Free 1858 by Bruce Chadwick Page A

France, Spain, and Mexico or by the free and voluntary act of the independent state of Texas in blending her destinies with our own. This course we shall ever pursue unless circumstances should occur, which we do not now anticipate, rendering a departure from a clearly justifiable under the imperative and overruling law of self-preservation.” 642
    Buchanan’s insistence on the annexation of Cuba not only angered Northerners against slavery, but created yet another wave of speeches from Southerners calling for the reopening of the international slave trade, banned since 1808. This came about because, by putting the spotlight on Cuba, Buchanan inadvertently made people aware of the more than a dozen American ships that sailed out of Northern ports in the United States to Cuba and then engaged in the slave trade, carrying slaves between Cuba and Africa and Cuba and other Caribbean and South American countries. Some of these ships were stopped by U.S. Naval vessels, but many were not.
    Angry Southerners accused Northerners of hypocrisy—on one hand they called for slavery’s elimination, but on the other they privately made large sums of money engaging in the transportation of slaves. The British consul charged that in the late 1850s half of the fifty ships a year that stopped in Cuba on slave-trade expeditions sailed secretly out of New York City. Stephen Douglas charged a year later, in 1859, that clandestine American ships were carrying more than fifteen thousand slaves a year from Africa to America; he swore that he had himself seen three hundred new arrivals in Vicksburg, Mississippi. 643 The federal government had captured one slave ship trying to sneak into the United States through Carolina waters and detained the captain while the State Department decided whether he should be prosecuted by federal or state courts. Many Southern public officials used Cuba and the Northern slave ships in a new logic: if it was legal for a planter to buy slaves in Mississippi and transport them a thousand miles to his plantation in South Carolina, why was it illegal for a planter to buy slaves in Cuba and transport them ninety miles to Florida? 644
    Another group of Southerners argued that America’s annexation of Cuba would end international slave trading, a mainstay at the island. Northerners, of course, argued that the Southern scenario then made Cuba a Southern state and permitted Cubans to send their slaves to other Southern states. It also permitted Southern planters to send slaves who were discipline problems to Cuba and to threaten slave families with deportation to the much hotter climate of the island.
    The president, as usual, had grossly underestimated the opposition of the Republican Party and antislavery members of his own party. The Republicans opposed the purchase or annexation of Cuba because it would add yet another state to the “slave power” and open up a quasi-slave trade between Cuba and planters in Southern states, the principle they had denounced for so long in their successful opposition to the African slave trade.
    The Republicans were also against it because many of them, particularly former members of the American and Know-Nothing parties, were anti-Catholic. They were opposed to the rapid spread of newly arrived Catholic immigrants throughout the country and any and all proposals for state governments to fund parochial schools, an issue that had become heated in large cities such as Boston and New York. Spain was the heart of Roman Catholicism, they believed, and they would do anything to curtail the power of the Catholic Spanish government; they would do even more to prevent the Spanish king and his bishops from lining their pockets with American money from the sale of a slave republic. 645
    The Republicans expressed their opposition to the annexation of Cuba as soon as the president began to discuss it. They were against the $30 million negotiation fund, against the $100 million purchase, and were sure