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First Events and Early Influences: Cuba
The trouble here, as it is plain to see, was slavery and the natural opposition of the slave holders to "the premature establishment of ultra free institutions." However, the book we quote undertook to show that the freedom of Cuba would certainly come speedily, and in that made a miscalculation of at least forty-five years.
The question of the annexation of Cuba to the United States was subordinated on both sides--until the abolishment of slavery by the ten years' war, closing in 1878--to the consideration of the slave questions, and but for this Cuba would have escaped from Spain without aid long ago.
Senator Lodge cleverly, in his speech before the Massachusetts State Convention, read a few lines that were "written in order to be precise" as follows:
For myself I cannot doubt that in the interest of both parties, Cuba and Spain, and in the interest of humanity, also, the contest should be closed. This is my judgment on the facts so far as known to me. Cuba must be saved from its bloody delirium or little will be left for the final conquerors. Nor can the enlightened mind fail to see that the Spanish power on this Island is anachronism. The day of European colonies has passed, at least in this hemisphere, where the rights of men were first proclaimed and self-government first organized. [Applause.] The words were Charles Sumner's, spoken in 1869, when the ten years' war had been going on one year--the same length of time the present warfare has raged. Mr. Summer was, of course, hindered in his sympathies with the Cuban rebellion of that time because the rebels were largely slave holders, and it was not given him to see that when the conflict pending, as he spoke, was over, Cuba should be free in the sense that there would be an end of slavery on her soil. We may go back to the far-seeing statesman, Thomas Jefferson, who found, when the Louisiana Purchase was proposed, that the constitution which he sought to construe with a sharp outlook for the suppression of doubtful powers, was broad enough to permit the nation to buy the mouth of the Mississippi, and we find him writing, as recently quoted in the United States Senate by Mr. Vest of Missouri:
Napoleon will certainly give his consent without difficulty to our receiving the Floridas, and with some difficulty possibly Cuba. That he would give us the Floridas to withhold intercourse with the residue of the colonies cannot be doubted. But that is no price, because they are ours in the first moment of the first war, and until a war they are of no particular necessity to us. But, although with difficulty, he will consent to our receiving Cuba into our Union, to prevent our aid to Mexico and the other provinces. That would be a price, and I would immediately erect a column in the southernmost limit of Cuba, and inscribe on it Ne Plus Ultra, as to us, in that direction. We should then have only to include the North in our confederacy, which would be, of course, in the first war, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation, and I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government. As the Mentor went away before this change, and will leave France probably while it is still a secret in that hemisphere, I presume the expediency of pursuing her with a swift-sailing dispatch was considered. It will be objected to our receiving Cuba that no limit can then be drawn to our future acquisitions. Cuba can be defended by us without a navy, and this develops the principle which ought to limit our views. Nothing should ever be accepted which would require a navy to defend it.
It was clearly in the mind of Jefferson that Spain might listen to reason and part with Cuba, as France with Louisiana. In the days when Jefferson and Sumner wrote the passages given, the dark problem of slavery confronted us in nearly half our own States, and complicated the issue of the acquisition of territory with that of the extension or the restriction of slave soil in the republic.
The Cuban filibustering expeditions of a former generation, attended, as they were, with the loss of valued lives and the transmission of an inheritance of excitements and hatreds, were distinctly to provide for the admission of more slave States into the American Union. With slavery abolished throughout America, we can contemplate Cuba without a shadow of slave power to obscure the vision; and there is the greater reason why the enfranchisement of her whole people should be established and her self--government absolutely achieved, while it is the true contention that the better form of that accomplishment is her annexation as a State to the United States, as Texas was annexed.
There was a narrow policy, involving the greatest men of their day and generation in our country, that would have excluded Texas--the France of America--and that could have abandoned the golden opportunity to acquire California. but the common sense of the common people was wiser far than the statesmanship of the giants of those days, Clay and Webster. It is fortunate that Cuba did not fall into our hands as a slave State, for when the slave power was so great in our government, and a greater peril than we were aware, it must have increased our difficulties, and our sovereign State idea would, at the same time, have taken evil shape. But that is all over. Our free Union, as it stands, is "one and inseparable," and just as certain as that is so, is the fact that the States are imperishable quantities, never to be subtracted from the sum. Our State method of self-government is that which Cuba wants--the style of autonomy she needs--and the pressure of our mighty forces upon her ways in affairs political, would steady the State to accept her share of our destiny. Cuba, it will be remembered, was of slow growth, and aroused from the stupor of centuries by the British occupation of 1762. "Cuba and the Cubans" says of the protracted paralysis of the Island: