[i]f a revolution were to generate new conditions favourable to the acquisition of the Canal zone by the United States, President Roosevelt would immediately seize the opportunity. I was henceforth certain of this capital point, as certain as if a solemn contract had been signed between us.”

  Later that same day, Roosevelt wrote again to Shaw of the Review of Reviews: “I cast aside the proposition made at this time to foment the secession of Panama. Whatever other governments can do, the United States cannot go into the securing by such underhand means, the secession.” Then, with Bunau-Varilla fresh in his mind, he volunteered: “I freely say to you that I should be delighted if Panama were an independent State, or if it made itself so at this moment.”

  A week later, Bunau-Varilla was introduced to John Hay at the State Department. When their talk was interrupted, Hay invited Bunau-Varilla to stop in at Lafayette Square at the end of the day so that they might discuss Panama more freely. “I had always imagined him as severe and cold, a sort of ‘Iron Chancellor’ of America,” Bunau-Varilla wrot
e. “How different he was when he doffed his outside armour!”

  As they talked over tea, Bunau-Varilla discovered that he had a great deal in common with Hay’s “delicate and refined mind.” They both believed in the betterment of “the moral and physical condition of man” and, more specifically, “the opening of the Panama Canal [as] the greatest service which could be rendered to the human family.” Bunau-Varilla told Hay of the impending revolution and urged the United States to be vigilant. Hay assured Bunau-Varilla, “[W]e shall not be caught napping”—although these are Bunau-Varilla’s words, not Hay’s. Hay purportedly also informed Bunau-Varilla that orders had already been given for the U.S. Navy to dispatch ships to Panama.

  Bunau-Varilla’s narrative cannot be substantiated, for Hay made no record of the meeting. At the very least, Bunau-Varilla compressed chronology; for orders directing naval forces to sail for Panama were not issued until several days after Bunau-Varilla left Washington. But sail they did.

  Yet Bunau-Varilla offered another anecdote from his visit with Hay that has a ring of authenticity, given Hay’s literary penchants and the fact that the meeting took place in his well-appointed library. As their conversation took a more general turn, Hay mentioned that he had just finished reading his friend Richard Harding Davis’s latest novel, Captain Macklin, which, it just so happened, was about an American mercenary who joins up with a French army officer to overthrow a corrupt Central American country—in this case Honduras.

  Hay presented the book to Bunau-Varilla. “[I]t will interest you,” he said. Bunau-Varilla took the gesture as a signal. “I could not help thinking that Mr. Hay, in giving this volume, had meant to make a subtle allusion in my efforts in the cause of justice and progress.”

  (Never mind that Davis calls the Honduran revolution a “fake,” orchestrated by a New York steamship company, and that during the fighting Macklin comes to learn that “there’s very few revolutions down here that haven’t got a money-making scheme at the bottom of them.”)

  “Perhaps he wished to go even further,” Bunau-Varilla speculated. “Did he not intend thus to make me understand that he had the presentiment of the personal part I was playing, and which I had not revealed to him? Did he not wish to tell me symbolically that he had understood that the revolution in preparation for the victory of the Idea, was taking shape under my direction?”

  Whatever Hay had meant by Captain Macklin, Bunau-Varilla left Lafayette Square with all doubts banished. “Notwithstanding Mr. Hay’s silence, I knew all,” he wrote. “It only remained for me to act. The United States would have a military force in the neighborhood of the Canal if revolution broke out.”

  Back in New York, Bunau-Varilla called Amador to the Waldorf-Astoria and painstakingly prepped him for the mission ahead. (“Room No. 1162 . . . deserves to be considered as the cradle of the Panama Republic,” Bunau-Varilla later declared.) The diligent engineer had thought of everything: he presented Amador with an outline of military operations, a declaration of independence, a constitution, and even a Panamanian flag sewn by Bunau-Varilla’s wife. He assured Amador that the United States would intervene within forty-eight hours of the proclamation of a new republic and guaranteed $100,000 for the cause. And finally he drew up a cable for Amador to send once the glorious deed was accomplished, naming Bunau-Varilla minister plenipotentiary “in order to obtain the recognition of the Republic and signature of Canal Treaty.” When Amador protested this last detail, suggesting that such an honor ought to be reserved for a Panamanian and not a Frenchman, Bunau-Varilla held firm. “A battle royal will be fought at Washington,” he forecast. “Let him wage it who is best equipped to win the victory.”

  Amador sailed for Panama on October 20, the new flag wrapped around his midriff beneath his shirt. He expected to land at Colón on the twenty-seventh. Bunau-Varilla had given him until November 3 to ignite the revolution.

  Just before leaving the United States, Amador mailed a letter to his son, an American army doctor: “The plan seems to me good. A portion of the Isthmus declares itself independent and that portion the United States will not allow any Colombian forces to attack. An assembly is called, and this gives authority to a minister to be appointed by the new Government in order to make a treaty without need of ratification by that assembly. The treaty being approved by both parties, the new Republic remains under the protection of the United States. . . . In 30 days everything will be concluded.”

  The revolution happened almost exactly this way—except that, instead of thirty days, it took only seventeen.

  HAY HAD PLENTY ELSE to think about besides Panama. With the help of his trusted China adviser, William Rockhill, and Edwin Conger in Peking, he was close to completing a commercial treaty with China that would open the Manchurian capital of Mukden and the port of Antung, at the mouth of the Yalu River, to American trade and consulships. The result would give the United States essentially the same privileges in Manchuria held by Russia. The treaty was to be signed on October 8, the day Russia had promised to withdraw its troops.

  Rockhill, Conger, the Chinese, the Japanese—all of them doubted that Russia would honor its commitment; but Hay held his tongue. “I agreed, beforehand,” he told Adee, “that we can fight Russian aggression in Manchuria better after our treaty is signed than we can now.” Conger and Prince Ch’ing of China put their names to the treaty on October 8, on schedule. Russia pronounced the initiative “a Trojan horse,” designed to put the United States in position to aid Japan’s interests in Korea. Not unexpectedly, Russia did not recall its troops.

  Hay fidgeted all day, waiting for the cable from Peking. “This is the day of Fate,” he wrote Clara, who was again visiting grandchildren. In the afternoon he took the Brazilian ambassador in to see the president, then went for a carriage ride in Rock Creek Park. Finally a messenger delivered the good news. “Hooray,” he wrote Clara, “the treaty is signed.” It was his sixty-fifth birthday.

  Home alone, Hay did what he had not done in a long while: he wrote to Lizzie Cameron, who for the past two years had been living in Europe. Henry Adams had seen her, but Hay had not. Nor, it seems, had he and Lizzie corresponded. “It has been—as I reckon—fourteen thousand years since I have heard from you,” he began. “Other people, happier though no more deserving, see your perfect face and listen to the golden music of your voice, and of course mention it, and fill me with envy.” He caught her up with family news and sought her sympathy for his imprisonment in the State Department. “Life has been very dull and gray for the last year or two,” he sighed with that mock melodrama he always used with her. “I could never have imagined I would last so long in this place. . . . Now I see no immediate prospect of release.” His affection for her was more reserved than in the past, but time and distance had not suppressed it entirely. “[B]itterly as I resent your absence,” he declared, “I am sure you have chosen the better part. Every body loves and admires you here—but then that is the habit of people everywhere.” And in closing he begged, “Be as good as you are splendid and say Hello.”

  If she answered, the letter is lost. Three weeks later, he wrote again to express condolences for the death of her nephew: “You will bear it—as you bear everything—with that beautiful strength and fortitude which is peculiar to you; and all we can do is stand by and say we love you and are sorry for you.”

  HAY HAD TIME FOR another indulgence that October. He wrote to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, asking if the sculptor “could make anything of so philistine and insignificant a head as mine.” He apologized for his lack of “profile, size, and every other requisite of sculpture.” But, he explained, “I have been an unusual length of time in office and I fear that, after I am dead, if not before, some blacksmith will try to bust me.”

  Hay well knew that to commission Saint-Gaudens was to enter an august pantheon. The sculptor’s catalogue of work had grown to include the magnificent Standing Lincoln in Chicago; the heroic Shaw Memorial to black soldiers and their white officer in Boston; and
the haunting monument to grief that Henry Adams had placed upon his wife’s grave in Rock Creek Cemetery. In May, Saint-Gaudens’s equestrian statue of Lizzie Cameron’s uncle, General William Tecumseh Sherman, had been unveiled in New York. (Family lore holds that the face of Nike, the goddess of victory who leads the general’s horse, bears an uncanny resemblance to Sherman’s divinely featured niece.)

  Saint-Gaudens agreed to try his hand on Hay the following winter. “It is a ruinous expense and folly,” Hay wrote to Clara. “It will be ugly but it will be an object of art.”

  ALL THE WHILE, THOUGH, he kept an eye on Panama. Throughout October, Minister Beaupré did his best to keep the State Department informed on the deliberations, erratic and ineffectual as they were, of the Colombian Congress. On October 19, he cabled Hay that the Colombians were considering sending a special envoy to Washington to renew negotiations on the canal treaty. Hay, plainly exasperated, wired back that if the Colombians believed they could achieve more favorable terms than already agreed upon in the Hay-Herrán Treaty, then Beaupré was to “intimate orally, but not in writing, that it will be useless to send a special envoy.”

  On October 31, the Colombian Congress adjourned for the year without taking any further action on the canal. Tomás Herrán came to see Hay, looking “most pathetic,” Hay told Clara. Herrán mentioned that his predecessor, Carlos Martínez Silva, had died of pneumonia shortly after returning to Colombia. Hay was relieved to hear that Martínez Silva had not been assassinated, as had been rumored. “No,” Herrán said to Hay grimly, “but that is what will happen to me when I return.”

  NEWS FROM PANAMA CAME from several sources, including Gabriel Duque, who was back on the isthmus, eager to share the latest gossip. At the end of September, he informed Hay that Colombian troops were hungry and unpaid. “Now you will see how easy it is to buy these men over.”