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The Play of President Pierce for Cuba

American Interest in Cuba and English Jealousy--The Famous Conference at Ostend in 1854, between Buchanan Mason and Soule, the Ministers to England, France and Spain--Mr. Marcy's Warlike Letters and Soule's Courtly Ways--Cuba we must have, in Peace if Possible, by War if Necessary, was the Policy of Pierce--The Famous Manifesto by Three Ministers--A Record of the Past Applicable to the Present--Buchanan's Nomination for the Presidency. It is an agreeable task to give the credit due to the American soldiers for the conquest of Cuba by the British in 1762. The reinforcements that arrived at Havana from New York were essential to the success of the immense expedition that had almost exhausted its strength in the siege of the Moro, when the provincials sailed through storm and were saved from shipwreck to the rescue. The records of their gallantry and sacrifices are but fragmentary, yet the magnitude of their deeds, though worthy the admiration of their race and age, were insufficient to win the gratitude or secure the justice of the king in whose name they took service and gained a prize rich as the other India. This was the period of American loyalty to England. Great Britain and her American colonies had together triumphed over the French, who abandoned the contest for North America when they burnt their fort at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela, and sailed down the Ohio to the land where the floods of the Mississippi overcome the tides of the Gulf. Together they were conquerors of Cuba, though the Island was bravely and bitterly defended. We say the conquest of Cuba, because the surrender of Havana substantially included all. If our fathers could then have rested on a ratified paper beginning "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America"--if there had been the rule of fundamental law rather than the caprice of a monarch and the favor and folly of his flatterers, Cuba would have been ours then and forever; and it should be considered now as one of the appeals to the equity of empires whether we did not acquire, through the blood the grandfathers of the American nation shed and the bones they laid in the soil of Cuba, certain inalienable preemption rights that entitle us, under lineal inheritance and irrepealable immemorial laws, written and unwritten, to possess the Island and preserve it from ruin. A preemption right is that to purchase certain lands in preference to others, and with the history of Cuba an open book before us, we may without immodesty assert the endurance of the privilege, and Spain, as a part of her indemnity, should claim from Great Britain the prize money carried to England from Havana, where even the bells of the churches had to be ransomed. We did not get the silver and gold, and may insist upon our right of preference to the land.