The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (72 page)

There was one possibility that, if it had become real, might have shifted the relationship between the enslavers and the world’s credit markets. In the past, the recipe of collusion between financiers, hard men with guns, and ambitious
politicians had worked to expand both the United States and the power of southern enslavers. More than once, such groups had teamed up to break juicy chunks like Florida off the edges decaying of empires. When that happened, enslavers suddenly controlled the territory and the enslaved labor necessary to generate speculative gains, and in such situations they had often been able to get credit under
favorable terms from investors who were eager to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing. There was an exceptionally attractive possibility of this sort right off the coast of Florida. If the South had acquired Cuba, the history of the expansion of slavery in the United States, including the history of investment in the expansion of slavery, would surely not have ended in 1865.

For by
1850, Cuba was the one real jewel yet to be pried from the crown of the Spanish Empire. It had become to sugar what Mississippi now was to cotton. Sugar production in the New World had moved from one island to the next, with new islands replacing old ones as the ones most desirable to investors, but the physical technology of making sugar had hardly improved over three centuries. Soon after Saint-Domingue,
planters fleeing the Haitian Revolution brought enslaved laborers and entrepreneurial expertise to Cuba; however, they began to transform sugar production in ways parallel to the creative destructions within the whipping-machine. In this case, using new machine technology, Cuban planters rebuilt processes in ways that shattered the bottleneck on productivity imposed by the fact that the
sucrose in cane begins to spoil if it isn’t extracted within twenty-four hours of harvesting. After harnessing the power of steam to turn cane-grinding mills fast enough to keep up with almost any number of enslaved cutters harvesting the raw cane, Cuban enslavers added vacuum pans to boil extracted cane syrup. This took the process of crystallizing sugar out of the control of skilled slave artisans.
The new
ingenios
, as Cubans called mill complexes, led to a 400 percent increase in the acres of cane that a mill could turn into sucrose crystals, an
efficiency increase in one generation greater than that of the preceding half-millennium of sugar production.
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Cuba was vast, as large as England and Wales together, and in 1791 it had only 86,000 slaves who made but 16,000 metric tons of sugar.
Despite an 1835 Anglo-Spanish treaty that was supposed to stop the Atlantic slave trade, between 1800 and the 1860s, Cuban enslavers imported 700,000 enslaved Africans, with 300,000 arriving after the 1835 treaty was signed. Already by 1830, the new
ingenio
system had made Cuba the world’s biggest sugar producer, and then, using British credit, the colonial government began to extend railroad
lines down the island’s spine, opening vast new areas for exploitation. By 1850, the slave population had climbed to more than 435,000, more than in any US slave state but Virginia, and Cuba was shipping 300,000 metric tons of sugar annually—one out of every four pounds of sugar made on the planet. And still the huge island was only partly developed.
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In 1848, the Polk administration offered
Spain’s impoverished government $100 million for the island. Political conflict over the Mexican Cession dissuaded the executive branch from carrying negotiations further at that time. But over the four years after 1848, pressure began to build for Cuban annexation from within the United States. This pressure came from sources in both the North and the South. One was the Cuban exile community in
New York, whose Havana Club proclaimed that rule from Madrid denied free Cubans basic natural rights, like that of free speech and political assembly, and denied them the right to trade freely. Spanish imperial officials also periodically held the threat of emancipation over Cuban enslavers’ heads; this threat in turn caused a defensive reaction among southern enslavers, who also wanted to acquire
the island because an “Africanized” “free negro colony” off the Florida coast would “destroy the efficiency of mainland slaves,” as a Tennessee newspaper put it. The newspaper meant that freedom in Cuba would suggest to enslaved people on the mainland that their emancipation was next. Such fears seemed more than imaginary because, in 1839, fifty-three recently enslaved Africans had overthrown the
white crew of the Cuban slave-ship
Amistad
as they were being transported from Havana to the island’s eastern sugar frontier. Trying to sail to Africa, the rebels made an accidental landfall on the Connecticut coast. State authorities charged them with murder, but abolitionists intervened and pushed the case into the Supreme Court. Concluding that the
Amistad
’s cargo had been illegally transported
across the Atlantic, the Court made its only pre-twentieth-century antislavery decision. It ruled that the rebels had been kidnapped, that they had freed themselves, and that they could return to Africa.
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After the Wilmot Proviso, however, southern expansionists were determined to regain the offensive. A Virginia-born State Department official, writing to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in
around 1853, said that expansion into Cuba was “essential to the South both in a political and a geographical point of view.” Because of Cuba’s size and population, it could be carved into multiple states, each one sending proslavery senators and representatives to Washington to rebalance Congress. Bringing Cuba’s ultramodern sugar plantations inside American tariff walls would reduce Louisiana sugar’s
market share, but then, as southern entrepreneurs anticipated, they could simply move operations to “the untouched soil of Cuba,” and thus find “the means of underselling the world in sugar.” The
New Orleans Delta
believed that “wresting [Cuba] from the mongrelism which now blights and
blackens
it” would make the enslaved population “yield its riches up to the hands of
organized and stable industry and intelligent enterprise.
” This would be “
manifest destiny
accomplished.”
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Many northern Democrats also supported American acquisition of the “Queen of Islands,” as pro-expansion
New York Sun
journalist “Cora Montgomery” (pen name of Jane McManus Cazneau, daughter of a New York congressman) described Cuba. She was one of many aggressively pro-expansion New York journalists whose support for
“Manifest Destiny”—a term the expansionists coined—was frankly chauvinist. But annexation also drew support from idealistic refugees from the failed European revolutions of 1848, or so Jane Cazneau claimed. She wrote that “the native Cubans are wild for annexation,” because they hoped its incorporation into the United States would make “Young America” a multilingual republican empire to eclipse
the Old Europe that had forced out revolutionaries and still sought to shackle Cuba to a European throne. Above all, New York City had a deep economic interest in Cuba. Steam-driven sugar mills were the most significant heavy industrial product made in the city itself. Wall Street power-brokers such as August Belmont, the so-called “King of Fifth Avenue,” who founded (and bankrolled) the national
Democratic Party Committee, knew that Cuba was already the mainland’s third-biggest trading partner, and he enthusiastically supported acquisition.
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White southerners were happy to see northern Democrats demanding a bigger empire for slavery. And in the 1850s, southern enslavers and northern allies didn’t just demand new territories. They acted. When the Whig-run executive branch didn’t move
toward acquiring Cuba between 1849 and 1853, many Cuba expansionists supported extralegal tactics called “filibustering,” a term that in the mid-nineteenth century did not mean obstructionist legislative behavior, but still held its seventeenth-century meaning deriving
from the activity of Caribbean pirates. Cuban exiles, Wall Street money, New York publicists, and Mississippi power-brokers supported
a series of attempted “filibuster” expeditions intended to overthrow the island’s Spanish colonial government. The most substantial ones were led by Narciso Lopez, an exiled Cuban planter, in 1850 and 1851. Drawing on financial support from the money-men of New York and the Mississippi Valley (including R. C. Ballard and New Orleans-based millionaire enslaver John Henderson), Lopez recruited
his foot soldiers among young men from Louisiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and the northeastern states. But his second invasion ended in disaster. The Spanish government captured his force and brutally executed Lopez and about fifty American prisoners in Havana’s public square.
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“American blood has been shed! It cries aloud for vengeance,” shouted the
New Orleans Courier
. “Cuba must be seized!” Angry
mass meetings erupted in US cities, leading in New Orleans to riots that attacked Spanish property. The New York
Democratic Review
, the organ of the “Young America” movement, argued that the party needed a “States-Rights” candidate who would make the 1852 presidential election a referendum on the Whigs’ passive expansion policy. When Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire won the Democratic nomination,
he adopted Cuba acquisition as a key platform plank. August Belmont threw his money behind Pierce, who demolished Whig Winfield Scott, 253 electoral votes to 44. One victory parade banner proclaimed “The Fruits of the Late Democratic Victory—Pierce and Cuba,” and when March 1853 rolled around, the new president’s inaugural address proclaimed that his administration would “not be controlled by
any timid forebodings of evil from expansion.”
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Southern and northern Democrats sensed that the time had come. At last they could fulfill the hopes of Manifest Destiny, provide an expansion pie big enough for all of their party’s interests, and, of course, frustrate the plans of Whigs, abolitionists, free blacks, and everyone else they collectively despised. Pierce, described in the press as
a “Northern Man of Southern Principles,” announced that the executive branch would not attempt to stop citizens who chose to “emigrate” to Cuba. Spain could reflect on what happened when US citizens had “emigrated” to Mexican Texas. Pierce sent expansionists as the government’s official emissaries to the courts of Europe—such as Louisiana Senator Pierre Soulé, who went to Spain, and Belmont, appointed
to the Netherlands. In April 1854, Secretary of State William Marcy instructed the emissaries to “detach that island” from Spain, authorizing them to offer $130 million for Cuba. Belmont already planned to manipulate European financial markets in order to bring Spain’s heavily indebted government to its knees.

Image 10.2. By the 1850s enslavers had their eyes on expansion into Cuba in order to expand Southern political power. Here we see an idyllic image of a Cuba tobacco plantation, plus the idea of “Southern rights” being used to sell cigars. “Southerner rights segars. Expressly manufactured for Georgia & Alabama by Salomon Brothers. Fabrica de tabacos, de superior calidad de la vuelta-abajo,” Broadside, 1859. Library of Congress.

In October, the US ministers gathered at Ostend in Belgium, where they crafted a policy paper called the Ostend Manifesto. This report, which Belmont et al. sent back to Marcy and Pierce, proclaimed that if Spain refused to sell Cuba, “the law of self-preservation”—a euphemism here for protecting mainland slavery from the alleged destabilization that offshore
emancipation would inflict—entitled the United States to seize the island. But even as they wrote, on the other side of the Atlantic Pierce was learning that the survival of the Democratic Party itself depended so heavily on alliance behind the cause of expanding slavery that he wasn’t going to be allowed to wait for Spain to sell Cuba.
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