Conquest of the Empire

The most important measures of the government that were pending at the death of President Taylor, and which claimed the early attention of President Fillmore, were the several bills included in the Compromise Act. These were all adopted, with slight modifications, and became laws in the month of September, by receiving the signature of the President. Mr. Seward offered an amendment to the act for the suppression of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, which provided "That slavery in the District be entirely abrogated; that its abolition depend on the vote of the inhabitants; and that in case, on such vote being taken, it should be in favor of emancipation, the sum of two hundred thousand dollars be appropriated to pay the owners of the slaves for whatever loss they may suffer." This amendment, after a brief discussion, was rejected by five years to forty-five nays.

During Taylor's administration, some unpleasant feeling had been engendered between the governments of the United States and Spain, by an invasion of Cuba by a military force organized in this country. It will be observed hereafter, that the men and measures connected with these movements, were intimately associated with the actors in, and the preliminary events of the late Civil War. General Lopez, a native of Cuba, who led an expedition to that island from the United States, was backed by many men who were conspicuous in the secession movements ten years later. The avowed object of the invasion was to stir up the Creoles, or native Cubans, to a revolt for the purpose of overthrowing the local government, casting off the Spanish yoke, and forming an independent State. No doubt this was the principal and perhaps the only design of Lopez, but not of the politicians at his back. Their chief object undoubtedly was to seize Cuba, and make it a part of a great slave empire of the South--a proposition shamelessly set forth in the discreditable "Ostend Manifesto" of a later day. Lopez and his followers landed at Cardenas, in Cuba, at the middle of April, 1850, where he expected to be joined by some of the Spanish troops and a host of native Cubans, and with them to overthrow the government of the island. He was disappointed. The troops and people did not appear, to co-operate with him, and he returned to the United States to prepare for a more formidable invasion.

The introduction of the Compromise Act, the invasion of Cuba and the admission of one State and three Territories into the Union, were the most prominent features of President Taylor's administration. That State was California; the Territories were New Mexico, Utah, and Minnesota. The name of the latter is the Indian title of the River St. Peter, a large tributary of the Upper Mississippi, and means sky-colored water.