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Title: The Path of Empire
A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume
46 in The Chronicles of America Series
Author: Carl Russell Fish
Editor: Allen Johnson
Posting Date: February 28, 2009 [EBook #3157]
Release Date: April, 2002
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PATH OF EMPIRE ***
Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's
University, Alev Akman, and Dianne Bean
THE PATH OF EMPIRE,
A CHRONICLE OF THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER
By Carl Russell Fish
CONTENTS
I. THE MONROE DOCTRINE
II. CONTROVERSIES WITH GREAT BRITAIN
III. ALASKA AND ITS PROBLEMS
IV. BLAINE AND PAN-AMERICANISM
V. THE UNITED STATES AND THE PACIFIC
VI. VENEZUELA
VII. THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR WITH SPAIN
VIII. DEWEY AND MANILA BAY
IX. THE BLOCKADE OF CUBA
X. THE PREPARATION OF THE ARMY
XI. THE CAMPAIGN OF SANTIAGO DE CUBA
XII. THE CLOSE OF THE WAR
XIII. A PEACE WHICH MEANT WAR
XIV. THE OPEN DOOR
XV. THE PANAMA CANAL
XVI. PROBLEMS OF THE CARIBBEAN
XVII. WORLD RELATIONSHIPS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
THE PATH OF EMPIRE
CHAPTER I. The Monroe Doctrine
In 1815 the world found peace after twenty-two years of continual war.
In the forests of Canada and the pampas of South America, throughout
all the countries of Europe, over the plains of Russia and the hills of
Palestine, men and women had known what war was and had prayed that its
horrors might never return. In even the most autocratic states subjects
and rulers were for once of one mind: in the future war must be
prevented. To secure peace forever was the earnest desire of two
statesmen so strongly contrasted as the impressionable Czar Alexander
I of Russia, acclaimed as the "White Angel" and the "Universal Savior,"
and Prince Metternich, the real ruler of Austria, the spider who was
for the next thirty years to spin the web of European secret diplomacy.
While the Czar invited all governments to unite in a "Holy Alliance" to
prevent war, Metternich for the same purpose formed the less holy but
more powerful "Quadruple Alliance" of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and
England.
The designs of Metternich, however, went far beyond the mere prevention
of war. To his mind the cause of all the upheavals which had convulsed
Europe was the spirit of liberty bred in France in the days of the
Revolution; if order was to be restored, there must be a return to the
former autocratic principle of government, to the doctrine of "Divine
Right"; it was for kings and emperors to command; it was the duty of
subjects to obey. These principles had not, it was true, preserved peace
in the past, but Metternich now proposed that, in the future, sovereigns
or their representatives should meet "at fixed periods" to adjust their
own differences and to assist one another in enforcing the obedience of
subjects everywhere. The rulers were reasonably well satisfied with
the world as it was arranged by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and
determined to set their faces against any change in the relations of
governments to one another or to their subjects. They regretted, indeed,
that the Government of the United States was built upon the sands of
a popular vote, but they recognized that it was apparently well
established and decently respectable, and therefore worthy of
recognition by the mutual protection society of the Holy Alliance.
The subjects of these sovereigns, however, did not all share the
satisfaction of their masters, and some of them soon showed that much as
they desired peace they desired other things even more. The inhabitants
of Spanish America, while their imperial mother was in the chaos of
Napoleon's wars, had nibbled at the forbidden fruit of freedom. They
particularly desired freedom to buy the products of British factories,
which cost less and satisfied better than those previously furnished
by the Spanish merchants, secure in their absolute monopoly. With peace
came renewed monopoly, haughty officials, and oppressive laws dictated
by that most stupid of the restored sovereigns, Ferdinand VII of Spain.
Buenos Aires, however, never recognized his rule, and her general, the
knightly San Martin, in one of the most remarkable campaigns of history,
scaled the Andes and carried the flag of revolution into Chili and Peru.
Venezuela, that hive of revolution, sent forth Bolivar to found the
new republics of Colombia and Bolivia. Mexico freed herself, and
Brazil separated herself from Portugal. By 1822 European rule had been
practically swept off the American mainland, from Cape Horn to the
borders of Canada, and, except for the empire of Dom Pedro in Brazil,
the newly born nations had adopted the republican form of government
which the European monarchs despised. The spirit of unrest leaped
eastward across the Atlantic. Revolutions in Spain, Portugal, and Naples
sought impiously and with constitutions to bind the hands of their
kings. Even the distant Greeks and Serbians sought their independence
from the Turk.
Divine Right, just rescued from the French Revolution, was tottering
and had yet to test the strength of its new props, the "Holy" and the
"Quadruple" alliances, and the policy of intervention to maintain the
status quo. Congresses at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, at Troppau in 1820,
and at Laibach in 1821, decided to refuse recognition to governments
resting on such revolutions, to offer mediation to restore the old
order, and, if this were refused, to intervene by force. In the United
States, on the other hand, founded on the right of revolution and
dedicated to government by the people, these popular movements were
greeted with enthusiasm. The fiery Clay, speaker and leader of the House
of Representatives, made himself champion of the cause of the Spanish
Americans; Daniel Webster thundered forth the sympathy of all lovers of
antiquity for the Greeks; and Samuel Gridley Howe, an impetuous young
American doctor, crossed the seas, carrying to the Greeks his services
and the gifts of Boston friends of liberty. A new conflict seemed to be
shaping itself--a struggle of absolutism against democracy, of America
against Europe.
Between the two camps, both in her ideas and in her geographical
situation, stood England. Devoted as she was to law and order, bulwark
against the excesses of the French Terror and the world dominion that
Napoleon sought, she was nevertheless equally strong in her opposition
to Divine Right. Her people and her government alike were troubled at
the repressive measured by which the Allies put down the Revolution of
Naples in 1821 and that of Spain in 1823. Still more were they disturbed
at the hint given at the Congress of Verona in 1822 that, when Europe
was once quieted, America would engage the attention of Europe's
arbiters. George Canning, the English foreign minister, soon discovered
that this hint foreshadowed a new congress to be devoted especially to
the American problem. Spain was to be restored to her sovereignty, but
was to pay in liberal grants of American territory to whatever powers
helped her. Canning is regarded as the ablest English foreign minister
of the nineteenth century; at least no one better embodied the
fundamental aspirations of the English people. He realized that liberal
England would be perpetually a minority in a united Europe, as Europe
was then organized. He believed that the best security for peace was not
a union but a balance of powers. He opposed intervention in the internal
affairs of nations and stood for the right of each to choose its own
form of government. Particularly he fixed his eyes on America, where he
hoped to find weight to help him balance the autocrats of the Old World.
He wished to see the new American republics free, and he believed that
in freedom of trade England would obtain from them all that she needed.
Alarmed at the impending European intervention to restore the rule
of Spain or of her monarchical assignees in America, he sought an
understanding with the United States. He proposed to Richard Rush,
the United States minister in London, that the two countries declare
concurrently that the independence of Spanish America, was a fact,
that the recognition of the new governments was a matter of time and
circumstance, that neither country desired any portion of Spain's
former dominions, but that neither would look with indifference upon the
transfer of any portion of them to another power.
On October 9, 1823, this proposal reached Washington. The answer would
be framed by able and most experienced statesmen. The President, James
Monroe, had been almost continuously in public service since 1782. He
had been minister to France, Spain, and England, and had been Secretary
of State. In his earlier missions he had often shown an unwise
impetuosity and an independent judgment which was not always well
balanced. He had, however, grown in wisdom. He inspired respect by
his sterling qualities of character, and he was an admirable presiding
officer. William H. Crawford, his Secretary of the Treasury, John C.
Calhoun, his Secretary of War, William Wirt, his Attorney-General,
and even John McLean, his Postmaster-General, not then a member of the
Cabinet, were all men who were considered as of presidential caliber.
Foremost in ability and influence, however, was John Quincy Adams, the
Secretary of State. Brought up from early boyhood in the atmosphere
of diplomacy, familiar with nearly every country of Europe, he
had nevertheless none of those arts of suavity which are popularly
associated with the diplomat. Short, baldheaded, with watery eyes, he
on the one hand repelled familiarity, and on the other hand shocked some
sensibilities, as for example when he appeared in midsummer Washington
without a neckcloth. His early morning swim in the Potomac and his
translations of Horace did not conquer a temper which embittered many
who had business with him, while the nightly records which he made of
his interviews show that he was generally suspicious of his visitors.
Yet no American can show so long a roll of diplomatic successes.
Preeminently he knew his business. His intense devotion and his native
talent had made him a master of the theory and practice of international
law and of statecraft. Always he was obviously honest, and his word was
relied on. Fundamentally he was kind, and his work was permeated by
a generous enthusiasm. Probably no man in America, had so intense a
conviction not only of the correctness of American principles and
the promise of American greatness but of the immediate strength and
greatness of the United States as it stood in 1823.
Fully aware as Adams was of the danger that threatened both America and
liberty, he was not in favor of accepting Canning's proposal for the
cooperation of England and the United States. He based his opposition
upon two fundamental objections. In the first place he was not prepared
to say that the United States desired no more Spanish territory. Not
that Adams desired or would tolerate conquest. At the time of the
Louisiana Purchase he had wished to postpone annexation until the assent
of the people of that province could be obtained. But he believed that
all the territory necessary for the geographical completeness of the
United States had not yet been brought under the flag. He had just
obtained Florida from Spain and a claim westward to the Pacific north of
the forty-second parallel, but he considered the Southwest--Texas, New
Mexico, and California--a natural field of expansion. These areas, then
almost barren of white settlers, he expected time to bring into the
United States, and he also expected that the people of Cuba would
ultimately rejoice to become incorporated in the Union. He wished
natural forces to work out their own results, without let or hindrance.
Not only was Adams opposed to Canning's proposed self-denying ordinance,
but he was equally averse to becoming a partner with England. Such
cooperation might well prove in time to be an "entangling alliance,"
involving the United States in problems of no immediate concern to its
people and certainly in a partnership in which the other member would
be dominant. If Canning saw liberal England as a perpetual minority in
absolutist Europe, Adams saw republican America as a perpetual inferior
to monarchical England. Although England, with Canada, the West Indies,
and her commerce, was a great American power, Adams believed that
the United States, the oldest independent nation in America, with a
government which gave the model to the rest, could not admit her to
joint, leadership, for her power was in, not of, America, and her
government was monarchical. Already Adams had won a strategic advantage
over Canning, for in the previous year, 1822, the United States had
recognized the new South American republics.
Great as were the dangers involved in cooperation with England, however,
they seemed to many persons of little moment compared with the menace of
absolutist armies and navies in the New World or of, perhaps, a French
Cuba and a Russian Mexico. The only effective obstacle to such foreign
intervention was the British Navy. Both President Monroe and Thomas
Jefferson, who in his retirement was still consulted on all matters of
high moment, therefore favored the acceptance of Canning's proposal as
a means of detaching England from the rest of Europe. Adams argued,
however, that England was already detached; that, for England's
purposes, the British Navy would still stand between Europe and
America, whatever the attitude of the United States; that compromise or
concession was unnecessary; and that the country could as safely take
its stand toward the whole outside world as toward continental Europe
alone. To reject the offer of a country whose assistance was absolutely
necessary to the safety of the United States, and to declare the
American case against her as well as against the more menacing forces
whose attack she alone could prevent, required a nerve and poise which
could come only from ignorant foolhardiness or from absolute knowledge
of the facts. The self-assurance of Adams was well founded, and no
general on the field of battle ever exhibited higher courage.
Adams won over the Cabinet, and the President decided to incorporate in
his annual message to Congress a declaration setting forth the attitude
of the United States toward all the world, and in particular denying the
right of any European power, England included, to intervene in American
affairs. In making such a statement, however, it was necessary to offer
compensation in some form. The United States was not prepared to offer
Canning's self-denying ordinance barring the way to further American
expansion, but something it must offer. This compensating offset Adams
found in the separation of the New World from the Old and in abstention
from interference in Europe. Such a renunciation involved, however, the
sacrifice of generous American sympathies with the republicans across
the seas. Monroe, Gallatin, and many other statesmen wished as active
a policy in support of the Greeks as of the Spanish Americans. Adams
insisted, however, that the United States should create a sphere for its
interests and should confine itself to that sphere. His plan for peace
provided that European and American interests should not only not clash
but should not even meet.
The President's message of December 2, 1823, amounted to a rejection of
the Holy Alliance as guardian of the world's peace, of Canning's request
for an entente, and of the proposal that the United States enter upon
a campaign to republicanize the world. It stated the intention of the
Government to refrain from interference in Europe, and its belief that
it was "impossible that the allied powers should extend their political
system to any portion of either continent [of America] without
endangering our peace and happiness." The message contained a strong
defense of the republican system of government and of the right of
nations to control their own internal development. It completed the
foreign policy of the United States by declaring, in connection with
certain recent encroachments of Russia along the northwest coast, that
the era of colonization in the Americas was over. The United States was
to maintain in the future that boundaries between nations holding
land in America actually existed and could be traced--a position which
invited arbitration in place of force.
Both Canning and Adams won victories, but neither realized his full
hopes. Canning prevented the interference of Europe in Spanish America,
broke up the Quadruple Alliance, rendered the Holy Alliance a shadow,
and restored a balance of power that meant safety for England for almost
a hundred years; but he failed to dictate American policy. Adams on his
part detached the United States from European politics without throwing
England into the arms of Europe. He took advantage of the divisions of
the Old World to establish the priority of the United States in American
affairs; but he failed in his later attempt to unite all the Americas in
cordial cooperation. Earnest as was his desire and hard as he strove in
1825 when he had become President with Clay as his Secretary of State,
Adams found that the differences in point of view between the United
States and the other American powers were too great to permit a
Pan-American policy. The Panama Congress on which he built his hopes
failed, and for fifty years the project lay dormant.
Under the popular name of the Monroe Doctrine, however, Adams's policy
has played a much larger part in world affairs than he expected.
Without the force of law either in this country or between nations,
this doctrine took a firm hold of the American imagination and became
a national ideal, while other nations have at least in form taken
cognizance of it. The Monroe Doctrine has survived because Adams did
not invent its main tenets but found them the dominating principles of
American international politics; his work, like that of his contemporary
John Marshall, was one of codification. But not all those who have
commented on the work of Adams have possessed his analytical mind, and
many have confused what was fundamental in his pronouncement with what
was temporary and demanded by the emergency of the time.
Always the American people have stood, from the first days of their
migration to America, for the right of the people of a territory to
determine their own development. First they have insisted that their own
right to work out their political destiny be acknowledged and made safe.
For this they fought the Revolution. It has followed that they have in
foreign affairs tried to keep their hands free from entanglements
with other countries and have refrained from interference with foreign
politics. This was the burden of Washington's "Farewell Address," and it
was a message which Jefferson reiterated in his inaugural. These are
the permanent principles which have controlled enlightened American
statesmen in their attitude toward the world, from the days of John
Winthrop to those of Woodrow Wilson.
It was early found, however, that the affairs of the immediate neighbors
of the United States continually and from day to day affected the
whole texture of American life and that actually they limited American
independence and therefore could not be left out of the policy of the
Government. The United States soon began to recognize that there was a
region in the affairs of which it must take a more active interest. As
early as 1780 Thomas Pownall, an English colonial official, predicted
that the United States must take an active part in Cuban affairs. In
1806 Madison, then Secretary of State, had instructed Monroe, Minister
to Great Britain, that the Government began to broach the idea that the
whole Gulf Stream was within its maritime jurisdiction. The message
of Monroe was an assertion that the fate of both the Americas was of
immediate concern to the safety of the United States, because the fate
of its sister republics intimately affected its own security. This
proved to be an enduring definition of policy, because for many
years there was a real institutional difference between the American
hemisphere and the rest of the world and because oceanic boundaries were
the most substantial that the world affords.
Adams, however, would have been the last to claim that his method
of securing the fundamental purposes of the United States was itself
fundamental. It is particularly important for Americans to make a
distinction between the things which they have always wished to obtain
and the methods which they have from time to time used. To build a
policy today on the alleged isolation of the American continents would
be almost as absurd as to try to build a government on the belief in
Divine Right. The American continents are no longer separated from the
rest of the world by their national institutions, because the spirit of
these institutions has permeated much of Europe, Asia, and even Africa.
No boundaries, not even oceans, can today prohibit international
interference. But while the particular method followed in 1823 is no
longer appropriate, the ends which the United States set out to attain
have remained the same. Independence, absolute and complete, including
the absence of all entanglements which might draw the country into other
peoples' quarrels; the recognition of a similar independence in all
other peoples, which involves both keeping its own hands off and also
strongly disapproving of interference by one nation with another--these
have been the guiding principles of the United States. These principles
the Government has maintained by such means as seemed appropriate to the
time. In colonial days the people of America fought in courts for
their charter rights; at the time of the Revolution, by arms for
their independence from England; during the Napoleonic wars, for their
independence from the whole system of Europe. The Monroe Doctrine
declared that to maintain American independence from the European system
it was necessary that the European system be excluded from the Americas.
In entering the Great War in the twentieth century the United States has
recognized that the system of autocracy against which Monroe fulminated
must disappear from the entire world if, under modern industrial
conditions, real independence is to exist anywhere.
It is the purpose of the following chapters to trace the expansion of
American interests in the light of the Monroe Doctrine and to explain
those controversies which accompanied this growth and taxed the
diplomatic resources of American Secretaries of State from the times of
Adams and Webster and Seward to those of Blaine and Hay and Elihu Root.
The diplomacy of the Great War is reserved for another volume in this
Series.
CHAPTER II. Controversies With Great Britain
No two nations have ever had more intimate relationships than the United
States and Great Britain. Speaking the same language and owning a common
racial origin in large part, they have traded with each other and in
the same regions, and geographically their territories touch for three
thousand miles. During the nineteenth century the coastwise shipping of
the United States was often forced to seek the shelter of the British
West Indies. The fisherfolk of England and America mingled on the Grand
Bank of Newfoundland and on the barren shores of that island and of
Labrador, where they dried their fish. Indians, criminals, and game
crossed the Canadian boundary at will, streams flowed across it, and
the coast cities vied for the trade of the interior, indifferent to the
claims of national allegiance. One cannot but believe that this intimacy
has in the long run made for friendship and peace; but it has also
meant constant controversy, often pressed to the verge of war by the
pertinacious insistence of both nations on their full rights as they saw
them.
The fifteen years following Adams's encounter with Canning saw the
gradual accumulation of a number of such disputes, which made the
situation in 1840 exceptionally critical. Great Britain was angered at
the failure of the United States to grant her the right to police the
seas for the suppression of the slave trade, while the United States,
with memories of the vicious English practice of impressment before the
War of 1812, distrusted the motives of Great Britain in asking for this
right. Nearly every mile of the joint boundary in North America was in
dispute, owing to the vagueness of treaty descriptions or to the errors
of surveyors. Twelve thousand square miles and a costly American fort
were involved; arbitration had failed; rival camps of lumberjacks
daily imperiled peace; and both the Maine Legislature and the National
Congress had voted money for defense. In a New York jail Alexander
McLeod was awaiting trial in a state court for the murder of an American
on the steamer Caroline, which a party of Canadian militia had cut out
from the American shore near Buffalo and had sent to destruction over
Niagara Falls. The British Government, holding that the Caroline was at
the time illegally employed to assist Canadian insurgents, and that
the Canadian militia were under government orders justifiable by
international law, assumed the responsibility for McLeod's act and his
safety. Ten thousand Americans along the border, members of "Hunters'
Lodges," were anxious for a war which would unleash them for the
conquest of Canada. Delay was causing all these disputes to fester, and
the public mind of the two countries was infected with hostility.
Fortunately in 1841 new administrations came into power in both England
and the United States. Neither the English Tories nor the American Whigs
felt bound to maintain all the contentions of their predecessors, and
both desired to come to an agreement. The responsibility on the American
side fell upon Daniel Webster, the new Secretary of State. With less
foreign experience than John Quincy Adams, he was more a man of the
world and a man among men. His conversation was decidedly less ponderous
than his oratory, and there was no more desirable dinner guest in
America. Even in Webster's lightest moments, his majestic head gave the
impression of colossal mentality, and his eyes, when he was in earnest,
almost hypnotized those upon whom he bent his gaze. A leading figure
in public life for twenty-five years, he now attained administrative
position for the first time, and his constant practice at the bar had
given something of a lawyerlike trend to his mind.
The desire of the British Government for an agreement with the United
States was shown by the selection of Washington instead of London as the
place of negotiation and of Lord Ashburton as negotiator. The head of
the great banking house of Baring Brothers, he had won his title by
service and was, moreover, known to be a friend of the United States.
While in Philadelphia in his youth, he had married Miss Bingham of that
city, and she still had American interests. In the controversies before
the War of 1812 Lord Ashburton had supported many of the American
contentions. He knew Webster personally, and they both looked forward
to the social pleasure of meeting again during the negotiations. The
two representatives came together in this pleasant frame of mind and did
most of their business at the dinner table, where it is reported that
more than diplomatic conversation flowed. They avoided an exchange of
notes, which would bind each to a position once taken, but first came to
an agreement and then prepared the documents.
It must not be supposed, however, that either Ashburton or Webster
sacrificed the claims of his own Government. Webster certainly was a
good attorney for the United States in settling the boundary disputes,
as is shown by the battle of the maps. The territorial contentions of
both countries hung largely upon the interpretation of certain clauses
of the first American treaty of peace. Webster therefore ordered a
search for material to be made in the archives of Paris and London. In
Paris there was brought to light a map with the boundary drawn in red,
possibly by Franklin, and supporting the British contention. Webster
refrained from showing this to Ashburton and ordered search in London
discontinued. Ironically enough, however, a little later there was
unearthed in the British Museum the actual map used by one of the
British commissioners in 1782, which showed the boundary as the United
States claimed it to be. Though they had been found too late to affect
the negotiations, these maps disturbed the Senate discussion of the
matter. Yet, as they offset each other, they perhaps facilitated the
acceptance of the treaty.
Rapidly Webster and Ashburton cleared the field. Webster obtained the
release of McLeod and effected the passage of a law to prevent a similar
crisis in the future by permitting such cases to be transferred to a
federal court. The Caroline affair was settled by an amicable exchange
of notes in which each side conceded much to the other. They did not
indeed dispose of the slave trade, but they reached an agreement by
which a joint squadron was to undertake to police efficiently the
African seas in order to prevent American vessels from engaging in that
trade.
Upon the more important matter of boundary, both Webster and Ashburton
decided to give up the futile task of convincing each other as to the
meaning of phrases which rested upon half-known facts reaching back
into the misty period of first discovery and settlement. They abandoned
interpretation and made compromise and division the basis of their
settlement. This method was more difficult for Webster than for
Ashburton, as both Maine and Massachusetts were concerned, and each must
under the Constitution be separately convinced. Here Webster used the
"Red Line" map, and succeeded in securing the consent of these States.
They finally settled upon a boundary which was certainly not that
intended in 1782 but was a compromise between the two conceptions
of that boundary and divided the territory with a regard for actual
conditions and geography. From Passamaquoddy Bay to the Lake of the
Woods, accepted lines were substituted for controversy, and the basis of
peace was thus made more secure. The treaty also contained provision
for the mutual extradition of criminals guilty of specified crimes, but
these did not include embezzlement, and "gone to Canada" was for years
the epitaph of many a dishonest American who had been found out.
The friendly spirit in which Webster and Ashburton had carried on their
negotiations inaugurated a period of reasonable amity between their two
nations. The United States annexed Texas without serious protest; in
spite of the clamor for "fifty-four forty or fight," Oregon was divided
peacefully; and England did not take advantage of the war with Mexico.
Each of these events, however, added to American territory, and these
additions gave prominence to a new and vexing problem. The United
States was now planted solidly upon the Pacific, and its borders were
practically those to which Adams had looked forward. Natural and unified
as this area looks upon the map and actually is today, in 1850
the extent of territorial expansion had overreached the means of
transportation. The Great Plains, then regarded as the Great American
Desert, and the Rockies presented impossible barriers to all but
adventurous individuals. These men, uniting in bands for self-protection
and taking their lives in their hands, were able with good luck to take
themselves but little else across this central region and the western
barrier. All ordinary communication, all mail and all freight, must go
by sea. The United States was actually divided into two very unequal
parts, and California and Oregon were geographically far distant
colonies.
The ocean highroad belonged to the United States in common with all
nations, but it took American ships to the opposite ends of the earth.
No regular shuttle of traffic sufficient to weave the nation together
could be expected to pass Cape Horn at every throw. The natural route
lay obviously through the Caribbean, across some one of the isthmuses,
and up the Pacific coast. Here however, the United States would have
to use territory belonging to other nations, and to obtain the right of
transit and security agreement was necessary. All these isthmus routes,
moreover, needed improvement. Capital must be induced to do the work,
and one necessary inducement was a guarantee of stable conditions of
investment.
This isthmus route became for a time the prime object of American
diplomacy. The United States made in 1846 satisfactory arrangements with
the Republic of New Granada (later Colombia), across which lay the
most southern route, and in 1853 with Mexico, of whose northern or
Tehuantepec route many had great expectations; but a further difficulty
was now discovered. The best lanes were those of Panama and of
Nicaragua. When the discovery of gold in California in 1848 made haste
a more important element in the problem, "Commodore" Vanderbilt, at that
time the shipping king of the United States, devoted his attention to
the Nicaragua route and made it the more popular. Here however, the
United States encountered not only the local independent authorities
but also Great Britain. Just to the north of the proposed route Great
Britain possessed Belize, now British Honduras, a meager colony but with
elastic boundaries. For many generations, too, she had concerned herself
with securing the rights of the Mosquito Indians, who held a territory,
also with elastic boundaries, inconveniently near the San Juan River,
the Caribbean entrance to the Nicaraguan thoroughfare. From Great
Britain, moreover, must come a large portion of the capital to be
employed in constructing the canal which was expected soon to cut the
isthmus.
The local situation soon became acute. Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and
the Mosquitoes all claimed the mouth of the San Juan; Honduras and
Nicaragua, the control of the Pacific outlet. British diplomatic and
naval officers clashed with those of the United States until, in their
search for complete control, both exceeded the instructions which they
had received from home. The British occupied Greytown on the San Juan
and supported the Mosquitoes and Costa Rica. The Americans won favor
in Nicaragua and Honduras, framed treaties allowing transit and canal
construction, and proposed the annexation of Tigre Island, which,
commanded the proposed Pacific outlet.
To untie these knots, Sir Henry Bulwer was sent to Washington to
negotiate with John M. Clayton, President Taylor's Secretary of
State. Neither of these negotiators was of the caliber of Webster and
Ashburton, and the treaty which they drew up proved rather a Pandora's
box of future difficulties than a satisfactory settlement. In the first
place it was agreed that any canal to be constructed over any of the
isthmuses was to be absolutely neutral, in time of war as well as of
peace. Both nations were to guarantee this neutrality, and other nations
were invited to join with them. No other nations did join, however, and
the project became a dual affair which, owing to the superiority of the
British Navy, gave Britain the advantage, or would eventually have
done so if a canal had been constructed. Subsequently the majority of
Americans decided that such a canal must be under the sole control of
the United States, and the treaty then stood as a stumbling block in the
way of the realization of this idea.
More immediately important, however, and a great wrench to American
policies, was the provision that neither power "will ever erect or
maintain any fortifications commanding" the canal "or occupy, or
fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over... any part
of Central America." This condition violated Adams's principle that the
United States was not on the same footing with any European power in
American affairs and should not be bound by any self-denying ordinance,
and actually it reversed the principle against the United States. An
explanatory note accompanying the treaty recognized that this provision
did not apply to Belize and her dependencies, and Great Britain promptly
denied that it applied to any rights she already possessed in Central
America, including the Mosquito protectorate and certain Bay Islands
which were claimed by Great Britain as dependencies of Belize and by
Honduras as a part of her territory.
In vain did Webster, who succeeded Clayton, seek an agreement. His
term of office passed, and the controversy fell into the hands of Lord
Palmerston, the jingoistic spirit who began at this time to dominate
British foreign policy, and of James Buchanan, who, known to us as a
spineless seeker after peace where there was no peace, was at this time
riding into national leadership on a wave of expansionist enthusiasm.
Buchanan and Palmerston mutually shook the stage thunder of verbal
extravagance, but probably neither intended war. Poker was at this time
the national American game, and bluff was a highly developed art. The
American player won a partial victory. In 1856 Great Britain agreed
to withdraw her protectorate over the Mosquitoes, to acknowledge the
supremacy of Honduras over the Bay Islands, and to accept a reasonable
interpretation of the Belize boundary. Though this convention was never
ratified, Great Britain carried out its terms, and in 1860 Buchanan
announced himself satisfied.
The dreams of 1850, however, were not satisfied. A railroad was
completed across Panama in 1855, but no canal was constructed until
years after the great transcontinental railroads had bound California
to the East by bonds which required no foreign sanction. Yet the
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty remained an entangling alliance, destined to give
lovers of peace and amity many more uncomfortable hours.
During the Civil War other causes of irritation arose between the United
States and Great Britain. The proclamation of neutrality, by which the
British Government recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent, seemed
to the North an unfriendly act. Early in the war occurred the Trent
affair, which added to the growing resentment. * It was held to be a
violation of professed neutrality that Confederate commerce destroyers
were permitted to be built and fitted out in British yards. The
subsequent transfer of hundreds of thousands of tons of American
shipping to British registry, owing to the depredations of these
raiders, still further incensed the American people. It was in the midst
of these strained relations that the Fenian Brotherhood in the United
States attempted the invasion of Canada.
* See Stephenson, "Abraham Lincoln and the Union," in "The
Chronicles of America."
America laid claims against Great Britain, based not merely on the
actual destruction of merchantmen by the Alabama, the Florida, and other
Confederate vessels built in British yards, but also on such indirect
losses as insurance, cost of pursuit, and commercial profits. The
American Minister, Charles Francis Adams, had proposed the arbitration
of these claims, but the British Ministry, declined to arbitrate matters
involving the honor of the country. Adams's successor, Reverdy Johnson,
succeeded in arranging a convention in 1868 excluding from consideration
all claims for indirect damages, but this arrangement was unfavorably
reported from the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Senate. It was
then that Charles Sumner, Chairman of the Committee, gave utterance
to his astounding demands upon Great Britain. The direct claims of
the United States, he contended, were no adequate compensation for its
losses; the indirect claims must also be made good, particularly those
based on the loss of the American merchant marine by transfer to the
British flag. The direct or "individual" American losses amounted to
$15,000,000. "But this leaves without recognition the vaster damage
to commerce driven from the ocean, and that other damage, immense and
infinite, caused by the prolongation of the war, all of which may be
called NATIONAL in contradistinction to INDIVIDUAL." Losses to commerce
he reckoned at $110,000,000, adding that this amount must be considered
only an item in the bill, for the prolongation of the war was directly
traceable to England. "The rebellion was suppressed at a cost of more
than four thousand million dollars...through British intervention the
war was doubled in duration;... England is justly responsible for the
additional expenditure." Sumner's total bill against Great Britain,
then, amounted to over $2,000,000,000; "everyone," said he, "can make
the calculation."
Had an irresponsible member of Congress made these demands, they might
have been dismissed as another effort to twist the British lion's tail;
but Charles Sumner took himself seriously, expected others to take him
seriously, and unhappily was taken seriously by a great number of his
fellow countrymen. The explanation of his preposterous demand appeared
subsequently in a memorandum which he prepared. To avoid all possible
future clashes with Great Britain, he would have her withdraw from the
American continents and the Western Hemisphere. Great Britain might
discharge her financial obligations by transferring to the United States
the whole of British America! And Sumner seems actually to have believed
that he was promoting the cause of international good will by this
tactless proposal.
For a time it was believed that Sumner spoke for the Administration, and
public opinion in the United States was disposed to look upon his
speech as a fair statement of American grievances and a just demand for
compensation. The British Government, too, in view of the action of the
Senate and the indiscreet utterances of the new American Minister in
London, John Lothrop Motley, believed that President Grant favored an
aggressive policy. Further negotiations were dropped. Both Governments,
nevertheless, were desirous of coming to an understanding, though
neither wished to take the first step.
Fortunately it happened that Caleb Cushing for the United States and
John Rose for Canada were then engaged at Washington in the discussion
of some matters affecting the two countries. In the course of informal
conversations these accomplished diplomats planned for a rapprochement.
Rose presented a memorandum suggesting that all questions in dispute
be made the subject of a general negotiation and treaty. It was at
this moment that Sumner came forward with his plan of compensation
and obviously he stood in the way of any settlement. President Grant,
however, already incensed by Motley's conduct and by Sumner's opposition
to his own favorite project, the annexation of Santo Domingo, now broke
definitely with both by removing Motley and securing Sumner's deposition
from the chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. The way was
now prepared for an agreement with Great Britain.
On February 27, 1871, a Joint High Commission, composed of five
distinguished representatives from each Government, began its memorable
session at Washington. The outcome was the Treaty of Washington, signed
on May 8, 1871. The most important question--the "Alabama Claims"--was
by this agreement to be submitted to a tribunal of five arbitrators,
one to be selected by the President of the United States, another by the
Queen of Great Britain, a third by the King of Italy, a fourth by the
President of the Swiss Republic, and a fifth by the Emperor of Brazil.
This tribunal was to meet at Geneva and was to base its award on three
rules for the conduct of neutral nations: "First, to use due diligence
to prevent the fitting out,... within its jurisdiction, of any
vessel which it has reasonable ground to believe is intended to
cruise... against a Power with which it is at peace...; secondly, not to
permit... either belligerent to make use of its ports or waters as a base
of naval operations...; thirdly, to exercise due diligence in its own
ports and waters... to prevent any violation of the foregoing obligations
and duties."
Another but less elaborate tribunal was to decide all other claims which
had arisen out of the Civil War. Still another arbitration commission
was to assess the amount which the United States was to pay by way of
compensation for certain privileges connected with the fisheries. The
vexed question of the possession of the San Juan Islands was to be left
to the decision of the Emperor of Germany. A series of articles provided
for the amicable settlement of border questions between the United
States and Canada. Never before in history had such important
controversies been submitted voluntarily to arbitration and judicial
settlement.
The tribunal which met at Geneva in December was a body of distinguished
men who proved fully equal to the gravity of their task. Charles Francis
Adams was appointed to represent the United States; Sir Alexander
Cockburn, to represent Great Britain; the commissioners from neutral
States were also men of distinction. J. C. Bancroft Davis was agent for
the United States, and William M. Evarts, Caleb Cushing, and Morrison R.
Waite acted as counsel. The case for the United States was not presented
in a manner worthy of the occasion. According to Adams the American
contentions "were advanced with an aggressiveness of tone and
attorney-like smartness, more appropriate to the wranglings of a
quarter-sessions court than to pleadings before a grave international
tribunal." The American counsel were instructed to insist not, indeed,
on indemnity for the cost of two years of war, but on compensation
because of the transfer of our commerce to the British merchant marine,
by virtue of the clause of the treaty which read "acts committed by the
several vessels which have given rise to the claims generally known as
the 'Alabama Claims.'" British public opinion considered this contention
an act of bad faith. Excitement in England rose to a high pitch and the
Gladstone Ministry proposed to withdraw from the arbitration.
That the tribunal of arbitration did not end in utter failure was due to
the wisdom and courage of Adams. At his suggestion the five arbitrators
announced on June 19, 1872, that they would not consider claims for
indirect damages, because such claims did "not constitute, upon
the principles of international law applicable to such cases, good
foundation for an award of compensation, or computations of damages
between nations." These claims dismissed, the arbitrators entered into
an examination of the direct American claims and on September 14, 1872,
decided upon an award of fifteen and a half million dollars to the
United States. The Treaty of Washington and the Geneva Tribunal
constituted the longest step thus far taken by any two nations toward
the settlement of their disputes by judicial process.
CHAPTER III. Alaska And Its Problems
The impulse for expansion upon which Buchanan floated his political raft
into the presidency was not a party affair. It was felt by men of all
party creeds, and it seemed for a moment to be the dominant national
ideal. Slaveholders and other men who had special interests sought
to make use of it, but the fundamental feeling did not rest on their
support. American democracy, now confident of its growing strength,
believed that the happiness of the people and the success of the
institutions of the United States would prove a loadstone which would
bring under the flag all peoples of the New World, while those of the
Old World would strike off their shackles and remold their governments
on the American pattern. Attraction, not compulsion, was the method to
be used, and none of the paeans of American prophets in the editorials
or the fervid orations of the fifties proposed an additional battleship
or regiment.
No one saw this bright vision more clearly than did William H. Seward,
who became Secretary of State under Lincoln. Slight of build, pleasant,
and talkative, he gave an impression of intellectual distinction, based
upon fertility rather than consistency of mind. He was a disciple of
John Quincy Adams, but his tireless energy had in it too much of nervous
unrest to allow him to stick to his books as did his master, and there
was too wide a gap between his beliefs and his practice. He held as
idealistic views as any man of his generation, but he believed so firmly
that the right would win that he disliked hastening its victory at the
expense of bad feeling. He was shrewd, practical--maliciously practical,
many thought. When, in the heat of one of his perorations, a flash of
his hidden fires would arouse the distrust of the conservative, he
would appear to retract and try to smother the flames in a cloud of
conciliatory smoke. Only the restraining hand of Lincoln prevented him
from committing fatal blunders at the outset of the Civil War, yet his
handling of the threatening episode of the French in Mexico showed a
wisdom, a patient tact, and a subtle ingenuity which make his conduct of
the affair a classic illustration of diplomacy at almost its best. *
* See "Abraham Lincoln and the Union" and "The Hispanic Nations
of the New World" (in "The Chronicles of America").
In 1861 Seward said that he saw Russia and Great Britain building on
the Arctic Ocean outposts on territory which should belong to his own
country, and that he expected the capital of the great federal republic
of the future would be in the valley of Mexico. Yet he nevertheless
retained the sentiment he had expressed in 1846: "I would not give one
human life for all the continent that remains to be annexed." The Civil
War prevented for four years any action regarding expansion, and the
same conspiracy which resulted in the assassination of Lincoln brought
Seward to the verge of the grave. He recovered rapidly, however, and
while on a recuperating trip through the West Indies he worked for
the peaceable annexation of the Danish Islands and Santo Domingo. His
friend, Charles Sumner, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign
Affairs, was framing his remarkable project for the annexation of
Canada. President Johnson and, later, President Grant endorsed parts
of these plans. Denmark and Santo Domingo were willing to acquiesce for
money, and Sumner believed, although he was preposterously wrong, that
the incorporation of Canada in our Union would be welcomed by the best
sentiment of England and of Canada.
To willing ears, therefore, came in 1867 the offer of the Russian
Minister, Baron Stoeckl, to sell Alaska. The proposal did not raise a
question which had been entirely unthought of. Even before the Civil
War, numbers of people on the Pacific coast, far from being overawed
by the responsibility of developing the immense territories which they
already possessed, had petitioned the Government to obtain Alaska,
and even the proper purchase price had been discussed. The reasons
for Russia's decision to sell, however, have not been sufficiently
investigated. It is apparent from the conduct of the negotiation that it
was not a casual proposal but one in which Baron Stoeckl, at least, was
deeply interested. It is to be remembered that at this time Russia's
ambitions were in Asia, and that her chief rival was Great Britain.
Russia's power was on land; the seas she could not hope to control. The
first moment of war would put Russian rule in, Alaska at the mercy of
the British fleet. In those days when a Siberian railroad was an idle
dream, this icebound region in America was so remote from the center
of Russian power that it could be neither enjoyed nor protected. As
Napoleon in 1803 preferred to see Louisiana in the hands of the United
States rather than in those of his rival England, so Russia preferred
Alaska to fall to the United States rather than to Canada, especially as
she could by peaceful cession obtain money into the bargain.
Seward was delighted with the opportunity, but diplomatically concealed
his satisfaction and bargained closely. Stoeckl asked ten million
dollars; Seward offered five. Stoeckl proposed to split the difference;
Seward agreed, if Stoeckl would knock off the odd half million. Stoeckl
accepted, on condition that Seward add two hundred thousand as special
compensation to the Russian American Company. It was midnight of the
29th of March when $7,200,000 was made the price. Seward roused Sumner
from bed, and the three worked upon the form of a treaty until four
o'clock in the morning. No captains of industry could show greater
decision.
The treaty, however, was not yet a fact. The Senate must approve, and
its approval could not be taken for granted. The temper of the majority
of Americans toward expansion had changed. The experiences of the later
fifties had caused many to look upon expansion as a Southern heresy.
Carl Schurz a little later argued that we had already taken in all those
regions the climate of which would allow healthy self-government and
that we should annex no tropics. Hamilton Fish, then Secretary of State,
wrote in 1873 that popular sentiment was, for the time being, against
all expansion. In fact, among the people of the United States the idea
was developing that expansion was contrary to their national policy,
and their indisposition to expand became almost a passion. They
rejected Santo Domingo and the Danish Islands and would not press any
negotiations for Canada.
What saved the Alaska Treaty from a similar disapproval was not any
conviction that Alaska was worth seven million dollars, although Sumner
convinced those who took the trouble to read, that the financial bargain
was not a bad one. The chief factor in the purchase of Alaska was almost
pure sentiment. Throughout American history there has been a powerful
tradition of friendliness between Russia and the United States, yet
surely no two political systems have been in the past more diametrically
opposed. The chief ground for friendship has doubtless been the great
intervening distance which has reduced intercourse to a minimum. Some
slight basis for congeniality existed in the fact that the interests of
both countries favored a similar policy of freedom upon the high seas.
What chiefly influenced the public mind, however, was the attitude
which Russia had taken during the Civil War. When the Grand Duke Alexis
visited the United States in 1871, Oliver Wendell Holmes greeted him
with the lines:
Bleak are our coasts with the blasts of December,
Thrilling and warm are the hearts that remember
Who was our friend when the world was our foe.
This Russian friendship had presented itself dramatically to the public
at a time when American relations with Great Britain were strained, for
Russian fleets had in 1863 suddenly appeared in the harbors of New York
and San Francisco. These visits were actually made with a sole regard
for Russian interests and in anticipation of the outbreak of a general
European war, which the Czar then feared. The appearance of the fleets,
however, was for many years popularly supposed to signify sympathy with
the Union and a willingness to defend it from attack by Great Britain
and France. Many conceived the ingenuous idea that the purchase price
of Alaska was really the American half of a secret bargain of which the
fleets were the Russian part. Public opinion, therefore, regarded the
purchase of Alaska in the light of a favor to Russia and demanded that
the favor be granted.
Thus of all the schemes of expansion in the fifty years between the
Mexican and the Spanish wars, for the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 was
really only a rectification of boundary, this alone came to fruition.
Seward could well congratulate himself on his alertness in seizing an
opportunity and on his management of the delicate political aspects of
the purchase. Without his promptness the golden opportunity might have
passed and never recurred. Yet he could never have saved this fragment
of his policy had not the American people cherished for Russia a
sentimental friendship which was intensified at the moment by anger at
the supposed sympathy of Great Britain for the South.
If Russia hoped by ceding Alaska to involve the United States in
difficulties with her rival Great Britain, her desire was on one
occasion nearly gratified. The only profit which the United States
derived from this new possession was for many years drawn from the
seal fishery. The same generation of Americans which allowed the
extermination of the buffalo for lap robes found in the sealskin sack
the hall mark of wealth and fashion. While, however, the killing of the
buffalo was allowed to go on without official check, the Government in
1870 inaugurated a system to preserve the seal herds which was perhaps
the earliest step in a national conservation policy. The sole right of
killing was given to the Alaska Commercial Company with restrictions
under which it was believed that the herds would remain undiminished.
The catch was limited to one hundred thousand a year; it was to include
only male seals; and it was to be limited to the breeding grounds on the
Pribilof Islands.
The seals, however, did not confine themselves to American territory.
During the breeding season they ranged far and wide within a hundred
miles of their islands; and during a great part of the year they were to
be found far out in the Pacific. The value of their skins attracted the
adventurous of many lands, but particularly Canadians; and Vancouver
became the greatest center for deep-sea sealing. The Americans saw the
development of the industry with anger and alarm. Considering the seals
as their own, they naturally resented this unlimited exploitation by
outsiders when Americans themselves were so strictly limited by law.
They also believed that the steady diminution of the herds was due to
the reckless methods of their rivals, particularly the use of explosives
which destroyed many animals to secure a few perfect skins.
Public opinion on the Pacific coast sought a remedy and soon found
one in the terms of the treaty of purchase. That document, in dividing
Alaska from Siberia, described a line of division running through Bering
Sea, and in 1881 the Acting Secretary of the Treasury propounded the
theory that this line divided not merely the islands but the water as
well. There was a widespread feeling that all Bering Sea within this
line was American territory and that all intruders from other nations
were poachers. In accordance with this theory, the revenue cutter Corwin
in 1886 seized three British vessels and hauled their skippers before
the United States District Court of Sitka. Thomas F. Bayard, then
Secretary of State under President Cleveland, did not recognize this
theory of interpreting the treaty, but endeavored to right the grievance
by a joint agreement with France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and Great
Britain, the sealing nations, "for the better protection of the fur seal
fisheries in Bering Sea."
A solution had been almost reached, when Canada interposed. Lord Morley
has remarked, in his "Recollections," how the voice of Canada fetters
Great Britain in her negotiations with the United States. While Bayard
was negotiating an agreement concerning Bering Sea which was on the
whole to the advantage of the United States, he completed a similar
convention on the more complicated question of the northeastern or
Atlantic fisheries which was more important to Canada. This latter
convention was unfavorably reported by the Senate Committee on Foreign
Affairs, which foreshadowed rejection. Thereupon, in May, 1888, Lord
Salisbury, the British Foreign Minister, withdrew from the Bering Sea
negotiation.
At this critical moment Cleveland gave place to Harrison, and Bayard
was succeeded by James G. Blaine, the most interesting figure in our
diplomatic activities of the eighties. These years marked the lowest
point in the whole history of our relations with other countries, both
in the character of our agents and in the nature of the public opinion
to which they appealed. Blaine was undoubtedly the most ill-informed
of our great diplomats; yet a trace of greatness lingers about him. The
exact reverse of John Quincy Adams, he knew neither law nor history, and
he did not always inspire others with confidence in his integrity. On
the other hand, the magnetic charm of his personality won many to a
devotion such as none of our great men except Clay has received. Blaine
saw, moreover, though through a glass darkly, farther along the path
which the United States was to take than did any of his contemporaries.
It was his fate to deal chiefly in controversy with those accomplished
diplomats, Lord Salisbury and Lord Granville, and it must have been
among the relaxations of their office to point out tactfully the defects
and errors in his dispatches. Nevertheless when he did not misread
history or misquote precedents but wielded the broadsword of equity, he
often caught the public conscience, and then he was not an opponent to
be despised.
Blaine at once undertook the defense of the contention that Bering Sea
was "closed" and the exclusive property of the United States, in
spite of the fact that this position was opposed to the whole trend of
American opinion, which from the days of the Revolution had always stood
for freedom of the high seas and the limitation of the water rights of
particular nations to the narrowest limits. The United States and Great
Britain had jointly protested against the Czar's ukase of 1821, which
had asserted Russia's claim to Bering Sea as territorial waters; and if
Russia had not possessed it in 1821, we certainly could not have bought
it in 1867. In the face of Canadian opinion, Great Britain could never
consent, even for the sake of peace, to a position as unsound as it was
disadvantageous to Canadian industry. Nor did Blaine's contention that
the seals were domestic animals belonging to us, and therefore subject
to our protection while wandering through the ocean, carry conviction to
lawyers familiar with the fascinating intricacies of the law, domestic
and international, relating to migratory birds and beasts. To the
present generation it seems amusing that Blaine defended his basic
contention quite as much on the ground of the inhumanity of destroying
the seals as of its economic wastefulness. Yet Blaine rallied Congress
to his support, as well as a great part of American sentiment.
The situation, which had now become acute, was aggravated by the fact
that most American public men of this period did not separate their
foreign and domestic politics. Too many sought to secure the important
Irish vote by twisting the tail of the British lion. The Republicans,
in particular, sought to identify protection with patriotism and were
making much of the fact that the recall of Lord Sackville-West, the
British Minister, had been forced because he had advised a correspondent
to vote for Cleveland. It spoke volumes for the fundamental good sense
of the two nations that, when relations were so strained, they could
agree to submit their differences to arbitration. For this happy outcome
credit must be given to the cooler heads on both sides, but equal credit
must be given to their legacy from the cool heads which had preceded
them. The United States and Great Britain had acquired the habit of
submitting to judicial decision their disputes, even those closely
touching honor, and this habit kept them steady.
In accepting arbitration in 1892, the United States practically gave up
her case, although Blaine undoubtedly believed it could be defended, and
in spite of the fact that it was ably presented by John W. Foster from
a brief prepared by the American counsel, Edward J. Phelps, Frederic R.
Coudert, and James C. Carter. The tribunal assembled at Paris decided
that Bering Sea was open and determined certain facts upon which a
subsequent commission assessed damages of nearly half a million against
the United States for the seizure of British vessels during the period
in which the American claim was being asserted. Blaine, however, did not
lose everything. The treaty contained the extraordinary provision that
the arbitration tribunal, in case it decided against the United States,
was to draw up regulations for the protection of the seal herds. These
regulations when drafted did not prove entirely satisfactory, and bound
only the United States and Great Britain. It required many years and
much tinkering to bring about the reasonably satisfactory arrangement
that is now in force. Yet to leave to an international tribunal not
merely the decision of a disputed case but the legislation necessary
to regulate an international property was in itself a great step in the
development of world polity. The charlatan who almost brought on war by
maintaining an indefensible case was also the statesman who made perhaps
the greatest single advance in the conservation of the world's resources
by international regulation.
CHAPTER IV. Blaine And Pan-Americanism
During the half century that intervened between John Quincy Adams and
James G. Blaine, the Monroe Doctrine, it was commonly believed, had
prevented the expansion of the territories of European powers in the
Americas. It had also relieved the United States both of the necessity
of continual preparation for war and of that constant tension in which
the perpetual shifting of the European balance of power held the nations
of that continent. But the Monroe Doctrine was not solely responsible
for these results. Had it not been for the British Navy, the United
States would in vain have proclaimed its disapproval of encroachment.
Nor, had Europe continued united, could the United States have withstood
European influence; but Canning's policy had practically destroyed
Metternich's dream of unity maintained by intervention, and in 1848 that
whole structure went hopelessly tumbling before a new order. Yet British
policy, too, failed of full realization, for British statesmen always
dreamed of an even balance in continental Europe which Great Britain
could incline to her wishes, whereas it usually proved necessary, in
order to preserve a balance at all, for her to join one side or the
other. Divided Europe therefore stood opposite united America, and our
inferior strength was enhanced by an advantageous position.
The insecurity of the American position was revealed during the Civil
War. When the United States divided within, the strength of the nation
vanished. The hitherto suppressed desires of European nations at once
manifested themselves. Spain, never satisfied that her American empire
was really lost, at once leaped to take advantage of the change. On a
trumped up invitation of some of the inhabitants of Santo Domingo, she
invaded the formerly Spanish portion of the island and she began war
with Peru in the hope of acquiring at least some of the Pacific islands
belonging to that state.
More formidable were the plans of Napoleon III, for the French, too,
remembered the glowing promise of their earlier American dominions. They
had not forgotten that the inhabitants of the Americas as far north as
the southern borders of the United States were of Latin blood, at least
so far as they were of European origin. In Montevideo there was a French
colony, and during the forties France had been active in proffering her
advice in South American disputes. When the second French Republic had
been proclaimed in 1848, one of the French ministers in South America
saw a golden chance for his country to assume the leadership of all
Latin America, which was at that time suspicious of the designs of
the United States and alarmed by its rapid expansion at the expense of
Mexico. With the power of the American Government neutralized in
1861, and with the British Navy immobilized by the necessity of French
friendship, which the "Balance" made just then of paramount interest to
Great Britain, Napoleon III determined to establish in Mexico an empire
under French influence.
It is instructive to notice that General Bernhardi states, in "Germany
and the Next War" which has attracted such wide attention and which has
done so much to convince Americans of the bad morals of autocracy, that
Great Britain lost her great chance of world dominance by not taking
active advantage of this situation, as did France and Spain. It is
indeed difficult to see what would have been the outcome had Great
Britain also played at that time an aggressive and selfish part. She
stayed her hand, but many British statesmen were keenly interested in
the struggle, from the point of view of British interests. They did not
desire territory, but they foresaw that the permanent separation of the
two parts of the United States would leave the country shorn of weight
in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. North and South, if separated,
would each inevitably seek European support, and the isolation of
the United States and its claim to priority in American affairs would
disappear. The balance of power would extend itself to the Western
Hemisphere and the assumption of a sphere of influence would vanish with
the unity of the United States.
Nor did the close of the Civil War reveal less clearly than its
beginning the real international position of the United States. When
the country once more acquired unity, these European encroachments were
renounced, and dreams of colonial empire in America vanished. There was
a moment's questioning as to the reality of the triumph of the North--a
doubt that the South might rise if foreign war broke out; but the
uncertainty was soon dispelled. It was somewhat embarrassing, if not
humiliating, for the Emperor of the French to withdraw from his Mexican
undertaking, but the way was smoothed for him by the finesse of
Seward. By 1866 the international position of the United States was
reestablished and was perhaps the stronger for having been tested.
In all these years, however, the positive side of the Monroe Doctrine,
the development of friendly cooperation between the nations of America
under the leadership of the United States, had made no progress. In
fact, with the virtual disappearance of the American merchant marine
after the Civil War, the influence of the United States diminished.
Great Britain with her ships, her trade, and her capital, at that time
actually counted for much more, while German trade expanded rapidly
in the seventies and eighties and German immigration into Brazil gave
Prussia a lever hold, the ultimate significance of which is not even yet
fully evident.
Under these circumstances, Blaine planned to play a brilliant role as
Secretary of State in President Garfield's Cabinet. Though the President
was his personal friend, Blaine regarded him as his inferior in
practical statecraft and planned to make his own foreign policy the
notable feature of the Administration. His hopes were dashed, however,
by the assassination of Garfield and by the accession of President
Arthur. The new Secretary of State, F T. Frelinghuysen, reversed
nearly all of his predecessor's policies. When Blaine returned to
the Department of State in 1889, he found a less sympathetic chief in
President Harrison and a less brilliant role to play. Whether his final
retirement before the close of the Harrison Administration was due
directly to the conflict of views which certainly existed or was a play
on his part for the presidency and for complete control is a question
that has never been completely settled.
Narrow as was Blaine's view of world affairs, impossible as was
his conception of an America divided from Europe economically and
spiritually as well as politically and of an America united in itself
by a provoked and constantly irritated hostility to Europe, he had an
American program which, taken by itself, was definite, well conceived,
and in a sense prophetic. It is interesting to note that in referring
to much the same relationship, Blaine characteristically spoke of the
United States as "Elder Sister" of the South American republics, while
Theodore Roosevelt, at a later period, conceived the role to be that of
a policeman wielding the "Big Stick."
Blaine's first aim was to establish peace in the Western Hemisphere by
offering American mediation in the disputes of sister countries. When he
first took office in 1881, the prolonged and bitter war existing between
Chili, Bolivia, and Peru for the control of the nitrate fields which lay
just where the territories of the three abutted, provided a convenient
opportunity. If he could restore peace on an equitable basis here, he
would do much to establish the prestige of the United States as a wise
and disinterested counselor in Spanish American affairs. In this his
first diplomatic undertaking, there appeared, however, one of the
weaknesses of execution which constantly interfered with the success of
his plans. He did not know how to sacrifice politics to statesmanship,
and he appointed as his agents men so incompetent that they aggravated
rather than settled the difficulty. Later he saw his mistake and made a
new and admirable appointment in the case of Mr. William H. Trescot of
South Carolina. Blaine himself, however, lost office before new results
could be obtained; and Frelinghuysen recalled Trescot and abandoned the
attempt to force peace.
A second object of Blaine's policy was to prevent disputes between
Latin American and European powers from becoming dangerous by acting as
mediator between them. When he took office, France was endeavoring to
collect from Venezuela a claim which was probably just. When Venezuela
proved obdurate, France proposed to seize her custom houses and to
collect the duties until the debt was paid. Blaine protested, urged
Venezuela to pay, and suggested that the money be sent through the
American agent at Caracas. He further proposed that, should Venezuela
not pay within three months, the United States should seize the custom
houses, collect the money, and pay it to France. Again his short term
prevented him from carrying out his policy, but it is nevertheless
of interest as anticipating the plan actually followed by President
Roosevelt in the case of Santo Domingo.
Blaine was just as much opposed to the peaceful penetration of European
influence in the Western Hemisphere as to its forceful expression. The
project of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, to be built and owned
by a French company, had already aroused President Hayes on March 8,
1880, to remark: "The policy of this country is a canal under American
control. The United States cannot consent to the surrender of this
control to any European power or to any combination of European powers."
Blaine added that the passage of hostile troops through such a canal
when either the United States or Colombia was at war, as the terms of
guarantee of the new canal allowed, was "no more admissible than on the
railroad lines joining the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the United
States."
It is characteristic of Blaine that, when he wrote this dispatch, he was
apparently in complete ignorance of the existence of the Clayton-Bulwer
Treaty, in which the United States accepted the exactly opposite
principles--had agreed to a canal under a joint international guarantee
and open to the use of all in time of war as well as of peace.
Discovering this obstacle, he set to work to demolish it by announcing
to Great Britain that the treaty was antiquated, thirty years old, that
the development of the American Pacific slope had changed conditions,
and that, should the treaty be observed and such a canal remain
unfortified, the superiority of the British fleet would give the nation
complete control. Great Britain, however, could scarcely be expected to
regard a treaty as defunct from old age at thirty years, especially as
she also possessed a developing Pacific coast. Moreover, if the treaty
was to British advantage, at least the United States had accepted it.
Great Britain, therefore, refused to admit that the treaty was not in
full force. Blaine then urged the building of an American canal across
the Isthmus of Nicaragua, in defiance of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty--a
plan which received the support of even President Arthur, under whom a
treaty for the purpose was negotiated with the Republic of Nicaragua.
Before this treaty was ratified by the Senate, however, Grover
Cleveland, who had just become President, withdrew it. He believed in
the older policy, and refused his sanction to the new treaty on the
ground that such a canal "must be for the world's benefit, a trust
for mankind, to be removed from the chance of domination by any single
power."
The crowning glory of Blaine's system, as he planned it, was the
cooperation of the American republics for common purposes. He did not
share Seward's dream that they would become incorporated States of the
Union, but he went back to Henry Clay and the Panama Congress of 1826
for his ideal. During his first term of office he invited the republics
to send representatives to Washington to discuss arbitration, but his
successor in office feared that such a meeting of "a partial group of
our friends" might offend Europe, which indeed was not improbably part
of Blaine's intention. On resuming office, Blaine finally arranged
the meeting of a Pan-American Congress in the United States. Chosen
to preside, he presented an elaborate program, including a plan for
arbitrating disputes; commercial reciprocity; the establishment of
uniform weights and measures, of international copyright, trade-marks
and patents, and, of common coinage; improvement of communications; and
other subjects. At the same time he exerted himself to secure in
the McKinley Tariff Bill, which was just then under consideration, a
provision for reciprocity of trade with American countries. This meeting
was not a complete success, since Congress gave him only half of what
he wanted by providing for reciprocity but making it general instead of
purely American. Nevertheless one permanent and solid result was secured
in the establishment of the Bureau of American Republics at Washington,
which has become a clearing house of ideas and a visible bond of common
interests and good feeling.
Throughout the years of Blaine's prominence, the public took more
interest in his bellicose encounters with Europe, and particularly with
Great Britain, than in his constructive American policy; and he failed
to secure for either an assured popular support. His attempt to widen
the gulf between Europe and America was indeed absurd at a time when the
cable, the railroad, and the steamship were rendering the world daily
smaller and more closely knit, and when the spirit of democracy,
rapidly permeating western Europe, was breaking down the distinction
in political institutions which had given point to the pronouncement
of 1823. Nevertheless Blaine did actually feel the changing industrial
conditions at home which were destroying American separateness, and
he made a genuine attempt to find a place for the United States in the
world, without the necessity of sharing the responsibilities of all the
world, by making real that interest in its immediate neighbors which his
country had announced in 1823. Even while Blaine was working on his plan
of "America for the Americans," events were shaping the most important
extension of the interests of the United States which had taken place
since 1823.
CHAPTER V. The United States And The Pacific
Long before the westward march of Americans had brought their flag to
the Pacific, that ocean was familiar to their mariners. From Cape Horn
to Canton and the ports of India, there ploughed the stately merchantmen
of Salem, Providence, and Newburyport, exchanging furs and ginseng for
teas, silks, the "Canton blue" which is today so cherished a link with
the past, and for the lacquer cabinets and carved ivory which give
distinction to many a New England home. Meanwhile the sturdy whalers of
New Bedford scoured the whole ocean for sperm oil and whalebone, and the
incidents of their self-reliant three-year cruises acquainted them with
nearly every coral and volcanic isle. Early in the century missionaries
also began to brave the languor of these oases of leisure and the
appetite of their cannibalistic inhabitants.
The interest of the Government was bound to follow its adventurous
citizens. In 1820 the United States appointed a consular agent at
Honolulu; in the thirties and forties it entered into treaty relations
with Siam, Borneo, and China; and owing to circumstances which were by
no means accidental it had the honor of persuading Japan to open her
ports to the world. As early as 1797 an American vessel chartered by the
Dutch had visited Nagasaki. From time to time American sailors had been
shipwrecked on the shores of Japan, and the United States had more
than once picked up and sought to return Japanese castaways. In 1846
an official expedition under Commodore Biddle was sent to establish
relationships with Japan but was unsuccessful. In 1853 Commodore Perry
bore a message from the President to the Mikado which demanded--though
the demand was couched in courteous language--"friendship, commerce,
a supply of coal and provisions, and protection for our shipwrecked
people." After a long hesitation the Mikado yielded. Commodore Perry's
success was due not solely to the care with which his expedition was
equipped for its purpose nor to his diplomatic skill but in part to the
fact that other countries were known to be on the very point of forcing
an entrance into the seclusion of Japan. Few Americans realize how
close, indeed, were the relations established with Japan by the United
States. The treaty which Townsend Harris negotiated in 1858 stated that
"The President of the United States, at the request of the Japanese
Government, will act as a friendly mediator in such matters of
difference as may arise between the Government of Japan and any European
power." Through his personal efforts Harris may almost be said to have
become the chief adviser of the Japanese Government in the perplexities
which it encountered on entering international society.
Not only did the United States allow itself a closer intimacy with this
new Pacific power than it would have done with a state of Europe, but
it exhibited a greater freedom in dealing with the European powers
themselves in the Far East than at home or in America. In 1863 the
United States joined--in fact, in the absence of a naval force it
strained a point by chartering a vessel for the purpose--with a concert
of powers to force the opening of the Shimonoseki Straits; subsequently
acting with Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands, the United
States secured an indemnity to pay the cost of the expedition; and in
1866 it united with the same powers to secure a convention by which
Japan bound herself to establish certain tariff regulations.
Nor were the relations of the United States with the Pacific Ocean and
its shores confined to trade and international obligations. The American
flag waved over more than ships and a portion of the Pacific coast.
Naval officers more than once raised it over islands which they
christened, and Congress authorized the President to exercise temporary
authority over islands from which American citizens were removing guano
and to prevent foreign encroachment while they were so engaged. In the
eighties, fifty such islands of the Pacific were in the possession of
the United States.
In 1872 an American naval officer made an agreement with the local
chieftain of Tutuila, one of the Samoan Islands, for the use of Pago
Pago, which was the best harbor in that part of the ocean. The United
States drifted into more intimate relationship with the natives until
in 1878 it made a treaty with the Samoan king allowing Americans to use
Pago Pago as a coaling station. In return the United States agreed: "If
unhappily, any differences should have arisen, or shall hereafter arise,
between the Samoan government and any other government in amity with the
United States, the government of the latter will employ its good offices
for the purpose of adjusting those differences upon a satisfactory and
solid foundation." In 1884 the Senate insisted on securing a similar
harbor concession from Hawaii, and within the next few years the
American Navy began to arise again from its ashes. The obligation
incurred in exchange for this concession, however, although it resembled
that in the Japanese treaty, was probably an unreflecting act of good
nature for, if it meant anything, it was an entangling engagement such
as the vast majority of Americans were still determined to avoid.
The natives of Samoa did not indulge in cannibalism but devoted the
small energy the climate gave them to the social graces and to pleasant
wars. They were governed by local kings and were loosely united under a
chief king. At Apia, the capital, were three hundred foreigners, nearly
all connected in one way or another with trade. This commerce had long
been in the hands of English and Americans, but now the aggressive
Germans were rapidly winning it away. Three consuls, representing
the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, spent their time in
exaggerating their functions and in circumventing the plots of which
they suspected each other. The stage was set for comic opera, the
treaty with the United States was part of the plot, and several acts had
already been played, when Bismarck suddenly injected a tragic element.
In 1884, at the time when the German statesman began to see the vision
of a Teutonic world empire and went about seeking places in the sun,
the German consul in Samoa, by agreement with King Malietoa, raised the
German flag over the royal hut, with a significance which was all too
obvious. In 1886 the American consul countered this move by proclaiming
a United States protectorate. The German consul then first pressed home
a quarrel with the native king at a time opportunely coinciding with the
arrival of a German warship, the Adler; he subsequently deposed him and
put up Tamasese in his stead. The apparently more legitimate successor,
Mataafa, roused most of the population under his leadership. The Adler
steamed about the islands shelling Mataafa villages, and the American
consul steamed after him, putting his launch between the Adler and the
shore. In the course of these events, on December 18, 1888, Mataafa
ambushed a German landing party and killed fifty of its members.
German public opinion thereupon vociferously demanded a punishment which
would establish the place of Germany as a colonial power in the Pacific.
Great Britain, however, was not disposed to give her growing rival a
free hand. The United States was appealed to under the Treaty of 1878,
and American sentiment determined to protect the Samoans in their heroic
fight for self-government. All three nations involved sent warships to
Apia, and through the early spring of 1889 their chancelleries and the
press were prepared to hear momentarily that some one's temper had
given way in the tropic heat and that blood had been shed--with what
consequences on the other side of the globe no man could tell.
Very different, however, was the news that finally limped in, for there
was no cable. On March 16, 1889, a hurricane had swept the islands,
wrecking all but one of the warships. The common distress had brought
about cooperation among all parties. Tales of mutual help and mutual
praise of natives and the three nations filled the dispatches. The play
turned out to be a comedy after all. Yet difficulties remained which
could be met only by joint action. A commission of the three nations
therefore was arranged to meet in Berlin. The United States insisted on
native government; Germany, on foreign control. Finally they agreed to
a compromise in the form of a General Act, to which Samoa consented.
The native government was retained, but the control was given to a Chief
Justice and a President of the Municipal Council of Apia, who were to
be foreigners chosen by the three powers. Their relative authority is
indicated by the fact that the king was to receive $1800 a year, the
Chief Justice, $6000, and the President, $5000.
Small as was the immediate stake, this little episode was remarkably
significant of the trend of American development. Begun under Grant and
concluded under Blaine and Harrison, the policy of the United States
was the creation of no one mind or party nor did it accord with American
traditions. Encountering European powers in the Pacific, with no
apparent hesitation though without any general intent, the United States
entered into cooperative agreements with them relating to the native
governments which it would never have thought proper or possible in
other parts of the world. The United States seemed to be evolving a new
policy for the protection of its interests in the Pacific. This first
clash with the rising colonial power of Germany has an added interest
because it revealed a fundamental similarity in colonial policy between
the United States and Great Britain, even though they were prone to
quarrel when adjusting Anglo-American relations.
While the Samoan affair seemed an accidental happening, there was taking
shape in the Pacific another episode which had a longer history and was
more significant of the expansion of American interests in that ocean.
Indeed, with the Pacific coast line of the United States, with the
superb harbors of San Francisco, Portland, and Puget Sound, and with
Alaska stretching its finger tips almost to Asia, even Blaine could not
resist the lure of the East, though he endeavored to reconcile American
traditions of isolation with oceanic expansion. Of all the Pacific
archipelagoes, the Hawaiian Islands lie nearest to the shores of the
United States. Although they had been discovered to the European world
by the great English explorer, Captain Cook, their intercourse had, for
geographic reasons, always been chiefly with the United States. Whalers
continually resorted to them for supplies. Their natives shipped on
American vessels and came in numbers to California in early gold-mining
days. American missionaries attained their most striking success in the
Hawaiian Islands and not only converted the majority of the natives but
assisted the successive kings in their government. The descendants
of these missionaries continued to live on the islands and became the
nucleus of a white population which waxed rich and powerful by the
abundant production of sugar cane on that volcanic soil.
In view of this tangible evidence of intimacy on the part of the United
States with the Hawaiian Islands, Webster in 1842 brought them within
the scope of the Monroe Doctrine by declaring that European powers must
not interfere with their government. Marcy, Secretary of State, framed
a treaty of annexation in 1853, but the Hawaiian Government withdrew its
assent. Twenty years later Secretary Fish wrote: "There seems to be a
strong desire on the part of many persons in the islands, representing
large interests and great wealth, to become annexed to the United
States and while there are, as I have already said, many and influential
persons in the country who question the policy of any insular
acquisition, perhaps even any extension of territorial limits, there are
also those of influence and wise foresight who see a future that must
extend the jurisdiction and the limits of this nation, and that will
require a resting spot in the mid-ocean, between the Pacific coast
and the vast domains of Asia, which are now opening to commerce, and
Christian civilization."
All immediate action, however, was confined to a specially intimate
treaty of reciprocity which was signed in 1875, and which secured
a substantial American domination in commerce. When Blaine became
Secretary of State in 1881, he was, or at least he affected to be,
seriously alarmed at the possibility of foreign influence in Hawaiian
affairs, particularly on the part of Great Britain. The native
population was declining, and should it continue to diminish, he
believed that the United States must annex the islands. "Throughout the
continent, north and south," he wrote, "wherever a foothold is found
for American enterprise, it is quickly occupied, and the spirit of
adventure, which seeks its outlet, in the mines of South America and the
railroads of Mexico, would not be slow to avail itself of openings of
assured and profitable enterprise even in mid-ocean." As the feeling
grew in the United States that these islands really belonged to the
American continent, Blaine even invited Hawaii to send representatives
to the Pan-American Congress of 1889. When he again became Secretary
of State, he was prepared to give indirect support at least to American
interests, for the new queen, Liliuokalani, was supposed to be under
British influence. On the arrival of a British gunboat in Honolulu, J.
L. Stevens, the American Minister, went so far as to write on February
8, 1892: "At this time there seems to be no immediate prospect of its
being safe to have the harbor of Honolulu left without an American
vessel of war."
Revolution was, indeed, impending in Hawaii. On January 14, 1893, the
Queen abolished the later constitution under which the Americans had
exercised great power, and in its place she proclaimed the restoration
of the old constitution which established an absolutism modified
by native home rule. At two o'clock on the afternoon of the 16th of
January, the resident Americans organized a committee of safety; at
half-past four United States marines landed at the call of Stevens. The
Queen was thereupon deposed, a provisional government was organized, and
at its request Stevens assumed for the United States the "protection"
of the islands. Without delay, John W. Foster, who had just succeeded
Blaine as Secretary of State, drew up a treaty of annexation, which he
immediately submitted to the Senate.
On March 4, 1893, Cleveland became President for the second time. He
at once withdrew the treaty and appointed James H. Blount special
commissioner to investigate the facts of the revolt. While the report
of Commissioner Blount did not, indeed, convict Stevens of conspiring to
bring about the uprising, it left the impression that the revolt would
not have taken place and certainly could not have succeeded except for
the presence of the United States marines and the support of the
United States Minister. Cleveland recalled Stevens and the marines, and
requested the provisional government to restore the Queen. This Sanford
Ballard Dole, the President of the new republic, refused to do, on the
contention that President Cleveland had no right to interfere in the
domestic affairs of Hawaii. On the legality or propriety of Stevens's
conduct, opinion in Congress was divided; but with regard to Dole's
contention, both the Senate and the House were agreed that the islands
should maintain their own domestic government without interference from
the United States. Thus left to themselves, the Americans in Hawaii
bided their time until public opinion in the United States should prove
more favorable to annexation.
CHAPTER VI. Venezuela
Probably no President ever received so much personal abuse in his own
day as did Grover Cleveland. In time, however, his sterling integrity
and fundamental courage, his firm grasp of the higher administrative
duties of his office, won the approval of his countrymen, and a
repentant public sentiment has possibly gone too far in the other
direction of acclaiming his statesmanship. Unlike Blaine, Cleveland
thought soundly and consistently; but he was more obstinate, his vision
was often narrower, and he was notably lacking both in constructive
power and in tact, particularly in foreign relations. In his first
Administration, through his Secretary of State, Thomas F. Bayard,
Cleveland had negotiated fairly amicably with Great Britain, and when
he failed to secure the Senate's assent to a treaty on the irritating
question of the northeastern fisheries, he arranged a modus vivendi
which served for many years. In American affairs he opposed not only
the annexation of Hawaii but also the development of the spirit of
Pan-Americanism. He was, however, no more disposed than was Blaine to
permit infractions of that negative side of the Monroe Doctrine which
forbade European interference in America. His second Administration
brought to the forefront of world diplomacy an issue involving this
traditional principle.
The only European possession in South America at this time was Guiana,
fronting on the Atlantic north of Brazil and divided among France,
Holland, and Great Britain. Beyond British Guiana, the westernmost
division, lay Venezuela. Between the two stretched a vast tract of
unoccupied tropical jungle. Somewhere there must have been a boundary,
but where, no man could tell. The extreme claim of Great Britain would
have given her command of the mouth of the Orinoco, while that of
Venezuela would practically have eliminated British Guiana. Efforts to
settle this long-standing dispute were unavailing. Venezuela had from
time to time suggested arbitration but wished to throw the whole area
into court. Great Britain insisted upon reserving a minimum territory
and would submit to judicial decision only the land west of what
was known as the Schomburgh line of 1840. As early as 1876 Venezuela
appealed to the United States, "the most powerful and oldest of the
Republics of the new continent," for its "powerful moral support
in disputes with European nations." Several times the United States
proffered its good offices to Great Britain, but to no effect. The
satisfactory settlement of the question grew more difficult as time went
on, particularly after the discovery of gold in the disputed region had
given a new impulse to occupation.
President Cleveland took a serious view of this controversy because it
seemed to involve more than a boundary dispute. To his mind it called
into question the portion of Monroe's message which, in 1823, stated
that "the American continents... are henceforth not to be considered as
subjects for future colonization by any European powers." According
to this dictum, boundaries existed between all nations and colonies of
America; the problem was merely to find these boundaries. If a European
power refused to submit such a question to judicial decision, the
inference must be made that it was seeking to extend its boundaries.
In December, 1894, Cleveland expressed to Congress his hope that an
arbitration would be arranged and instructed his Secretary of State to
present vigorously to Great Britain the view of the United States.
Richard Olney of Boston, a lawyer of exceptional ability and of
the highest professional standing, was then Secretary of State. His
Venezuela dispatch, however, was one of the most undiplomatic documents
ever issued by the Department of State. He did not confine himself to
a statement of his case, wherein any amount of vigor would have been
permissible, but ran his unpracticed eye unnecessarily over the whole
field of American diplomacy. "That distance and three thousand miles of
intervening ocean make any permanent political union between a European
and an American state unnatural and inexpedient," may have been a
philosophic axiom to many in Great Britain as well as in the United
States, but it surely did not need reiteration in this state paper, and
Olney at once exposed himself to contradiction by adding the phrase,
"will hardly be denied." Entirely ignoring the sensitive pride of the
Spanish Americans and thinking only of Europe, he continued: "Today the
United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat
is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition."
The President himself did not run into any such uncalled-for
extravagance of expression, but his statement of the American position
did not thereby lose in vigor. When he had received the reply, of the
British Government refusing to recognize the interest of the United
States in the case, Cleveland addressed himself, on December 17, 1895,
to Congress. In stating the position of the Government of the United
States, he declared that to determine the true boundary line was its
right, duty, and interest. He recommended that the Government itself
appoint a commission for this purpose, and he asserted that this line,
when found, must be maintained as the lawful boundary. Should Great
Britain continue to exercise jurisdiction beyond it, the United
States must resist by every means in its power. "In making these
recommendations I am fully alive to the responsibility incurred, and
keenly realize all the consequences that may follow." Yet "there is no
calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows
a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of
national self-respect and honor beneath which axe shielded and defended
a people's safety and greatness."
Perhaps no American document relating to diplomacy ever before made so
great a stir in the world. Its unexpectedness enhanced its effect, even
in the United States, for the public had not been sufficiently aware of
the shaping of this international episode to be psychologically prepared
for the imminence of war. Unlike most Anglo-American diplomacy, this
had been a long-range negotiation, with notes exchanged between the home
offices instead of personal conferences. People blenched at the thought
of war; stocks fell; the attention of the whole world was arrested. The
innumerable and intimate bonds of friendship and interest which would
thus have to be broken merely because of an insignificant jog in a
boundary remote from both the nations made war between the United States
and Great Britain seem absolutely inconceivable, until people realized
that neither country could yield without an admission of defeat both
galling to national pride and involving fundamental principles of
conduct and policy for the future.
Great Britain in particular stood amazed at Cleveland's position. The
general opinion was that peace must be maintained and that diplomats
must find a formula which would save both peace and appearances. Yet
before this public opinion could be diplomatically formulated, a new
episode shook the British sense of security. Germany again appeared as
a menace and, as in the case of Samoa, the international situation thus
produced tended to develop a realization of the kinship between Great
Britain and the United States. Early in January, 1896, the Jameson raid
into the Transvaal was defeated, and the Kaiser immediately telegraphed
his congratulations to President Krtiger. In view of the possibilities
involved in this South African situation, British public opinion
demanded that her diplomats maintain peace with the United States, with
or without the desired formula.
The British Government, however, was not inclined to act with undue
haste. It became apparent even to the most panicky that war with the
United States could not come immediately, for the American Commission of
Inquiry must first report. For a time Lord Salisbury hoped that Congress
would not support the President--a contingency which not infrequently
happened under Cleveland's Administration. On this question of foreign
relations, however, Congress stood squarely behind the President. Lord
Salisbury then toyed with the hope that the matter might be delayed
until Cleveland's term expired, in the hope he might have an opportunity
of dealing with a less strenuous successor.
In the summer of 1896, John Hay, an intimate friend of Major McKinley,
the probable Republican candidate for the presidency, was in England,
where he was a well-known figure. There he met privately Arthur J.
Balfour, representing Lord Salisbury, and Sir William Harcourt, the
leader of the Opposition. Hay convinced them that a change in the
Administration of his country would involve no retreat from the existing
American position. The British Government thereupon determined to yield
but attempted to cover its retreat by merging the question with one
of general arbitration. This proposal, however, was rejected, and Lord
Salisbury then agreed to "an equitable settlement" of the Venezuela
question by empowering the British Ambassador at Washington to begin
negotiations "either with the representative of Venezuela or with the
Government of the United States acting as the friend of Venezuela."
The achievement of the Administration consisted in forcing Great Britain
to recognize the interest of the United States in the dispute with
Venezuela, on the ground that Venezuela was one of the nations of the
Western Hemisphere. This concession practically involved recognition of
the interest of the United States in case of future disputes with other
American powers. The arbitration treaty thus arranged between Great
Britain and Venezuela under the auspices of the United States submitted
the whole disputed area to judicial decision but adopted the rule that
fifty years of occupation should give a sufficient title for possession.
The arbitration tribunal, which met in Paris in 1899, decided on a
division of the disputed territory but found that the claim of Great
Britain was, on the whole, more nearly correct than that of Venezuela.
Cleveland's startling and unconventional method of dealing with this
controversy has been explained by all kinds of conjectures. For example,
it has been charged that his message was the product of a fishing
trip on which whisky flowed too freely; on the other hand, it has been
asserted that the message was an astute political play for the thunder
of patriotic applause. More seriously, Cleveland has been charged by one
set of critics with bluffing, and by another with recklessly running
the risk of war on a trivial provocation. The charge of bluffing comes
nearer the fact, for President Cleveland probably had never a moment's
doubt that the forces making for peace between the two nations would be
victorious. If he may be said to have thrown a bomb, he certainly had
attached a safety valve to it, for the investigation which he proposed
could not but give time for the passions produced by his message to
cool. It is interesting to note in passing that delay for investigation
was a device which that other great Democrat, William Jennings Bryan,
Cleveland's greatest political enemy, sought, during his short term as
Secretary of State under President Wilson, to make universal in a series
of arbitration treaties--treaties which now bind the United States and
many other countries, how tightly no man can tell.
While, however, Cleveland's action was based rather on a belief in peace
than on an expectation of war, it cannot be dismissed as merely a
bluff. Not only was he convinced that the principle involved was worth
establishing whatever the cost might be, but he was certain that the
method he employed was the only one which could succeed, for in no other
way was it possible to wake England to a realization of the fact that
the United States was full-grown and imbued with a new consciousness of
its strength. So far was Cleveland's message from provoking war that it
caused the people of Great Britain vitally to realize for the first time
the importance of friendship with the United States. It marks a change
in their attitude toward things American which found expression not only
in diplomacy, but in various other ways, and which strikingly revealed
itself in the international politics of the next few years. Not that
hostility was converted into affection, but a former condescension gave
way to an appreciative friendliness towards the people of the United
States.
The reaction in America was somewhat different. Cleveland had united the
country upon a matter of foreign policy, not completely, it is true,
but to a greater degree than Blaine had ever succeeded in doing. More
important than this unity of feeling throughout the land, however,
was the development of a spirit of inquiry among the people. Suddenly
confronted by changes of policy that might bring wealth or poverty, life
or death, the American people began to take the foreign relations of
the United States more seriously than they had since the days of the
Napoleonic wars. Yet it is not surprising that when the Venezuela
difficulty had been settled and Secretary Olney and Sir Julian
Pauncefote, the British Ambassador, had concluded a general treaty of
arbitration, the Senate should have rejected it, for the lesson that
caution was necessary in international affairs had been driven home.
Time was needed for the new generation to formulate its foreign policy.
CHAPTER VII. The Outbreak Of The War With Spain
Before the nineteenth century ended, the Samoan, Hawaiian, and
Venezuelan episodes had done much to quicken a national consciousness in
the people of the United States and at the same time to break down their
sense of isolation from the rest of the world. Commerce and trade were
also important factors in overcoming this traditional isolation. Not
only was American trade growing, but it was changing in character.
Argentina was beginning to compete with the United States in exporting
wheat and meat, while American manufacturers were reaching the point
where they were anxious for foreign markets in which they felt they
could compete with the products of Great Britain and Germany.
In a thousand ways and without any loss of vigor the sense of American
nationality was expressing itself. The study of American history was
introduced into the lower schools, and a new group of historians began
scientifically to investigate whence the American people had come and
what they really were. In England, such popular movements find instant
expression in literature; in the United States they take the form of
societies. Innumerable patriotic organizations such as the "Daughters
of the American Revolution" and a host of others, sought to trace out
American genealogy and to perpetuate the memory of American military and
naval achievements. Respect for the American flag was taught in schools,
and the question was debated as to whether its use in comic opera
indicated respect or insult. This new nationalism was unlike the
expansionist movement of the fifties in that it laid no particular
stress upon the incorporation of the neighboring republics by a process
of federation. On the whole, the people had lost their faith in the
assimilating influence of republican institutions and did not desire to
annex alien territory and races. They were now more concerned with the
consolidation of their own country and with its place in the world. Nor
were they as neglectful as their fathers had been of the material means
by which to accomplish their somewhat indefinite purposes.
The reconstruction of the American Navy, which had attained such
magnitude and played so important a part in the Civil War but which
had been allowed to sink into the merest insignificance, was begun by
William E. Chandler, the Secretary of the Navy under President Arthur.
William C. Whitney, his successor under President Cleveland, continued
the work with energy. Captain Alfred T. Mahan began in 1883 to publish
that series of studies in naval history which won him world-wide
recognition and did so much to revolutionize prevailing conceptions of
naval strategy. A Naval War College was established in 1884, at Newport,
Rhode Island, where naval officers could continue the studies which they
had begun at Annapolis.
The total neglect of the army was not entirely the result of
indifference. The experience with volunteers in the Civil War had given
almost universal confidence that the American people could constitute
themselves an army at will. The presence of several heroes of that war
in succession in the position of commander-in-chief of the army had
served to diffuse a sense of security among the people. Here and there
military drill was introduced in school and college, but the regular
army attracted none of the romantic interest that clung about the navy,
and the militia was almost totally neglected. Individual officers, such
as young Lieutenant Tasker Bliss, began to study the new technique of
warfare which was to make fighting on land as different from that of the
wars of Napoleon as naval warfare was different from that of the time of
Nelson. Yet in spite of obviously changing conditions, no provision
was made for the encouragement of young army officers in advanced and
up-to-date Studies. While their contemporaries in other professions were
adding graduate training to the general education which a college gave,
the graduates of West Point were considered to have made themselves in
four years sufficiently proficient for all the purposes of warfare.
By the middle nineties thoughtful students of contemporary movements
were aware that a new epoch in national history was approaching. What
form this national development would take was, however, still uncertain,
and some great event was obviously required to fix its character.
Blaine's Pan-Americanism had proved insufficient and, though the baiting
of Great Britain was welcome to a vociferous minority, the forces making
for peace were stronger than those in favor of war. Whatever differences
there were did not reach to fundamentals but were rather in the nature
of legal disputes between neighbors whom a real emergency would quickly
bring to the assistance of each other. A crisis involving interest,
propinquity, and sentiment, was needed to shake the nation into an
activity which would clear its views.
At the very time of the Venezuela difficulty, such a crisis was taking
shape in the Caribbean. Cuba had always been an object of immediate
concern to the United States. The statesmen of the Jeffersonian period
all looked to its eventually becoming part of American territory. Three
quarters of a century before, when the revolt of the Spanish colonies
had halted on the shores of the mainland, leaving the rich island of
Cuba untouched, John Quincy Adams, on April 28, 1823, in a lengthy and
long-considered dispatch to Mr. Nelson, the American Minister to Spain,
asserted that the United States could not consent to the passing of Cuba
from the flag of Spain to that of any other European power, that under
existing conditions Cuba was considered safer in the hands of Spain than
in those of the revolutionaries, and that the United States stood for
the maintenance of the status quo, with the expectation that Cuba would
ultimately become American territory.
By the late forties and the fifties, however, the times had changed,
and American policy had changed with them. It was becoming more and more
evident that, although no real revolution had as yet broken out, the
"Pearl of the Antilles" was bound to Spain by compulsion rather than by
love. In the United States there was a general feeling that the time had
at last come to realize the vision of Jefferson and Adams and to annex
Cuba. But the complications of the slavery question prevented immediate
annexation. As a slave colony which might become a slave state, the
South wanted Cuba, but the majority in the North did not.
After the Civil War in the United States was over, revolution at length
flared forth in 1868, from end to end of the island. Sympathy with the
Cubans was widespread in the United States. The hand of the Government,
however, was stayed by recent history. Americans felt keenly the right
of governments to exert their full strength to put down rebellion, for
they themselves were prosecuting against Great Britain a case based on
what they contended was her too lax enforcement of her obligations to
the American Government and on the assistance which she had given to
the South. The great issue determined the lesser, and for ten years the
United States watched the Cuban revolution without taking part in it,
but not, however, without protest and remonstrance. Claiming special
rights as a close and necessarily interested neighbor, the United States
constantly made suggestions as to the manner of the contest and its
settlement. Some of these Spain grudgingly allowed, and it was in part
by American insistence that slavery was finally abolished in the island.
Further internal reform, however, was not the wish and was perhaps
beyond the power of Spain. Although the revolution was seemingly brought
to a close in 1878, its embers continued to smolder for nearly a score
of years until in 1895 they again burst into flame.
War in Cuba could not help affecting in a very intimate way the people
of the United States. They bought much the greater part of the chief
Cuban crops, sugar and tobacco. American capital had been invested in
the island, particularly in plantations. For years Cubans of liberal
tendencies had sent their sons to be educated in the United States, very
many of whom had been naturalized before returning home. Cuba was but
ninety miles from Florida, and much of our coastwise shipping passed
in sight of the island. The people of the United States were aroused
to sympathy and to a desire to be of assistance when they saw that the
Cubans, so near geographically and so bound to them by many commercial
ties, were engaged against a foreign monarchy in a struggle for
freedom and a republican form of government. Ethan Allen headed a
Cuban committee in New York and by his historic name associated the new
revolution with the memory of the American struggle for freedom. The
Cuban flag was displayed in the United States, Cuban bonds were sold,
and volunteers and arms were sent to the aid of the insurgents.
Owing to the nature of the country and the character of the people, a
Cuban revolution had its peculiarities. The island is a very long and
rugged mountain chain surrounded by fertile, cultivated plains. The
insurgents from their mountain refuges spied out the land, pounced upon
unprotected spots, burned crops and sugar mills, and were off before
troops could arrive. The portion of the population in revolt at any
particular time was rarely large. Many were insurgents one week and
peaceful citizens the next. The fact that the majority of the population
sympathized with the insurgents enabled the latter to melt into the
landscape without leaving a sign. A provisional government hurried
on mule-back from place to place. The Spanish Government, contrary to
custom, acted at this time with some energy: it put two hundred thousand
soldiers into the island; it raised large levies of loyal Cubans; it was
almost always victorious; yet the revolution would not down. Martinez
Campos, the "Pacificator" of the first revolution, was this time unable
to protect the plains. In 1896 he was replaced by General Weyler, who
undertook a new system. He started to corral the insurgents by a chain
of blockhouses and barbed wire fences from ocean to sea--the first
completely guarded cross-country line since the frontier walls of the
Roman Empire in Europe and the Great Wall of China in Asia. He then
proceeded to starve out the insurgents by destroying all the food in the
areas to which they were confined. As the revolutionists lived largely
on the pillage of plantations in their neighborhood, this policy
involved the destruction of the crops of the loyal as well as of the
disloyal, of Americans as well as of Cubans. The population of the
devastated plantations was gathered into reconcentrado camps where,
penned promiscuously into small reservations, they were entirely
dependent upon a Government which was poor in supplies and as careless
of sanitation as it was of humanity. The camps became pest-holes,
spreading contagion to all regions having intercourse with Cuba, and in
vain the interned victims were crying aloud for succor.
This new policy of disregard for property and life deeply involved
American interests and sensibilities. The State Department maintained
that Spain was responsible for the destruction of American property
by insurgents. This Spain denied, for, while she never officially
recognized the insurgents as belligerents, the insurrection had passed
beyond her control. This was, indeed, the position which the Spanish
Treaty Claims Commission subsequently took in ruling that to establish a
claim it would be necessary to show that the destruction of property was
the consequence of negligence upon the part of Spanish authorities or
of military orders. Of other serious grievances there was no doubt.
American citizens were imprisoned, interned in reconcentrado camps, and
otherwise maltreated. The nationality of American sufferers was in some
cases disputed, and the necessity of dealing with each of these doubtful
cases by the slow and roundabout method of complaint to Madrid, which
referred matters back to Havana, which reported to Madrid, served but
to add irritation to delay. American resentment, too, was fired by
the sufferings of the Cubans themselves as much as by the losses and
difficulties of American citizens.
One change of extreme importance had taken place since the Cuban revolt
of 1868-78. This was the development of the modern American newspaper.
It was no longer possible for the people at large to remain ignorant
of what was taking place at their very doors. Correspondents braved the
yellow fever and imprisonment in order to furnish the last details of
each new horror. Foremost in this work were William Randolph Hearst, who
made new records of sensationalism in his papers, particularly in the
New York Journal, and Joseph Pulitzer, proprietor of the New York World.
Hearst is reported to have said that it cost him three millions to
bring on the Spanish American War. The net result of all this newspaper
activity was that it became impossible for the American people to remain
in happy ignorance of what was going on in the world. Their reaction to
the facts was their own.
President Cleveland modeled his policy upon that of Grant and Grant's
Secretary, Hamilton Fish. He did not recognize the independence of the
Cuban republic, for that would have meant immediate war with Spain; nor
did he recognize even its belligerency. Public men in the United States
were still convinced that Great Britain had erred in recognizing the
belligerency of the Southern Confederacy, and consistency of foreign
policy demanded that the Government should not accord recognition to a
Government without a navy, a capital, or fixed territory. This decision
made it particularly difficult for the President to perform his
acknowledged duty to Spain, of preventing aid being sent from the
United States to the insurgents. He issued the proper proclamations, and
American officials were reasonably diligent, it is true, but without any
of the special powers which would have resulted from a recognized state
of war they were unable to prevent a leakage of supplies. As a result
General Weyler had some ground for saying, though with characteristic
Spanish extravagance, that it was American aid which gave life to the
revolt.
President Cleveland energetically pressed all cases involving American
rights; he offered mediation; he remonstrated against the cruelty
of Weyler's methods; he pointed out that the United States could not
forever allow an island so near and so closely related to be in flames
without intervention. Spain, however, assumed a rather lofty tone,
and Cleveland was able to accomplish nothing. Senator Lodge and other
Republicans violently attacked his policy as procrastinating, and the
nation as a whole looked forward with interest to the approaching change
in administration.
William McKinley, who became President on March 4, 1897, was not
actively interested in foreign affairs. This he illustrated in a
striking way by appointing as Secretary of State John Sherman of Ohio,
a man of undoubtedly high ability but one whose whole reputation rested
upon his financial leadership, and who now, at the age of seventy-four,
was known to be incapacitated for vigorous action. To the very moment of
crisis, McKinley was opposed to a war with Spain; he was opposed to the
form of the declaration of war and he was opposed to the terms of
peace which ended the war. Emphatically not a leader, he was, however,
unsurpassed in his day as a reader of public opinion, and he believed
his function to be that of interpreting the national mind. Nor did
he yield his opinion in a grudging manner. He grasped broadly the
consequences of each new position which the public assumed, and he was a
master at securing harmonious cooperation for a desired end.
The platform of the Republican party had declared: "The Government
of Spain having lost control of Cuba, and being unable to protect the
property or lives of resident American citizens, or to comply with its
treaty obligations, we believe that the Government of the United States
should actively use its influence and good offices to restore peace and
give independence to the island." With this mandate, McKinley sought to
free Cuba, absolutely or practically, while at the same time maintaining
peace with Spain. On June 26, 1897, Secretary Sherman sent a note to
the Spanish Minister, protesting against the Spanish methods of war and
asserting that "the inclusion of a thousand or more of our own citizens
among the victims of this policy" gives "the President the right of
specific remonstrance, but in the just fulfillment of his duty he cannot
limit himself to these formal grounds of complaint. He is bound by the
higher obligation of his representative office to protest against the
uncivilized and inhuman conduct of the campaign in the island of Cuba.
He conceives that he has a right to demand that a war, conducted almost
within sight of our shores and grievously affecting American citizens
and their interests throughout the length and breadth of the land, shall
at least be conducted according to the military codes of civilization."
Negotiations between the United States and Spain have always been
peculiarly irritating, owing to temperamental differences between the
two peoples. McKinley, however, had in mind a program for which there
was some hope of success. He was willing to agree to some form of words
which would leave Spain in titular possession of the island, thereby
making a concession to Spanish pride, for he knew that Spain was always
more loath to surrender the form than the substance. This hope of the
President was strengthened, towards the end of 1897, by a dramatic
incident in the political life of Spain. On the 8th of August, the
Spanish Prime Minister, the Conservative Antonio Canovas del Castillo,
was assassinated, and was succeeded on the 4th of October by the
Liberal, Praxedes Mateo Sagasta.
The new Spanish Government listened to American demands and made large
promises of amelioration of conditions in Cuba. General Blanco was
substituted for General Weyler, whose cruelty had made him known in the
American press as "the Butcher"; it was announced that the reconcentrado
camps would be broken up; and the Queen Regent decreed the legislative
autonomy of Cuba. Arrangements had been made for the handling of minor
disputes directly with the Governor-General of Cuba through the American
Consul General at Havana, General Fitzhugh Lee. On December 6, 1897,
McKinley, in his annual message to Congress, counseled patience.
Convinced of the good intentions of the new Spanish Government, he
sought to induce American public sentiment to allow it time to act. He
continued nevertheless to urge upon Spain the fact that in order to be
effective action must be prompt.
Public sentiment against Spain grew every day stronger in the United
States and was given startling impulse in February, 1898, by two of
those critical incidents which are almost sure to occur when general
causes are potent enough to produce a white heat of popular feeling. The
Spanish Minister in the United States, Senor Dupuy de Lome, had aroused
the suspicion, during his summer residence on the north shore of
Massachusetts Bay, that he was collecting information which would be
useful to a Spanish fleet operating on that coast. Whether this charge
was true or not, at any rate he wrote a letter to a friend, a Madrid
editor visiting Havana, in which he characterized McKinley as a
vacillating and timeserving politician. Alert American newspaper men,
who practically constituted a secret service of some efficiency, managed
to obtain the letter. On February 9, 1898, De Lome saw a facsimile of
this letter printed in a newspaper and at once cabled his resignation.
In immediately accepting De Lome's resignation Spain anticipated an
American demand for his recall and thus saved Spanish pride, though
undoubtedly at the expense of additional irritation in the United
States, where it was thought that he should have been punished instead
of being allowed to slip away.
Infinitely more serious than this diplomatic faux pas was the disaster
which befell the United States battleship Maine: On January 24, 1898,
the Government had announced its intention of sending a warship on a
friendly visit to Havana; with the desire of impressing the local Cuban
authorities with the imminence of American power. Not less important was
the purpose of affording protection to American citizens endangered
by the rioting of Spaniards, who were angry because they believed that
Sagasta by his conciliatory policy was betraying the interests of Spain.
Accordingly the Maine, commanded by Captain Sigsbee, was dispatched to
Cuba and arrived on the 25th of January in the harbor of Havana. On the
night of the 15th of February, an explosion utterly wrecked the vessel
and killed 260 of the crew, besides wounding ninety.
The responsibility for this calamity has never been positively
determined. It may have resulted from an accidental internal explosion,
from the official action of the Spanish authorities, from the unofficial
zeal of subordinate Spanish officers, or even--as suggested by Speaker
Reed who was an opponent of war--by action of the insurgents themselves
with the purpose of embroiling the United States and Spain. The careful
investigations which were afterwards made brought to light evidence of
both internal and external explosions; it therefore seems probable
that an external mine was the prime cause of the disaster and that the
internal explosion followed as a consequence. No direct evidence has
been discovered which would fix the responsibility for the placing of
the mine, but it is reasonable to attribute it to the Spanish hotheads
of Havana. It is not impossible that the insurgents were responsible;
but it is incredible that the Spanish Government planned the explosion.
The hasty, though perhaps natural, conclusion to which American public
sentiment at once leaped, however, was that the disaster was the work of
Spain, without making any discrimination between the Government itself
and the disaffected factions. A general sorrow and anger throughout the
United States reinforced the popular anxiety for national interests
and the humane regard for the Cubans. Press and public oratory
demanded official action. "Remember the Maine!" was an admonition
which everywhere met the eye and ear. The venerable and trusted Senator
Proctor, who visited Cuba, came back with the report that conditions on
the island were intolerable. On the 9th of March, "Uncle Joe" Cannon,
the watchdog of the Treasury, introduced a bill appropriating fifty
million dollars to be used for national defense at the discretion of the
President. No doubt remained in the public mind that war would result
unless the withdrawal of Spanish authority from Cuba could be arranged
peaceably and immediately.
Even in this final stage of the negotiations it is sufficiently
obvious that the United States Government was particularly desirous of
preserving peace. There is also little doubt that the Spanish Government
in good faith had the same desire. The intelligent classes in Spain
realized that the days of Spanish rule in Cuba were practically over.
The Liberals believed that, under the circumstances, war with the
United States would be a misfortune. Many of the Conservatives, however,
believed that a war, even if unsuccessful, was the only way of saving
the dynasty, and that the dynasty was worth saving. Public opinion in
Spain was therefore no less inflamed than in America, but it was less
well-informed. Cartoons represented the American hog, which would
readily fall before the Spanish rapier accustomed to its nobler
adversary the bull. Spanish pride, impervious to facts and statistics,
would brook no supine submission on the part of its people to foreign
demands. It was a question how far the Spanish Government could bring
itself to yield points in season which it fully realized must be yielded
in the end.
The negotiation waxed too hot for the aged John Sherman, and was
conducted by the Assistant Secretary, William Rufus Day, a close friend
of the President, but a man comparatively unknown to the public. When
Day officially succeeded Sherman (April 26, 1898) he had to face as
fierce a light of publicity as ever beat upon a public man in the United
States. Successively in charge of the Cuban negotiations, Secretary
of State from April to September, 1898, President of the Paris Peace
Commission in October, in December, after a career of prime national
importance for nine months in which he had demonstrated his high
competence, Day retired to the relative obscurity of the United States
circuit bench. Although later raised to the Supreme Court, he has never
since been a national figure. As an example of a meteoric career of a
man of solid rather than meteoric qualities, his case is unparalleled in
American history.
The acting Secretary of State telegraphed the ultimatum of the
Government on March 27, 1898, to General Stewart L. Woodford, then
Minister to Spain. By the terms of this document, in the first place
there was to be an immediate amnesty which would last until the 1st of
October and during which Spain would communicate with the insurgents
through the President of the United States; in the second place, the
reconcentrado policy was to cease immediately, and relief for the
suffering Cubans was to be admitted from the United States. Then, if
satisfactory terms were not reached by the 1st of October, the
President was to be recognized as arbiter between the Spaniards and the
insurgents.
On the 30th of March, Spain abrogated the reconcentrado policy in
the "western provinces of Cuba," and on the following day offered to
arbitrate the questions arising out of the sinking of the Maine. On
Sunday, the 3d of April, a cablegram from General Woodford was received
by the State Department indicating that Spain was seeking a formula for
an armistice that should not too obviously appear to be submission and
suggesting that the President ask the Pope to intervene and that the
United States abstain from all show of force. "If you can still give me
time and reasonable liberty of action," ran Woodford's message, "I will
get you the peace you desire so much and for which you have labored
so hard." To this the Secretary of State immediately replied that the
President would not ask the intervention of the Pope, and that the
Government would use the fleet as it saw fit. "Would the peace you are
so confident of securing," asked the Secretary, "mean the independence
of Cuba? The President cannot hold his message longer than Tuesday." On
Tuesday, the 5th of April, General Woodford cabled:
"Should the Queen proclaim the following before twelve o'clock noon of
Wednesday, April 6th, will you sustain the Queen, and can you prevent
hostile action by Congress? At the request of the Holy Father, in
this Passion Week and in the name of Christ, I proclaim immediate and
unconditional suspension of hostilities in the island of Cuba. This
suspension is to become immediately effective as soon as accepted by
the insurgents of that island, and is to continue for the space of
six months to the 5th day of October, 1898. I do this to give time for
passions to cease, and in the sincere hope and belief that during this
suspension permanent and honorable peace may be obtained between the
insular government of Cuba and those of my subjects in that island who
are now in rebellion against the authority of Spain...." "Please read
this in the light of all my previous telegrams and letters. I believe
this means peace, which the sober judgment of our people will approve
long before next November, and which must be approved at the bar of
final history."
To this message the Secretary of State replied:
"The President highly appreciates the Queen's desire for peace. He
cannot assume to influence the action of the American Congress beyond a
discharge of his constitutional duty in transmitting the whole matter to
them with such recommendations as he deems necessary and expedient."
On the 9th of April the Queen granted the amnesty, on the formula of a
request by the European powers. On the next day, General Woodford cabled
that the United States could obtain for Cuba a satisfactory autonomy, or
independence, or the cession of the island.
It was evident that there was no difference of opinion among those in
authority in the United States as to the fact that Cuba must be severed
from Spain. There were, however, differences of judgment as to which of
the three methods suggested by Woodford was preferable, and there was a
substantial disagreement as to the means necessary to realize the aims
of the American Government. General Woodford believed that Spain would
grant the demands of the United States, if she were given time and were
not pressed to the point of endangering her dignity. The overwhelming
majority in Congress, and particularly the leaders of the dominant
Republican party with the exception of Speaker Reed, refused to believe
in the sincerity of the Spanish Government. The Administration could not
overlook the fact that the Spanish Government, however sincere it might
be, might not be able to execute its promises. Great Britain had just
recognized the United States as intermediary in a dispute between
herself and one of the American nations. Spain, in a dispute much
more serious to the United States, refused publicly to admit American
intervention, while she did recognize that of the Pope and the European
powers. Was it then possible that a Government which was either
unwilling or afraid openly to acknowledge American interest in April
would, by October, yield to the wishes of the Administration? Was it
certain or likely that if the Spanish Government did so yield, it would
remain in power?
Reluctantly President McKinley decided that he could not announce to
Congress that he had secured the acceptance of the American policy.
In his message to Congress on the 11th of April, he reviewed the
negotiation and concluded by recommending forcible intervention. On
the 19th of April, Congress, by joint resolution, called upon Spain to
withdraw from Cuba and authorized the President to use force to compel
her to do so. Congress, however, was not content to leave the future of
the island merely indefinite, but added that the United States did not
desire Cuba and that the "people of the island of Cuba are, and of
right ought to be, free and independent." This decision ruled out both
autonomy and cession as solutions of the problem. It put an end to the
American century-long dream of annexing Cuba, unless the people of the
island themselves desired such a relation; and it practically determined
the recognition of the unstable Cuban Government then in existence. This
decision on the part of Congress, however, reflected the deep-seated
conviction of the American people regarding freedom and plainly put
the issue where the popular majority wished it to be--upon a basis of
unselfish sympathy with struggling neighbors.
The resolution was signed by the President on the 20th of April. On
the following day, Admiral Sampson's fleet left Key West with orders to
blockade the coast of Cuba, and, in the absence of a formal declaration
of war, this strategic move may be considered as its actual beginning.
On the 25th of April, Congress declared "that, war be, and the same
is hereby, declared to exist, and that war has existed since the
twenty-first of April, Anno Domini, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight,
including the said day, between the United States of America and the
Kingdom of Spain."
CHAPTER VIII. Dewey And Manila Day
War had begun, but the majority of the American people had hardly
considered seriously how they were to fight. Fortunately their navy
already existed, and it was upon it that they had to rely in the opening
moments of hostility. Ton for ton, gun for gun, it stood on fairly even
terms with that of Spain. Captain, later Admiral, Mahan, considered that
the loss of the Maine shifted a slight paper advantage from the United
States to Spain. In personnel, however, the American Navy soon proved
its overwhelming superiority, which was due not solely to innate ability
but also to sound professional training.
The Secretary of the Navy, John D. Long, had a thorough appreciation
of values. Although Congress had not provided for a general staff,
he himself appointed a Naval War Board, which served many of the same
purposes. Upon this Board he appointed Rear Admiral Sicard, who but
for ill health would have commanded the main fleet; Captain A. S.
Crowninshield; and, most important, Captain A. T. Mahan, whose equal as
master of the theory and history of naval warfare no navy of the world
could show. The spirit of the fighting force was speedily exhibited by
such exploits as that of Lieutenant Victor Blue in boldly plunging into
the Cuban wilderness to obtain information regarding the position of
Admiral Cervera's fleet, though in this dangerous sort of work the
individual palm must be given to Lieutenant A. S. Rowan of the army,
whose energy and initiative in overcoming obstacles are immortalized
in Elbert Hubbard's "Message to Garcia," the best American parable of
efficient service since the days of Franklin.
Efficient, however, as was the navy, it was far from being a complete
fighting force. Its fighting vessels were totally unsupplied with
that cloud of servers--colliers, mother ships, hospital ships, and
scouts--which we now know must accompany a fleet. The merchant marine,
then at almost its lowest point, was not in a position entirely to fill
the need. The United States had no extensive store of munitions. Over
all operations there hung a cloud of uncertainty. Except for the short
campaign of the Chino-Japanese War of 1894, modern implements of sea war
remained untested. Scientific experiment, valuable and necessary as
it was, did not carry absolute conviction regarding efficient service.
Would the weapons of offense or defense prove most effective? Accidents
on shipboard and even the total destruction of vessels had been common
to all navies during times of peace. That the Maine had not been a
victim of the failure of her own mechanism was not then certain. Such
misgivings were in the minds of many officers. Indeed, a report of the
total disappearance of two battling fleets would not have found the
watchful naval experts of the world absolutely incredulous. So much the
higher, therefore, was the heroism of those who led straight to battle
that complex and as yet unproved product of the brain--the modern
warship.
While negotiations with Spain were in their last stages, at the orders
of Secretary Long a swift vessel left San Francisco for Honolulu. There
its precious cargo was transferred to the warship Baltimore, which
then made hurriedly for Hongkong. It contained the ammunition which
was absolutely necessary if Commodore George Dewey, in command of the
Asiatic squadron, was to play a part in the war. The position of his
squadron, even after it received its ammunition, was indeed singular.
After the war began, it was unable to obtain coal or other supplies from
any neutral port and at the same time it was equally unable to remain in
any such port without being interned for the duration of the war. There
remained but one course of action. It must not be forgotten that the
Spanish empire stretched eastward as well as westward. Already William
Pitt, when he had foreseen in 1760 the entrance of Spain into the war
which England was then waging with France, had planned expeditions
against both Cuba and the Philippines. Now in 1898 the Navy Department
of the United States, anticipating war, saw in the proximity of
the American squadron to the Spanish islands of the Philippines an
opportunity rather than a problem. Commodore George Dewey, the commander
of the Asiatic squadron, was fully prepared to enter into the plan.
As early as the seventies, when the Virginius affair * threatened war
between Spain and the United States, Dewey, then a commander on the west
coast of Mexico, had proposed, in case war were declared, that he sail
for the Philippines and capture Manila. Now he was prepared to seek in
the hostile ports of those islands the liberty that international law
forbade him in the neutral ports of Asia. How narrow a margin of time he
had in which to make this bold stroke may be realized from the fact that
the Baltimore, his second vessel in size, reached Hongkong on the 22d of
April and went into dry dock on the 23d, and that on the following day
the squadron was ordered either to leave the port or to intern.
* A dispute between the United States and Spain, arising out of
the capture of the Virginius, an American vessel engaged in
filibustering off the coast of Cuba, and the execution at Santiago of
the captain and a number of the crew and passengers. The vessel and the
surviving passengers were finally restored by the Spanish authorities,
who agreed to punish the officials responsible for the illegal acts.
The little armada of six vessels with which Dewey started for the
Philippines was puny enough from the standpoint of today; yet it was
strong enough to cope with the larger but more old-fashioned Spanish
fleet, or with the harbor defenses unless these included mines--of
whose absence Dewey was at the moment unaware. If, however, the Spanish
commander could unite the strength of his vessels and that of the coast
defenses, Dewey might find it impossible to destroy the Spanish fleet.
In that case, the plight of the American squadron would be precarious,
if its ultimate self-destruction or internment did not become necessary.
Commodore Dewey belonged to that school of American naval officers who
combine the spirit of Farragut's "Damn the torpedoes" with a thorough
knowledge of the latest scientific devices. Though he would take all
precautions, he would not allow the unknown to hold him back. After a
brief rendezvous for tuning up at Mirs Bay near Hongkong on the Chinese
coast, Dewey steered straight for Subig Bay in the Philippines, where
he expected to meet his opponent. Finding the Bay empty, he steamed on
without pause and entered the Boca Grande, the southern channel leading
to Manila Bay, at midnight of the 30th of April. Slowly, awaiting
daylight, but steadily he approached Manila. Coming within three miles
of the city, he discovered the Spanish fleet, half a dozen miles to the
southeast, at the naval station of Cavite. Still without a pause, the
American squadron moved to the attack.
The Spanish Admiral Montojo tried, though ineffectually, to come to
close quarters, for his guns were of smaller caliber than those of the
American ships, but he was forced to keep his vessels for the most part
in line between the Americans and the shore. Commodore Dewey sailed back
and forth five times, raking the Spanish ships and the shore batteries
with his fire. Having guns of longer range than those of the Spaniards,
he could have kept out of their fire and slowly hammered them to pieces;
but he preferred a closer position where he could use more guns and
therefore do quicker work. How well he was justified in taking this risk
is shown by the fact that no man was killed on the American fleet that
day and only a few were wounded. After a few hours' fighting, with a
curious interval when the Americans withdrew and breakfasted, Dewey
completed the destruction or capture of the Spanish fleet, and found
himself the victor with his own ships uninjured and in full fighting
trim. By the 3d of May, the naval station at Cavite and the batteries at
the entrance of Manila Bay were in the hands of Commodore Dewey, and
the Asiatic squadron had wrested a safe and commodious harbor from the
enemy.
Secure for the moment and free, Dewey found himself in as precarious a
strategic position as has ever confronted a naval officer. With his
six war vessels and 1707 men, he was unsupported and at least a month's
voyage from America. It was two months, indeed, before any American
troops or additional ships reached him. Meanwhile the Spaniards held
Manila, and a Spanish fleet, formidable under the circumstances, began
to sail for the Philippines. Nevertheless Dewey proceeded to blockade
Manila, which was besieged on the land side by the Filipino insurgents
under Aguinaldo. This siege was indeed an advantage to the Americans as
it distressed the enemy and gave an opportunity to obtain supplies from
the mainland. Dewey, however, placed no confidence in Aguinaldo, and
further was instructed by Secretary Long on the 26th of May as follows:
"It is desirable, as far as possible, and consistent for your success
and safety, not to have political alliances with the insurgents or any
faction in the islands that would incur liability to maintain their
cause in the future." Meanwhile foreign nations were rushing vessels
to this critical spot in the Pacific. On the 17th of June, Dewey sent a
cable, which had to be relayed to Hongkong by boat, reporting that there
were collected, in Manila Bay, a French and a Japanese warship, two
British, and three German. Another German man-of-war was expected, which
would make the German squadron as strong as the American.
The presence of so large a German force, it was felt, could hardly fail
to have definite significance, and therefore caused an anxiety at home
which would, indeed, have been all the keener had Admiral Dewey not kept
many of his troubles to himself. European sympathy was almost wholly
with Spain. The French, for instance, had invested heavily in Spanish
bonds, many of which were secured on the Cuban revenues. There was also
perhaps some sense of solidarity among the Latin races in Europe and a
feeling that the United States was a colossus willfully exerting itself
against a weak antagonist. It was not likely that this feeling was
strong enough to lead to action, but at least during that summer of
1898 it was somewhat unpleasant for American tourists in Paris, and an
untoward episode might easily have brought unfriendly sentiment to
a dangerous head. Austria had never been very friendly to the United
States, particularly since the execution of the Emperor Maximilian in
Mexico, which his brother Francis Joseph believed the United States
could have prevented, and was tied to Spain by the fact that the Queen
Regent was an Austrian Hapsburg.
It was evident, moreover, that in Europe there was a vague but
nevertheless real dread of the economic potentialities of the United
States--a fear which led, in the next few years, to the suggestion that
the American invasion of trade should be resisted by a general European
economic organization which would even overrule the natural tendency
of powers to group themselves into hostile camps. In 1898 it seemed
possible that the United States was consciously planning to become a
world military power also, and a feeling, not exactly like Blaine's
"America for the Americans" but rather of "the world for Europeans,"
gathered force to meet any attempt at American expansion.
Even before war had broken out between Spain and the United States, this
sentiment had sufficiently crystallized to result in a not quite usual
diplomatic action. On April 6, 1898, the representatives of Great
Britain, Germany, France, Austro-Hungary, Russia, and Italy, presented a
note to the Government of the United States making "a pressing appeal
to the feelings of humanity and moderation of the President and of the
American people in their differences with Spain. They earnestly hope
that further negotiations will lead to an agreement which, while
securing the maintenance of peace, will afford all necessary guarantees
for the reestablishment of order in Cuba."
Of all the European powers none was more interested than Germany in the
situation in the Western Hemisphere. There seems to be no doubt that the
Kaiser made the remark to an Englishman with reference to the Spanish
American War: "If I had had a larger fleet I would have taken Uncle Sam
by the scruff of his neck." Though the reason for Germany's attitude
has never been proven by documents, circumstantial evidence points
convincingly to the explanation. The quest for a colonial empire, upon
which Bismarck had embarked rather reluctantly and late, had been taken
up with feverish zeal by William II, his successor in the direction of
German policy. Not content with the commercial conquests which German
trade was making in all countries of the earth, the Kaiser wanted a
place in the sun exclusively his own. The world seemed, however, as
firmly closed to the late-comer in search of colonies as it was open to
him as the bearer of cheap and useful goods. Such remnants of territory
as lay on the counter he quickly seized, but they hardly made an empire.
It is not, therefore, a daring conjecture that the Kaiser was
as carefully watching the decrepit empire of Spain as he was the
traditional sick man of Europe, the empire of Turkey. In 1898
revolutions were sapping both the extremities of the Spanish dominions.
The Kaiser, while he doubtless realized that Cuba would not fall to
him, in all probability expected that he would be able to get the
Philippines. Certain it is that at the close of the Spanish American War
he bought all the remaining Spanish possessions in the Pacific. If such
had been his expectations with regard to the Philippines, the news of
Dewey's victory must have brought him a bitter disappointment, while at
the same time the careless and indiscreet remark of an American official
to certain Germans--"We don't want the Philippines; why don't you take
them?"--may well have given him a feeling that perhaps the question was
still open.
Under such circumstances, with Europe none too well-disposed and the
Kaiser watching events with a jealous eye, it was very important to
the United States not to be without a friend. In England sympathy for
America ran strong and deep. The British Government was somewhat in
alarm over the political solitude in which Great Britain found herself,
even though its head, Lord Salisbury, described the position as one of
"splendid isolation." The unexpected reaction of friendliness on the
part of Great Britain which had followed the Venezuela affair continued
to augment, and relations between the two countries were kept smooth by
the new American Ambassador, John Hay, whom Queen Victoria described
as "the most interesting of all the ambassadors I have known."
More important still, in Great Britain alone was there a public who
appreciated the real sentiment of humanity underlying the entrance of
the United States into the war with Spain; and this public actually had
some weight in politics. The people of both Great Britain and the United
States were easily moved to respond with money and personal service
to the cry of suffering anywhere in the world. Just before the Spanish
American War, Gladstone had made his last great campaign protesting
against the new massacres in Armenia; and in the United States the
Republican platform of 1896 had declared that "the massacres in Armenia
have aroused the deep sympathy and just indignation of the American
people, and we believe that the United States should exercise all the
influence it can properly exert to bring these atrocities to an end."
John Hay wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge, of the Senate Committee on Foreign
Affairs, April 5, 1898, as follows: "For the first time in my life
I find the drawing-room sentiment altogether with us. If we wanted
it--which, of course, we do not--we could have the practical assistance
of the British Navy--on the do ut des principle, naturally." On the 25th
of May he added: "It is a moment of immense importance, not only for
the present, but for all the future. It is hardly too much to say the
interests of civilization are bound up in the direction the relations of
England and America are to take in the next few months." Already on the
15th of May, Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, had said to the
Birmingham Liberal Unionists: "What is our next duty? It is to establish
and to maintain bonds of permanent amity with our kinsmen across the
Atlantic. There is a powerful and a generous nation.... Their laws,
their literature, their standpoint upon every question are the same as
ours."
In Manila Harbor, where Dewey lay with his squadron, these distant
forces of European colonial policy were at work. The presence of
representative foreign warships to observe the maintenance of the
blockade was a natural and usual naval circumstance. The arrival of two
German vessels therefore caused no remark, although they failed to pay
the usual respects to the blockading squadron. On the 12th of May
a third arrived and created some technical inconvenience by being
commanded by an officer who outranked Commodore Dewey. A German
transport which was in the harbor made the total number of German
personnel superior to that of the Americans, and the arrival of
the Kaiser on the 12th of June gave the Germans distinct naval
preponderance.
The presence of so powerful a squadron in itself closely approached an
international discourtesy. Disregarding the laws of blockade, as Dewey,
trained in the Civil War blockade of the South, interpreted them, the
German officers were actively familiar both with the Spanish officials
of Manila and with the insurgents. Finally they ensconced themselves in
the quarantine station at the entrance of the Bay, and Admiral Diedrichs
took up land quarters. Further, they interfered between the insurgents
and the Spaniards outside of Manila Bay. In the controversy between
Diedrichs and Dewey which grew out of these difficulties, Captain
Chichester, commanding the British squadron, supported Dewey's course
unqualifiedly and, moreover, let it be clearly known that, in the event
of hostilities, the British vessels would take their stand with the
Americans.
CHAPTER IX. The Blockade Of Cuba
While the first victory of the war was in the Far East and the
possibility of events of world-wide significance hung upon the
level-headedness of Commodore Dewey at Manila, it was realized that the
war must really be fought in the West. Both President McKinley and the
Queen Regent of Spain had issued proclamations stating that they would
adhere to the rules of the Declaration of Paris and not resort to the
use of privateers. The naval contest, therefore, was confined to the
regular navies. Actually the American fleet was superior in battleships,
monitors, and protected cruisers; the Spanish was the better equipped in
armored cruisers, gunboats, and destroyers.
Both Spain and the United States hastily purchased, in the last days of
peace, a few vessels, but not enough seriously to affect their relative
strength. Both also drew upon their own merchant marines. Spain added
18 medium-sized vessels to her navy; the United States added in all 123,
most of which were small and used for scouting purposes. The largest and
most efficient of these additional American ships were the subsidized
St. Paul, St. Louis, New York, and Paris of the American line, of
which the last two, renamed the Harvard and Yale, proved to be of great
service. It was characteristic of American conditions that 28 were
private yachts, of which the Mayflower was the most notable. To man
these new ships, the personnel of the American Navy was increased from
13,750 to 24,123, of whom a large number were men who had received some
training in the naval reserves of the various States.
The first duty of the navy was to protect the American coast. In 1885
the War Department had planned and Congress had sanctioned a system
of coast defense. Up to 1898, however, only one quarter of the sum
considered necessary had been appropriated. Mines and torpedoes were
laid at the entrances to American harbors as soon as war broke out, but
there was a lack of highpower guns. Rumors of a projected raid by the
fast Spanish armored cruisers kept the coast cities in a state of high
excitement, and many sought, by petition and political pressure, to
compel the Navy Department to detach vessels for their defense. The
Naval War Board, however, had to remember that it must protect not only
the coast but commerce also, and that the United States was at war not
to defend herself but to attack. Cuba was the objective; and Cuba must
be cut off from Spain by blockade, and the seas must be made safe for
the passage of the American Army. If the navy were to accomplish all
these purposes, it must destroy the Spanish Navy. To achieve this
end, it would have to work upon the principle of concentration and not
dispersion.
For several months before the actual declaration of war with Spain, the
Navy Department had been effecting this concentration. On the 21st of
April, Captain William T. Sampson was appointed to command the forces on
the North Atlantic station. This included practically the whole
fleet, except the Pacific squadron under Dewey, and the Oregon, a new
battleship of unusual design, which was on the Pacific coast. On the
1st of March she was ordered from the Bremerton Yard, in the State of
Washington, to San Francisco, and thence to report in the Atlantic. Her
voyage was the longest emergency run undertaken up to that time by a
modern battleship. The outbreak of the war with Spain meant the sealing
of all ports in which she might have been repaired in case of emergency.
Rumors were rife of Spanish vessels ready to intercept her, and the eyes
not only of the United States but of the world were upon the Oregon.
A feeling of relief and rejoicing therefore passed through the country
when this American warship arrived at Key West on the 26th of May, fit
for immediate and efficient service.
The fleet, though concentrated in the Atlantic within the region of
immediate hostility, was divided for purposes of operation into a major
division under the immediate command of Admiral Sampson and a flying
squadron under Commodore Schley. * The first undertook the enforcement
of the blockade which was declared on the 21st of April against Cuba,
and patrolled the northern coast from Gardenas to Bahia. Key West was
soon filled with Spanish prizes. On the 27th of April a brush took place
between batteries at Matanzas and some of the American vessels, without
loss of life on either side, except for a mule which bids fair to become
immortal in history through being reported by the Spanish as their
only casualty and the first of the war. Admiral Sampson, following the
tradition of the American Navy of aiming at a vital spot, wished to
attack Havana; and a careful study of its fortifications seems to show
that he would have had a good chance of success. Chance, however, might
have caused the loss of some of his vessels, and, with the small margin
of naval superiority at its disposal the Naval War Board was probably
wise in not allowing him to take the risk.
* A patrol squadron of cruisers under Commodore Howell was also
established to protect the coast from the Delaware capes to eastern
Maine. "It can scarcely be supposed," writes Admiral Chadwick, "that
such action was taken but in deference to the unreasoning fear of
dwellers on the coast."
It was, in fact, Spain which took the initiative and decided the matter.
Her West India Squadron was weak, even on paper, and was in a condition
which would have made it madness to attempt to meet the Americans
without reenforcement. She therefore decided to dispatch a fighting
fleet from her home forces. Accordingly on the 29th of April, Admiral
Cervera left the Cape Verde Islands and sailed westward with one fast
second-class battleship, the Cristobal Colon, three armored cruisers,
and two torpedo boat destroyers. It was a reasonably powerful fleet as
fleets went in the Spanish War, yet it is difficult to see just what
good it could accomplish when it arrived on the scene of action. The
naval superiority in the West Indies would still be in the hands of
the concentrated American Navy, for the Spanish forces would still be
divided, only more equally, between Spanish and Caribbean waters. The
American vessels, moreover, would be within easy distance of their home
stations, which could supply them with every necessity. The islands
belonging to Spain, on the other hand, were ill equipped to become
the base of naval operations. Admiral Cervera realized to the full the
difficulty of the situation and protested against an expedition which he
feared would mean the fall of Spanish power, but public opinion forced
the ministry, and he was obliged to put to sea.
For nearly a month the Spanish fleet was lost to sight, and dwellers on
the American coast were in a panic of apprehension. Cervera's objective
was guessed to be everything from a raid on Bar Harbor to an attack on
the Oregon, then on its shrouded voyage from the Pacific coast. Cities
on the Atlantic seaboard clamored for protection, and the Spanish fleet
was magnified by the mist of uncertainty until it became a national
terror. Sampson, rightly divining that Cervera would make for San
Juan, the capital and chief seaport of Porto Rico, detached from his
blockading force a fighting squadron with which he sailed east, but not
finding the Spanish fleet he turned back to Key West. Schley, with the
Flying Squadron, was then ordered to Cienfuegos. In the meantime Cervera
was escaping detection by the American scouts by taking an extremely
southerly course; and with the information that Sampson was off San
Juan, the Spanish Admiral sailed for Santiago de Cuba, where he arrived
on May 19, 1898.
Though Cervera was safe in harbor, the maneuver of the American fleet
cannot be called unsuccessful. Cervera would have preferred to be at
San Juan, where there was a navy yard and where his position would have
obliged the American fleet either to split into two divisions separated
by eight hundred miles or to leave him free range of action. Next to San
Juan he would have preferred Havana or, Cienfuegos, which were connected
by railroad and near which lay the bulk of the Spanish Army. He found
himself instead at the extreme eastern end of Cuba in a port with no
railroad connection with Havana, partly blocked by the insurgents, and
totally unable to supply him with necessities.
Unless Cervera could leave Santiago, his expedition would obviously have
been useless. Though it was the natural function of the American fleet
to blockade him, for a week after his arrival there was an interesting
game of hide and seek between the two fleets. The harbors of Cienfuegos
and of Santiago are both landlocked by high hills, and Cervera had
entered Santiago without being noticed by the Americans, as that part
of the coast was not under blockade. Schley thought Cervera was at
Cienfuegos; Sampson was of the opinion that he was at Santiago. When it
became known that the enemy had taken refuge in Santiago, Schley began
the blockade on the 28th of May, but stated that he could not continue
long in position owing to lack of coal. On the 1st of June Sampson
arrived and assumed command of the blockading squadron.
With the bottling up of Cervera, the first stage of the war passed.
The navy had performed its primary function: it had established its
superiority and had obtained the control of the seas. The American coast
was safe; American commerce was safe except in the vicinity of Spain;
and the sea was open for the passage of an American expeditionary
force. Nearly the whole island of Cuba was now under blockade, and the
insurgents were receiving supplies from the United States. It had been
proved that the fairly even balance of the two fleets, so anxiously
scanned when it was reported in the newspapers in April, was entirely
deceptive when it came to real efficiency in action. Moreover, the
skillful handling of the fleets by the Naval War Board as well as by
the immediate commanders had redoubled the actual superiority of the
American naval forces.
A fleet in being, even though inferior and immobilized, still counts as
a factor in naval warfare, and Cervera, though immobilized by Sampson,
himself immobilized the greater number of American vessels necessary to
blockade him. The importance of this fact was evident to every one when,
in the middle of June, the remainder of the Spanish home fleet, whipped
hastily into a semblance of fighting condition, set out eastward under
Admiral Camara to contest the Philippines with Dewey. It was impossible
for the United States to detach a force sufficient to cross the Atlantic
and, without a base, meet this fleet in its home waters. Even if a
smaller squadron were dispatched from the Atlantic round Cape Horn, it
would arrive in the Philippines too late to be of assistance to Dewey.
The two monitors on the Pacific coast, the Monterey and the Monadnock,
had already been ordered across the Pacific, a voyage perilous for
vessels of their structure and agonizing to their crews; but it was
doubtful whether they or Camara would arrive first in the Philippines.
The logic of the situation demanded that the main American fleet be
released. Cervera must be destroyed or held in some other way than at
the expense of inactivity on the part of the American warships. Santiago
could not be forced by the navy. Two methods remained. The first and
simpler expedient was to make the harbor mouth impassable and in this
way to bottle up the Spanish fleet. It was decided to sink the collier
Merrimac at a narrow point in the channel, where, lying full length,
she would completely prevent egress. It was a delicate task and one of
extraordinary danger. It was characteristic of the spirit of the fleet
that, as Admiral Chadwick says, practically all the men were volunteers.
The honor of the command was given to Lieutenant Richmond Pearson
Hobson, Assistant Naval Constructor, who had been in charge of the
preparations. With a crew of six men he entered the harbor mouth on
the night of the 3d of June. A shell disabled the steering gear of
the Merrimac, and the ship sank too far within the harbor to block the
entrance entirely. Admiral Cervera himself rescued the crew, assured
Sampson of their safety in an appreciative note; and one of the best
designed and most heroic episodes in our history just missed success.
The failure of the Merrimac experiment left the situation as it had
been and forced the American command to consider the second method
which would release the American fleet. This new plan contemplated the
reduction of Santiago by a combined military and naval attack. Cervera's
choice of Santiago therefore practically determined the direction of
the first American overseas military expedition, which had been in
preparation since the war began.
CHAPTER X. The Preparation Of The Army
When one compares the conditions under which the Spanish American War
was fought with those of the Great War, he feels himself living in a
different age. Twenty years ago hysteria and sudden panics swept the
nation. Cheers and waving handkerchiefs and laughing girls sped the
troops on their way. It cannot be denied that the most popular song
of the war time was "There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night,"
though it may be believed that the energy and swing of the music rather
than the words made it so. The atmosphere of the country was one of
a great national picnic where each one was expected to carry his own
lunch. There was apparent none of the concentration of effort and of the
calm foresight so necessary for efficiency in modern warfare. For youth
the Spanish American War was a great adventure; for the nation it was a
diversion sanctioned by a high purpose.
This abandon was doubtless in part due to a comfortable consciousness
of the vast disparity in resources between Spain and the United States,
which, it was supposed, meant automatically a corresponding difference
in fighting strength. The United States did, indeed, have vast
superiorities which rendered unnecessary any worry over many of the
essentials which gripped the popular mind during the Great War. People
believed that the country could supply the munitions needed, and that
of facilities for transport it had enough. If the United States did not
have at hand exactly the munitions needed, if the transportation
system had not been built to launch an army into Cuba, it was
popularly supposed that the wealth of the country rendered such trifles
negligible, and that, if insufficient attention had been given to the
study of such matters in the past, American ingenuity would quickly
offset the lack of skilled military experience. The fact that
American soldiers traveled in sleeping cars while European armies
were transported in freight cars blinded Americans for a while to the
significant fact that there was but a single track leading to Tampa, the
principal point of embarkation for Cuba; and no one thought of building
another.
Nothing so strongly marks the amateur character of the conduct of the
Spanish War as the activity of the American press. The navy was dogged
by press dispatch boats which revealed its every move. When Admiral
Sampson started upon his cruise to San Juan, he requested the
press boats to observe secrecy, and Admiral Chadwick comments with
satisfaction upon the fact that this request was observed "fully and
honorably... by every person except one." When Lieutenant Whitney risked
his life as a spy in order to investigate conditions in Porto Rico; his
plans and purpose were blazoned in the press. Incredible as it may now
seem, the newspaper men appear to have felt themselves part of the army.
They offered their services as equals, and William Randolph Hearst even
ordered one of his staff to sink a vessel in the Suez Canal to delay
Camara on his expedition against Dewey. This order, fortunately for the
international reputation of the United States, was not executed. With
all their blare and childish enthusiasm, the reporters do not seem to
have been so successful in revealing to Americans the plans of Spain as
they were in furnishing her with itemized accounts of all the doings of
the American forces.
While the press not only revealed but formulated courses of action in
the case of the army, the navy, at least, was able to follow its own
plans. For this difference there were several causes, chief of which was
the fact that the navy was a fully professional arm, ready for action
both in equipment and in plans, and able to take a prompt initiative
in carrying out an aggressive campaign. The War Department had a more
difficult task in adjusting itself to the new conditions brought about
by the Spanish American War. The army was made up on the principle
traditionally held in the United States that the available army force in
time of peace should be just sufficient for the purposes of peace, and
that it should be enlarged in time of war. To allow a fair amount of
expansion without too much disturbance to the organization in increasing
to war strength, the regular army was over-officered in peace times. The
chief reliance in war was placed upon the militia. The organization
and training of this force was left, however, under a few very general
directions, to the various States. As a result, its quality varied and
it was nowhere highly efficient in the military sense. Some regiments,
it is true, were impressive on parade, but almost none of the officers
knew anything of actual modern warfare. There had been no preliminary
sifting of ability in the army, and it was only as experience gave
the test that the capable and informed were called into positions of
importance. In fact, the training of the regular officers was inferior
to that of the naval officers. West Point and Annapolis were both
excellent in the quality of their instruction, but what they offered
amounted only to a college course, and in the army there was no
provision for systematic graduate study corresponding to the Naval War
College at Newport.
These difficulties and deficiencies, however, cannot fully explain
the woeful inferiority of the army to the navy in preparedness.
Fundamentally the defect was at the top. Russell A. Alger, the Secretary
of War, was a veteran of the Civil War and a silver-voiced orator,
but his book on the "Spanish-American War," which was intended as
a vindication of his record, proves that even eighteen months of as
grueling denunciation as any American official has ever received could
not enlighten him as to what were the functions of his office. Nor did
he correct or supplement his own incompetence by seeking professional
advice. There existed no general staff, and it did not occur to him, as
it did to Secretary Long, to create one to advise him unofficially. He
was on bad terms with Major General Nelson A. Miles, who was the general
in command. He discussed even the details of questions of army strategy,
not only with Miles but with the President and members of the Cabinet.
One of the most extraordinary decisions made during his tenure of office
was that the act of the 9th of March, appropriating $50,000,000 "for
national defense," forbade money to be spent or even contracts to be
made by the quartermaster, the commissary, or the surgeon general. In
his book Secretary Alger records with pride the fact that all this money
was spent for coast defense. In view of the fact that the navy did its
task, this expenditure was absolutely unnecessary and served merely to
solace coast cities and munition makers.
The regular army on April 1, 1898, consisted of 28,183 officers and men.
An act of the 26th of April authorized its increase to about double that
size. As enlistment was fairly prompt, by August the army consisted
of 56,365 officers and men, the number of officers being but slightly
increased. It was decided not to use the militia as it was then
organized, but to rely for numbers as usual chiefly upon a volunteer
army, authorized by the Act of the 22d of April, and by subsequent acts
raised to a total of 200,000, with an additional 3000 cavalry, 3500
engineers, and 10,000 "immunes," or men supposed not to be liable to
tropical diseases. The war seemed equally popular all over the country,
and the million who offered themselves for service were sufficient to
allow due consideration for equitable state quotas and for physical
fitness. There were also sufficient Krag-Jorgensen rifles to arm the
increased regular army and Springfields for the volunteers.
To provide an adequate number of officers for the volunteer army was
more difficult. Even though a considerable number were transferred
from the regular to the volunteer army, they constituted only a small
proportion of the whole number necessary. Some few of those appointed
were graduates of West Point, and more had been in the militia. The
great majority, however, had purely amateur experience, and many not
even so much. Those who did know something, moreover, did not have the
same knowledge or experience. This raw material was given no officer
training whatsoever but was turned directly to the task of training the
rank and file. Nor were the appointments of new officers confined to the
lower ranks. The country, still mindful of its earlier wars, was charmed
with the sentimental elevation of confederate generals to the rank of
major general in the new army, though a public better informed would
hardly have welcomed for service in the tropics the selection of men old
enough to be generals in 1865 and then for thirty-three years without
military experience in an age of great development in the methods of
warfare. The other commanding officers were as old and were mostly
chosen by seniority in a service retiring at sixty-four. The unwonted
strain of active service naturally proved too great. At the most
critical moment of the campaign in Cuba, the commanding general, William
R. Shafter, had eaten nothing for four days, and his plucky second in
command, the wiry Georgian cavalry leader of 1864 and 1865, General
"Joe" Wheeler, was not physically fit to succeed him. There is not the
least doubt that the fighting spirit of the men was strong and did not
fail, but the defect in those branches of knowledge which are required
to keep an army fit to fight is equally certain. The primary cause for
the melting of the American army by disease must be acknowledged to be
the insufficient training of the officers.
This hit or miss method, however, had its compensations, for it brought
about some appointments of unusual merit. Conspicuous were those of
Colonel Leonard Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. The
latter had resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position
in which he had contributed a great deal to the efficiency of that
Department, in order to take a more tangible part in the war. After
raising among his friends and the cowboys of the West a regiment
of "Rough Riders," he declined its command on plea of military
inexperience. Roosevelt made one of those happy choices which are a mark
of his administrative ability in selecting as colonel Leonard Wood, an
army surgeon whose quality he knew through common experiences in the
West.
To send into a midsummer tropical jungle an American army, untrained
to take care of its health, for the most part clothed in the regulation
army woolens, and tumbled together in two months, was an undertaking
which-could be justified only on the ground that the national safety
demanded immediate action. In 1898, however, it seemed to be universally
taken for granted by people and administration, by professional soldier
as well as by public sentiment, that the army must invade Cuba without
regard to its fitness for such active service. The responsibility for
this decision must rest upon the nation. The experience of centuries
had proved conspicuously that climate was the strongest defense of the
Caribbean islands against invasion, and it was in large measure the
very sacrifice of so many American soldiers that induced the study of
tropical diseases. In 1898 it could hardly be expected that the American
command, inexperienced and eager for action, should have recognized the
mosquito as the carrier of yellow fever and the real enemy, or should
have realized the necessity of protecting the soldiers by inoculation
against typhoid fever.
Fixed as was the determination to send an army into Cuba at the earliest
possible moment, there had been a wide diversity of opinion as to what
should be the particular objective. General Miles wavered between the
choice of the island of Porto Rico and Puerto Principe, a city in
the interior and somewhat east of the middle of Cuba; the Department
hesitated between Tunas on the south coast of Cuba, within touch of the
insurgents, and Mariel on the north, the seizure of which would be the
first step in a siege of Havana. The situation at Santiago, however,
made that city the logical objective of the troops, and on the 31st of
May, General Shafter was ordered to be prepared to move. On the 7th
of June he was ordered to sail with "not less than 10,000 men," but an
alarming, though unfounded, rumor of a Spanish squadron off the north
coast of Cuba delayed the expedition until the 14th. With an army
of seventeen thousand on thirty-two transports, and accompanied by
eighty-nine newspaper correspondents, Shafter arrived on the 20th of
June off Santiago.
The Spanish troops in Cuba--the American control of the sea made it
unnecessary to consider those available in Spain--amounted, according to
returns in April, 1898, to 196,820. This formidable number, however,
was not available at any one strategic spot owing to the difficulty of
transporting either troops or supplies, particularly at the eastern end
of the island, in the neighborhood of Santiago. It was estimated that
the number of men of use about Santiago was about 12,000, with 5000
approaching to assist. Perhaps 3000 insurgents were at hand under
General Garcia. The number sent, then, was not inadequate to the task.
Equal numbers are not, indeed, ordinarily considered sufficient for an
offensive campaign against fortifications, but the American commanders
counted upon a difference in morale between the two armies, which was
justified by results. Besides the American Army could be reinforced as
necessity arose.
CHAPTER XI. The Campaign Of Santiago De Cuba
In planning the campaign against Santiago, Admiral Sampson wished the
army immediately to assault the defenses at the harbor mouth in order
to open the way for the navy. General Shafter, however, after conferring
with General Garcia, the commander of the insurgents, decided to march
overland against the city. The army did not have sufficient small
vessels to effect a landing; but the navy came to its assistance, and
on the 22d of June the first American troops began to disembark at
Daiquiri, though it was not until the 26th that the entire expedition
was on shore. On the second day Siboney, which had a better anchorage
and was some six miles closer to Santiago, was made the base. From
Siboney there stretched for eight or ten miles a rolling country covered
with heavy jungle brush and crossed by mere threads of roads. There was
indeed a railroad, but this followed a roundabout route by the coast.
Through this novel and extremely uncomfortable country, infected with
mosquitoes, the troops pressed, eager to meet the enemy.
The first engagement took place at Las Guasimas, on the 24th of June.
Here a force of about a thousand dismounted cavalry, partly regulars and
partly Rough Riders, defeated nearly twice their number of Spaniards.
This was the only serious resistance which the Americans encountered
until they reached the advanced defenses of Santiago. The next week
they spent in getting supplies ashore, improving the roads, and
reconnoitering. The newspapers considered this interval entirely too
long! The 30th of June found the Americans confronting the main body
of Spaniards in position, and on the 1st of July, the two armies joined
battle.
Between the opposing forces was the little river San Juan and its
tributaries. The Spanish left wing was at El Caney, supported by a stone
blockhouse, rifle pits, and barbed wire, but with no artillery. About
four miles away was San Juan Hill, with more formidable works straddling
the main road which led to Santiago. Opposite El Caney, General Lawton
was in command of about seven thousand Americans. The fight here began
at half-past six in the morning, but the American artillery was placed
at too great a distance to be very effective. The result was a long and
galling exchange of rifle firing, which is apt to prove trying to raw
troops. The infantry, however, advanced with persistency and showed
marked personal initiative as they pushed forward under such protection
as the brush and grass afforded until they finally rushed a position
which gave opportunity to the artillery. After this they speedily
captured the blockhouse.
The fight lasted over eight hours instead of two, as had been expected,
and thus delayed General Lawton, who was looked for at San Juan by
the American left. The losses, too, were heavy, the total casualties
amounting to seven per cent of the force engaged. The Americans,
however, had gained the position, and after a battle which had been long
and serious enough to test thoroughly the quality of the personnel
of the army. Whatever deficiencies the Americans may have had in
organization, training, and military education, they undoubtedly
possessed fighting spirit, courage, and personal ingenuity, and these
are, after all, the qualities for which builders of armies look.
The battle of El Caney was perhaps unnecessary, for the position lay
outside the main Spanish line anal would probably have been abandoned
when San Juan fell. For that more critical movement General Shafter
kept about eight thousand troops and the personal command. Both he
and General Wheeler, however, were suffering from the climate and were
unable to be with the troops. The problem of making a concerted advance
through the thick underbrush was a difficult one, and the disposition of
the American troops was at once revealed by a battery of artillery which
used black powder, and by a captive balloon which was injudiciously
towed about.
The right wing here, after assuming an exposed position, was unable to
act, as Lawton, by whom it was expecting to be reinforced, was delayed
at El Caney. The advance regiments were under the fire of the artillery,
the infantry, and the skillful sharpshooters of an invisible enemy and
were also exposed to the fierce heat of the sun, to which they were
unaccustomed. The wounded were carried back on litters, turned over to
the surgeons, who worked manfully with the scantiest of equipment, and
were then laid, often naked except for their bandages, upon the damp
ground. Regiment blocked regiment in the narrow road, and officers
carrying orders were again and again struck, as they emerged from cover,
by the sharpshooters' fire. The want of means of communication paralyzed
the command, for all the equipment of a modern army was lacking: there
were no aeroplanes, no wireless stations, no telephones.
Throughout the morning the situation grew worse, but the nerve of the
men did not give way, and American individual initiative rose to the
boiling point. Realizing that safety lay only in advance, the officers
on the spot began to take control. General Hawkins, with the Sixth and
Sixteenth Regulars, advanced against the main blockhouse, which crested
a slope of two hundred feet, and the men of the Seventy-first New York
Volunteers joined promiscuously in the charge.
To the right rose Kettle Hill, jutting out and Banking the approach to
the main position. Facing it and dismounted were the First and Ninth
Regular Cavalry, the latter a negro regiment, and the Rough Riders under
Colonel Roosevelt. The Tenth Infantry was between the two wings, and
divided in the support of both. A battery of Gatling guns was placed in
position. The Americans steadily advanced in an irregular line, though
kept in some sort of formation by their officers. Breaking down brush
and barbed wire and sheltering themselves in the high grass, the men on
the right wing worked their way up Kettle Hill, but before they reached
the rifle pits of the enemy, they saw the Spaniards retreating on the
run. The audacity of the Americans at the critical moment had insured
the ultimate success of their attack and they found the final capture of
the hill easy.
The longer charge against the center of the enemy was in the meantime
being pressed home, under the gallant leadership of General Hawkins, who
at times was far in advance of his line. The men of the right wing who
looked down from their new position on Kettle Hill, a quarter of a
mile distant, saw the Spaniards give way and the American center dash
forward. In order to support this advance movement, the Gatlings were
brought to Kettle Hill, and General S.S. Sumner and Colonel Roosevelt
led their men down Kettle and up San Juan Hill, where they swept over
the northern jut only a moment after Hawkins had carried the main
blockhouse.
The San Juan position now in the hands of the Americans was the key of
Santiago, but that entrenched city lay a mile and a quarter distant and
had still to be unlocked--a task which presented no little difficulty.
The Americans, it is true, had an advantageous position on a hilltop,
but the enemy had retired only a quarter of a mile and were supported
by the complete system of fortifications which protected Santiago. The
American losses totaled fifteen hundred, a number just about made good
at this moment by the arrival of General Duffield's brigade, which had
followed the main expedition. The number of the Spanish force, which was
unknown to the Americans, was increased on the 3d of July by the arrival
of a relief expedition under Colonel Escario, with about four thousand
men whom the insurgent forces had failed to meet and block, as had been
planned.
On the 2d of July there was desultory fighting, and on the 3d, General
Shafter telegraphed to the Secretary of War that he was considering the
withdrawal of his troops to a strong position, about five miles in the
rear. The Secretary immediately replied: "Of course you can judge the
situation better than we can at this end of the line. If, however,
you could hold your present position, especially San Juan Heights, the
effect upon the country would be much better than falling back."
The Spanish commanders, however, did not share General Shafter's view as
to the danger involving the Americans. Both Admiral Cervera and General
Blanco considered that the joint operations of the American Army and
Navy had rendered the reduction of Santiago only a question of time,
but they differed as to the course to be pursued. In the end, General
Blanco, who was in supreme command, decided, after an exchange of views
with the Spanish Government and a consultation with the Captain of the
German cruiser Geier, then at Havana, to order the Spanish squadron to
attempt an escape from Santiago harbor. Cervera's sailors had hitherto
been employed in the defense of the city, but with the arrival of the
reinforcements under Escario he found it possible to reman his fleet.
An attempt to escape in the dark seemed impossible because of the
unremitting glare of the searchlights of the American vessels. Cervera
determined upon the desperate expedient of steaming out in broad
daylight and making for Cienfuegos.
The blockade systematically planned by Admiral Sampson was conducted
with a high degree of efficiency. Each American ship had its definite
place and its particular duty. When vessels were obliged to coal at
Guantanamo, forty miles distant, the next in line covered the cruising
interval. The American combined squadron was about double Cervera's in
strength; his ships, however, were supposed to have the advantage in
speed, and it was conceivable that, by turning sharply to the one side
or the other, they might elude the blockading force. On the very day
that Cervera made his desperate dash out of the harbor, as it happened,
the New York, Admiral Sampson's flagship, was out of line, taking the
Admiral to a conference with General Shafter at Siboney, a few miles to
the eastward. The absence of the flagship, however, in no way weakened
the blockade, for, if Cervera turned westward he would find the squadron
of Schley and the other vessels designated to prevent his escape in
that direction, while if he turned eastward he would almost at once
be engaged with the New York, which would then be in an advantageous
position ahead of the chase.
At half-past nine on the morning of the 3d of July, the first vessel of
the Spanish fleet emerged from Santiago Harbor. By 10:10 A.M. all the
Spanish ships were outside of the harbor mouth. Commodore Schley, on
the Brooklyn, hoisted the signal to "close up," apparently on the
understanding that Sampson's signal on leaving for Siboney to "Disregard
motions of the commander-in-chief" had delegated the command to him.
Though this question of command later involved a bitter dispute, it was
at the time of little moment, for clouds of smoke obscured the signals
so frequently that no complicated maneuver could have been guided by
them, and, as far as concerted action was concerned, the whole squadron
was under exactly similar contingent orders from Admiral Sampson. As
a matter of fact, the thing to do was so obvious that the subsequent
dispute really raged on the point of who actually gave an order, the
sense of which every one of the commanders would have executed without
order. If, therefore, the layman feels some annoyance at such a
controversy over naval red tape, he may have the consolation of knowing
that all concerned, admirals and captains, did the right and sensible
thing at the time. If there be an exception, it was the curious maneuver
of Schley, the commander of the Brooklyn, who turned a complete circle
away from the enemy after the battle had begun. This action of his was
certainly not due to a desire to escape, for the Brooklyn quickly turned
again into the fight. A controversy, too, has raged over this maneuver.
Was it undertaken because the Brooklyn was about to be rammed by the
Vizcaya, or because Schley thought that his position blocked the fire of
the other American vessels? It is not unlikely that the commander of the
Spanish ship hoped to ram the Brooklyn, which was, because of her speed,
a most redoubtable foe. But unless this maneuver saved the Brooklyn, it
had little result except to scare the Texas, upon whom she suddenly bore
down out of a dense cloud of smoke.
Steering westward, the Spanish ships attempted to pass the battle line,
but the American vessels kept pace with them. For a short time the
engagement was very severe, for practically all vessels of both fleets
took part, and the Spanish harbor batteries added their fire. At 10:15
A.M. the Maria Teresa, Admiral Cervera's flagship, on fire and badly
shattered by heavy shells, turned toward the beach. Five minutes later
the Oquendo, after something of a duel with the Texas, also turned
inshore. The Brooklyn was in the lead of the Americans, closely followed
by the Oregon, which developed a wonderful burst of speed in excess of
that called for in her contract. These two ships kept up the chase of
the Vizcaya and the Cristobal Colon, while the slower vessels of the
fleet attended to the two Spanish destroyers, Furor and Pluton. At 11:15
A.M. the Vizcaya, riddled by fire from the Brooklyn and Oregon, gave up
the fight.
By this time, Sampson in the New York was rapidly approaching the fight,
and now ordered the majority of the vessels back to their stations. The
Colon, fleeing westward and far ahead of the American ships, was pursued
by the Brooklyn, the Oregon, the Texas, the New York, and the armed
yacht Vixen. It was a stern chase, although the American vessels had
some advantage by cutting across a slight concave indentation of the
coast, while the Colon steamed close inshore. At 1:15 P.M. a shot from
the Oregon struck ahead of the Colon, and it was evident that she was
covered by the American guns. At 1:30 P.M. she gave over her flight and
made for shore some forty-five miles west of Santiago. The victory was
won. It has often been the good fortune of Americans to secure their
greatest victories on patriotic anniversaries and thereby to enhance
the psychological effect. Admiral Sampson was able to announce to the
American people, as a Fourth of July present, the destruction of the
Spanish fleet with the loss of but one of his men and but slight damage
to his ships.
On the hills above Santiago the American Army had now only the
land forces of the Spaniards to contend with. Shafter's demand for
unconditional surrender met with a refusal, and there ensued a week
of military quiet. During this time General Shafter conducted a
correspondence with the War Department, in judging which it is
charitable to remember that the American commander weighed three
hundred pounds, that he was sweltering under a hot sun, and that he was
sixty-three years old, and sick. Too humane to bombard Santiago while
Hobson and his men were still in Spanish hands, he could not forgive
Sampson for not having forced the narrow and well-mined channel at the
risk of his fleet. The War Department, sharing Shafter's indignation,
prepared to attempt the entrance with one of its own transports
protected by baled hay, as had been done on the Mississippi during the
Civil War. Shafter continued to be alarmed at the situation. Without
reenforcements he could not attack, and he proposed to allow the
Spaniards to evacuate. The War Department forbade this alternative and,
on the 10th of July, he began the bombardment of Santiago.
The Secretary of War then hit upon the really happy though quite
unmilitary device of offering, in return for unconditional surrender, to
transport the Spanish troops, at once and without parole, back to their
own country. Secretary Alger was no unskillful politician, and he was
right in believing that this device, though unconventional, would make
a strong appeal to an army three years away from home and with dwindling
hopes of ever seeing Spain again. On the 15th of July a capitulation was
agreed upon, and the terms of surrender included not only the troops
in Santiago but all those in that military district--about twenty-four
thousand men, with cannon, rifles, ammunition, rations, and other
military supplies. Shafter's recommendation that the troops be allowed
to carry their arms back to Spain with them was properly refused by the
War Department. Arrangements were made for Spanish ships paid by the
United States to take the men immediately to Spain. This extraordinary
operation was begun on the 8th of August, while the war was still in
progress, and was accomplished before peace was established.
The Santiago campaign, like the Mexican War, was fought chiefly by
regulars. The Rough Riders and the Seventy-first New York Regiment
were the only volunteer units to take a heavy share. Yet the absence
of effective staff management was so marked that, as compared with the
professional accuracy shown by the navy, the whole campaign on land
appears as an amateur undertaking. But the individual character of both
volunteers and regulars was high. The American victory was fundamentally
due to the fighting spirit of the men and to the individual initiative
of the line and field officers.
In the meantime the health of the American Army was causing grave
concern to its more observant leaders. Six weeks of Cuban climate had
taken out of the army all that exuberant energy which it had brought
with it from the north. The army had accomplished its purpose only
at the complete sacrifice of its fighting strength. Had the Spanish
commander possessed more nerve and held out a little longer, he might
well have seen his victorious enemies wither before his eyes, as the
British had before Cartagena in 1741. On the 3d of August a large
number of the officers of the Santiago army, including Generals Wheeler,
Sumner, and Lawton, and Colonel Roosevelt, addressed a round robin to
General Shafter on the alarming condition of the army. Its substance is
indicated in the following sentences: "This army must be moved at
once or it will perish. As an army it can be safely moved now. Persons
responsible for preventing such a move will be responsible for the
unnecessary loss of many thousands of lives." Already on the 1st of
August, General Shafter had reported 4255 sick, of whom 3164 were cases
of yellow fever, that deadly curse of Cuba, which the lack of proper
quarantine had so often allowed to invade the shores of the United
States. On the 3d of August, even before General Shafter had received
the round robin, the Secretary of War authorized the withdrawal of at
least a portion of the army, which was to be replaced by supposedly
immune regiments. By the middle of August, the soldiers began to arrive
at Camp Wikoff at Montauk Point, on the eastern end of Long Island.
Through this camp, which had been hastily put into condition to receive
them, there passed about thirty-five thousand soldiers, of whom twenty
thousand were sick. When the public saw those who a few weeks before
had been healthy and rollicking American boys, now mere skeletons,
borne helpless in stretchers and looking old and shriveled, a wave of
righteous indignation against Secretary Alger swept over the country,
and eventually accomplished enough to prevent such catastrophes in the
future.
The distressing experience of the army was too real not to have its
constructive effect. Men like William Crawford Gorgas were inspired to
study the sanitation and the diseases of the tropics and have now made
it possible for white men to live there safely. Men of affairs like
Elihu Root were stimulated to give their talents to army administration.
Fortunately the boys were brought north just in time to save their
lives, and the majority, after a recuperation of two or three years,
regained their normal health.
The primary responsibility for this gamble with death rested with
those who sent an expedition from the United States to the tropics in
midsummer when the measures necessary to safeguard its health were not
yet known. This responsibility rested immediately upon the American
people themselves, all too eager for a war for which they were not
prepared and for a speedy victory at all costs. For this national
impatience they had to pay dearly. The striking contrast, however,
between the efficiency of the navy and the lack of preparation on the
part of the army shows that the people as a whole would have supported
a more thorough preparation of the army, had the responsible officials
possessed sufficient courage and intelligence to have demanded it; nor
would the people have been unwilling to defer victory until autumn, had
they been honestly informed of the danger of tropical disease into which
they were sending the flower of their youth. Such a postponement would
not only have meant better weather but it would have given time to teach
the new officers their duty in safeguarding the health of their men as
far as possible, and this precaution alone would have saved many lives.
Owing to the greater practical experience of the officers in the regular
regiments, the death rate among the men in their ranks fell far below
that among the volunteers, even though many of the men with the regulars
had enlisted after the declaration of war. On the other hand, speed as
well as sanitation was an element in the war, and the soldier who was
sacrificed to lack of preparation may be said to have served his country
no less than he who died in battle. Strategy and diplomacy in this
instance were enormously facilitated by the immediate invasion of Cuba,
and perhaps the outcome justified the cost. The question of relative
values is a difficult one.
No such equation of values, however, can hold the judgment in suspense
in the case of the host of secondary errors that grew out of the
indolence of Secretary Alger and his worship of politics. Probably
General Miles was mistaken in his charges concerning embalmed beef, and
possibly the canned beef was not so bad as it tasted; but there can be
no excuse for a Secretary of War who did not consider it his business
to investigate the question of proper rations for an army in the tropics
simply because Congress had, years before, fixed a ration for use within
the United States. There was no excuse for sending many of the men
clad in heavy army woolens. There was no excuse for not providing a
sufficient number of surgeons and abundant hospital service. There was
little excuse for the appointment of General Shafter, which was made in
part for political reasons. There was no excuse for keeping at the head
of the army administration General Nelson A. Miles, with whom, whatever
his abilities, the Secretary of War was unable to work.
The navy did not escape controversy. In fact, a war fought under the
eyes of hundreds of uncensored newspaper correspondents unskilled in
military affairs could not fail to supply a daily grist of scandal to
an appreciative public. The controversy between Sampson and Schley,
however, grew out of incompatible personalities stirred to rivalry by
indiscreet friends and a quarrelsome public. Captain Sampson was chosen
to command, and properly so, because of his recognized abilities.
Commodore Schley, a genial and open-hearted man, too much given to
impulse, though he outranked Sampson, was put under his command. Sampson
was not gracious in his treatment of the Commodore, and ill feeling
resulted. When the time came to promote both officers for their good
conduct, Secretary Long by recommending that Sampson be raised eight
numbers and Schley six, reversed their relative positions as they
had been before the war. This recommendation, in itself proper, was
sustained by the Senate, and all the vitality the controversy ever had
then disappeared, though it remains a bone of contention to be gnawed by
biographers and historians.
CHAPTER XII. The Close Of The War
While the American people were concentrating their attention upon the
blockade of Santiago near their own shores, the situation in the distant
islands of the Pacific was rapidly becoming acute. All through June,
Dewey had been maintaining himself, with superb nerve, in Manila Harbor,
in the midst of uncertain neutrals. A couple of unwieldy United States
monitors were moving slowly to his assistance from the one side, while
a superior Spanish fleet was approaching from the other. On the 26th of
June, the Spanish Admiral Camara had reached Port Said, but he was not
entirely happy. Several of his vessels proved to be in that ineffective
condition which was characteristic of the Spanish Navy. The Egyptian
authorities refused him permission to refit his ships or to coal, and
the American consul had with foresight bought up much of the coal which
the Spanish Admiral had hoped to secure and take aboard later from
colliers. Nevertheless the fleet passed through the Suez Canal and
entered the Red Sea.
Fully alive to the danger of the situation, the Naval War Board gave
orders on the 29th of June for a squadron under Commodore Watson to
start for the Spanish coast in hope of drawing Camara back.
The alarm which had previously been created on the American coast by
the shrouded approach of Cervera naturally suggested that the Americans
themselves might win one of those psychological victories now recognized
as such an important factor in modern warfare. The chief purpose of
future operations was to convince the Spanish people that they were
defeated, and nothing would more conduce to this result than to bring
war to their doors. This was, moreover, an operation particularly suited
to the conditions under which the United States was waging war, for
publicity was here a helping factor. Admiral Sampson, more intent
on immediate business than on psychological pressure, was not
enthusiastically in favor of the plan. Nevertheless preparation
proceeded with that deliberation which in this case was part of the
game, and presently the shadow of an impending American attack hung
heavy over the coasts of Spain. The Spanish Government at first perhaps
considered the order a bluff which the United States would not dare to
carry out while Cervera's fleet was so near its own shores; but with the
destruction of Cervera's ships the plan became plainly possible, and on
the 8th of July the Spanish Government ordered Camara back to parade his
vessels before the Spanish cities to assure them of protection.
But, before Camara was called home, the public were watching his advance
against the little American fleet at Manila, with an anxiety perhaps
greater than Dewey's own. Nothing in modern war equals in dramatic
tension the deadly, slow, inevitable approach of a fleet from one side
of the world against its enemy on the other. Both beyond the reach of
friendly help, each all powerful until it meets its foe, their home
countries have to watch the seemingly never coming, but nevertheless
certain, clash, which under modern conditions means victory or
destruction. It is the highest development of that situation which has
been so exploited in a myriad forms by the producers of dramas for the
moving pictures and which nightly holds audiences silent; but it plays
itself out in war, not in minutes but in months. No one who lived
through that period can ever forget the progress of Camara against
Dewey, or that of Rozhestvensky with the Russian fleet, six years later,
against Togo.
Meanwhile another move was made in the Caribbean. General Miles had from
the first considered Porto Rico the best immediate objective: it was
much nearer Spain than Cuba, was more nearly self-sufficing if left
alone, and less defensible if attacked. The War Department, on the 7th
of June, had authorized Miles to assemble thirty thousand troops for
the invasion of Porto Rico, and preparations for this expedition were
in progress throughout the course of the Santiago campaign. Miles at
the time of the surrender of Santiago was actually off that city with
reinforcements, which thereupon at once became available as a nucleus to
be used against Porto Rico. On the 21st of July he left Guantanamo Bay
and, taking the Spaniards as well as the War Department completely by
surprise as to his point of attack, he effected a landing on the 26th at
Guanica, near the southwestern corner of Porto Rico.
The expeditionary force to Porto Rico, however, consisted not of 30,000
men but of only about 15,000; and it was not fully assembled on the
island until the 8th of August. The total Spanish forces amounted to
only about 10,000, collected on the defensible ground to the north and
in the interior, so that they did not disturb the disembarkation. The
American Army which had been dispatched from large Atlantic ports,
such as Charleston and Newport News, seems to have been better and more
systematically equipped than the troops sent to Santiago. The Americans
occupied Guanica, Ponce, and Arroyo with little or no opposition, and
were soon in possession of the southern shores of the island.
Between the American forces and the main body of the enemy stretched
a range of mountains running east and west through the length of the
island. San Juan, the only fortress, which was the main objective of the
American Army, lay on the opposite side of this mountain range, on the
northern coast of the island. The approach to the fortress lay along a
road which crossed the hills and which possessed natural advantages
for defense. On the 7th of August a forward movement was begun. While
General Wilson's army advanced from Ponce along the main road toward San
Juan and General Brooke moved north from Arroyo, General Schwan was to
clear the western end of the island and work his way around to Arecibo,
toward which General Henry was to advance through the interior. The
American armies systematically worked forward, with an occasional
skirmish in which they were always victorious, and were received with
a warm welcome by the teeming native population. On the 13th of August,
General Wilson was on the point of clearing his first mountain range,
General Schwan had occupied Mayaguez, and General Henry had passed
through the mountains and was marching down the valley of the Arecibo,
when orders arrived from Washington to suspend operations.
The center of interest, however, remained in the far-away Philippines.
Dewey, who had suddenly burst upon the American people as their first
hero, remained a fixed star in their admiration, a position in which his
own good judgment and the fortunate scarcity of newspaper correspondents
served to maintain him. From him action was expected, and it had been
prepared for. Even before news arrived on the 7th of May of Dewey's
victory on the 1st of May, the Government had anticipated such a result
and had decided to send an army to support him. San Francisco was made
a rendezvous for volunteers, and on the 12th of May, General Wesley
Merritt was assigned to command the expedition. Dewey reported that he
could at any time command the surrender of Manila, but that it would be
useless unless he had troops to occupy the city.
On the 19th of May, General Merritt received the following orders: "The
destruction of the Spanish fleet at Manila, followed by the taking of
the naval station at Cavite, the paroling of the garrisons, and the
acquisition of the control of the bay, have rendered it necessary, in
the further prosecution of the measures adopted by this Government for
the purpose of bringing about an honorable and durable peace with Spain,
to send an army of occupation to the Philippines for the twofold purpose
of completing the reduction of the Spanish power in that quarter and
giving order and security to the islands while in the possession of the
United States."
On the 30th of June the first military expedition, after a bloodless
capture of the island of Guam, arrived in Manila Bay. A second
contingent arrived on the 17th of July, and on the 25th, General Merritt
himself with a third force, which brought the number of Americans up to
somewhat more than 10,000. The Spaniards had about 13,000 men guarding
the rather antiquated fortifications of old Manila and a semicircle of
blockhouses and trenches thrown about the city, which contained about
350,000 inhabitants.
It would have been easy to compel surrender or evacuation by the guns of
the fleet, had it not been for an additional element in the situation.
Manila was already besieged, or rather blockaded, on the land side, by
an army of nearly ten thousand Philippine insurgents under their shrewd
leader, Emilio Aguinaldo. It does not necessarily follow that those who
are fighting the same enemy are fighting together, and in this case
the relations between the Americans and the insurgents were far from
intimate, though Dewey had kept the situation admirably in hand until
the arrival of the American troops.
General Merritt decided to hold no direct communication with Aguinaldo
until the Americans were in possession of the city, but landed his army
to the south of Manila beyond the trenches of the Filipinos. On the
30th of July, General F. V. Greene made an informal arrangement with
the Filipino general for the removal of the insurgents from the trenches
directly in front of the American forces, and immediately advanced
beyond their original position. The situation of Manila was indeed
desperate and clearly demanded a surrender to the American forces, who
might be relied upon to preserve order and protect property. The Belgian
Consul, M. Eduard Andre, urged this course upon the Spanish commander.
The Governor-General, Fermin Jaudenes, exhibited the same spirit
which the Spanish commanders revealed throughout the war: though
constitutionally indisposed to take any bold action, he nevertheless
considered it a point of honor not to recognize the inevitable. He
allowed it to be understood that he could not surrender except to an
assault, although well knowing that such a melee might cause the city to
be ravaged by the Filipinos. M. Andre, however, succeeded by the 11th
of August in arranging a verbal understanding that the fleet should fire
upon the city and that the troops should attack, but that the Spaniards
should make no real resistance and should surrender as soon as they
considered that their honor was saved.
The chief contestants being thus amicably agreed to a spectacular but
bloodless battle, the main interest lay in the future action of the
interested and powerful spectators in the harbor. Admiral Dewey, though
relieved by the arrival of the monitor Monterey on the 4th of August,
was by no means certain that the German squadron would stand by without
interference and see the city bombarded. On the 9th of August he gave
notice of the impending action and ordered foreign vessels out of the
range of fire. On the 13th of August Dewey steamed into position before
the city. As the American vessels steamed past the British Immortalite,
her guard paraded and her band played Admiral Dewey's favorite march.
Immediately afterwards the British commander, Captain Chichester, moved
his vessels toward the city and took a position between our fleet and
the German squadron. The foreign vessels made no interference, but the
Filipinos were more restless. Eagerly watching the American assault,
they rushed forward when they saw it successful, and began firing on the
Spaniards just as the latter hoisted the white flag. They were quieted,
though with difficulty, and by nightfall the city was under the Stars
and Stripes, with American troops occupying the outworks facing the
forces of Aguinaldo, who were neither friends nor foes.
While the dispatch of Commodore Watson's fleet to Spain was still being
threatened and delayed, while General Miles was rapidly approaching
the capital of Porto Rico, and on the same day that Admiral Dewey and
General Merritt captured Manila, Spain yielded. On the 18th of July
Spain had taken the first step toward peace by asking for the good
offices of the French Government. On the 26th of July, M. Cambon, the
French Ambassador at Washington, opened negotiations with the United
States. On the 12th of August, a protocol was signed, but, owing to the
difference in time on the opposite side of the globe, to say nothing
of the absence of cable communication, not in time to prevent Dewey's
capture of Manila. This protocol provided for the meeting of peace
commissioners at Paris not later than the 1st of October. Spain agreed
immediately to evacuate and relinquish all claim to Cuba; to cede to the
United States ultimately all other islands in the West Indies, and one
in the Ladrones; and to permit the United States to "occupy and hold the
city, bay, and harbor of Manila pending the conclusion of a treaty of
peace which shall determine the control, disposition, and government of
the Philippines."
President McKinley appointed the Secretary of State, William R. Day,
as president of the peace commission, and summoned John Hay home from
England to take his place. The other commissioners were Senators
Cushman K. Davis and William P. Frye, Republicans, Senator George Gray,
Democrat, and Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the New York "Tribune".
The secretary of the commission was the distinguished student of
international law, John Bassett Moore. On most points there was general
agreement as to what they were to do. Cuba, of course, must be free. It
was, moreover, too obvious to need much argument that Spanish rule on
the American continent must come altogether to an end. As there was no
organized local movement in Porto Rico to take over the government, its
cession to the United States was universally recognized as inevitable.
Nevertheless when the two commissions met in Paris, there proved to be
two exciting subjects of controversy, and at moments it seemed possible
that the attempt to arrange a peace would prove unsuccessful. However
reassured the people were by the successful termination of the war, for
those in authority the period of anxiety had not yet entirely passed.
The first of these points was raised by the Spanish commissioners. They
maintained that the separation of Cuba from Spain involved the rending
of the Empire, and that Cuba should therefore take responsibilities as
well as freedom. The specific question was that of debts contracted by
Spain, for the security of which Cuban revenues had been pledged. There
was a manifest lack of equity in this claim, for Cuba had not been party
to the contracting of the obligations, and the money had been spent in
stifling her own desire to be free rather than on the development of her
resources. Nevertheless the Spanish commissioners could feel the
support of a sustaining public opinion about them, for the bulk of
these obligations were held in France and investors were doubtful of
the ability of Spain, if bereft of her colonies, to carry her enormous
financial burdens. The point, then, was stoutly urged, but the American
commissioners as stoutly defended the interests of their clients,
the Cubans, and held their ground. Thanks to their efforts, the Cuban
republic was born free of debt.
The other point was raised by the American commissioners, and was both
more important and more complicated, for when the negotiation began the
United States had not fully decided what it wanted. It was necessary
first to decide and then to obtain the consent of Spain with regard
to the great unsettled question of the disposition of the Philippines.
Dewey's victory came as an overwhelming surprise to the great majority
of Americans snugly encased, as they supposed themselves to be, in a
separate hemisphere. Nearly all looked upon it as a military operation
only, not likely to lead to later complications. Many discerning
individuals, however, both in this country and abroad, at once saw or
feared that occupation would lead to annexation. Carl Schurz, as early
as the 9th of May, wrote McKinley expressing the hope that "we remain
true to our promise that this is a war of deliverance and not one of
greedy ambition, conquest, self-aggrandizement." In August, Andrew
Carnegie wrote in "The North American Review" an article on "Distant
Possessions--The Parting of the Ways."
Sentiment in favor of retaining the islands, however, grew rapidly in
volume and in strength. John Hay wrote to Andrew Carnegie on the 22d
of August: "I am not allowed to say in my present fix (ministerial
responsibility) how much I agree with you. The only question in my mind
is how far it is now POSSIBLE for us to withdraw from the Philippines.
I am rather thankful it is not given to me to solve that momentous
question." On the 5th of September, he wrote to John Bigelow: "I fear
you are right about the Philippines, and I hope the Lord will be good
to us poor devils who have to take care of them. I marvel at your
suggesting that we pay for them. I should have expected no less of your
probity; but how many except those educated by you in the school of
morals and diplomacy would agree with you? Where did I pass you on the
road of life? You used to be a little my senior [twenty-one years]; now
you are ages younger and stronger than I am. And yet I am going to be
Secretary of State for a little while."
Not all those who advocated the retention of the Philippines did so
reluctantly or under the pressure of a feeling of necessity. In the very
first settlers of our country, the missionary impulse beat strong.
John Winthrop was not less intent than Cromwell on the conquest of all
humanity by his own ideals; only he believed the most efficacious
means to be the power of example instead of force. Just now there was a
renewed sense throughout the Anglo-Saxon public that it was the duty
of the civilized to promote the civilization of the backward, and the
Cromwellian method waxed in popularity. Kipling, at the summit of his
influence, appealed to a wide and powerful public in his "White Man's
Burden," which appeared in 1899.
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) towards the light:--
Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?
McKinley asked those having opinions on the subject of this burden to
write to him, and a strong call for the United States to take up her
share in the regeneration of mankind came from important representatives
of the religious public. Nor was the attitude of those different who saw
the possibilities of increased traffic with the East. The expansion of
the area of home distribution seemed a halfway house between the purely
nationalistic policy, which was becoming a little irksome, and the
competition of the open world.
It was not, however, the urging of these forces alone which made the
undecided feel that the annexation of the Philippines was bound to
come. The situation itself seemed to offer no other solution. Gradually
evidence as to the local conditions reached America. The Administration
was anxious for the commissioners to have the latest information, and,
as Admiral Dewey remained indispensable at Manila, General Merritt was
ordered to report at Paris, where he arrived on the 6th of October. He
was of the opinion that the Americans must remain in the Philippines,
and his reports were sustained by a cablegram from Dewey on the 14th
of October reading: "Spanish authority has been completely destroyed in
Luzon, and general anarchy prevails without the limits of the city and
Bay of Manila. Strongly probable that islands to the south will fall
into the same state soon." The history of the previous few years and
existing conditions made it highly improbable that Spanish domination
could ever be restored. The withdrawal of the United States would
therefore not mean the reestablishment of Spanish rule but no government
at all.
As to the regime which would result from our withdrawal, Admiral Dewey
judged from the condition of those areas where Spanish authority had
already ceased and that of the Americans had not yet been established.
"Distressing reports," he cabled, "have been received of inhuman cruelty
practised on religious and civil authorities in other parts of these
islands. The natives appear unable to govern." It was highly probable,
in fact, that if the United States did not take the islands, Spain would
sell her vanishing equity in the property to some other power which
possessed the equipment necessary to conquer the Philippines. To many
this eventuality did not seem objectionable, as is indicated by the
remark, already quoted, of an American official to certain Germans: "We
don't want the Philippines; why don't you take them?" That this attitude
was foolishly Quixotic is obvious, but more effective in the molding of
public opinion was the feeling that it was cowardly.
In such a changing condition of public sentiment, McKinley was a better
index of what the majority wanted than a referendum could have been. In
August he stated: "I do not want any ambiguity to be allowed to remain
on this point. The negotiators of both countries are the ones who
shall resolve upon the permanent advantages which we shall ask in
the archipelago, and decide upon the intervention, disposition, and
government of the Philippines." His instructions to the commissioners
actually went farther:
"Avowing unreservedly the purpose which has animated all our effort, and
still solicitous to adhere to it, we cannot be unmindful that, without
any desire or design on our part, the war has brought us new duties and
responsibilities which we must meet and discharge as becomes a great
nation on whose growth and career from the beginning the Ruler of
Nations has plainly written the high command and pledge of civilization.
"Incidental to our tenure in the Philippines is the commercial
opportunity to which American statesmanship cannot be indifferent....
Asking only the open door for ourselves, we are ready to accord the open
door to others.
"In view of what has been stated, the United States cannot accept less
than the cession in full rights and sovereignty of the island of Luzon."
The American commissioners were divided. Day favored the limited terms
of the instructions; Davis, Frye, and Reid wished the whole group of the
Philippines; Gray emphatically protested against taking any part of the
islands. On the 26th of October, Hay telegraphed that the President had
decided that "the cession must be of the whole Archipelago or none."
The Spanish commissioners objected strongly to this new development,
and threatened to break off the negotiations which otherwise were
practically concluded. This outcome would have put the United States in
the unfortunate position of continuing a war which it had begun in the
interests of Cuba for the quite different purpose of securing possession
of the Philippines. The Spanish were probably not without hopes that
under these changed conditions they might be able to bring to their
active assistance that latent sympathy for them which existed so
strongly in Europe. Nor was the basis of the claim of the United States
entirely clear. On the 3d of November the American commissioners cabled
to the President that they were convinced that the occupation of Manila
did not constitute a conquest of the islands as a whole.
By this time, however, the President had decided that the United States
must have the islands. On the 13th of November, Hay telegraphed that the
United States was entitled to an indemnity for the cost of the war. This
argument was not put forward because the United States wished indemnity
but to give a technical basis for the American claim to the Philippines.
In the same cablegram, Hay instructed the commissioners to offer Spain
ten or twenty millions for all the islands. Upon this financial basis
the treaty was finally concluded; it was signed on December 10, 1898;
and ratifications were exchanged on April 11, 1899.
The terms of the treaty provided, first, for the relinquishment of
sovereignty over Cuba by Spain. The island was to be occupied by the
United States, in whose hands its subsequent disposition was left. All
other Spanish islands in the West Indies, together with Guam in the
Ladrones, were ceded to the United States. The whole archipelago of the
Philippines, with water boundaries carefully but not quite accurately
drawn, was ceded to the United States, which by the same article agreed
to pay Spain $20,000,000. All claims for indemnity or damages between
the two nations, or either nation and the citizens of the other, were
mutually relinquished, the United States assuming the adjudication and
settlement of all claims of her own citizens against Spain.
This treaty, even more than the act of war, marked a turning point in
the relation of the United States to the outside world. So violent was
the opposition of those who disapproved, and so great the reluctance of
even the majority of those who approved, to acknowledge that the United
States had emerged from the isolated path which it had been treading
since 1823, that every effort was made to minimize the significance of
the beginning of a new era in American history. It was argued by those
delving into the past that the Philippines actually belonged to the
Western Hemisphere because the famous demarcation line drawn by Pope
Alexander VI, in 1493, ran to the west of them; it was, indeed, partly
in consequence of that line that Spain had possessed the islands. Before
Spain lost Mexico her Philippine trade had actually passed across the
Pacific, through the Mexican port of Acapulco, and across the Atlantic.
Yet these interesting historical facts were scarcely related in the
mind of the public to the more immediate and tangible fact that the
annexation of the Philippines gave the United States a far-flung
territory situated just where all the powerful nations of the world were
then centering their interest.
In opposition to those who disapproved of this extension of territory,
it was argued more cogently that, in spite of the prevailing belief
of the thirty preceding years, the United States had always been
an expanding power, stretching its authority over new areas with a
persistency and rapidity hardly equaled by any other nation, and that
this latest step was but a new stride in the natural expansion of the
United States. But here again the similarity between the former and
the most recent steps was more apparent than real. Louisiana, Florida,
Texas, California, and Oregon, had all been parts of an obvious
geographical whole. Alaska, indeed, was detached, but its acquisition
had been partly accidental, and it was at least a part of the American
continent and would, in the opinion of many, eventually become
contiguous by the probable annexation of Canada. Moreover, none of the
areas so far occupied by the United States had been really populated. It
had been a logical expectation that American people would soon overflow
these acquired lands and assimilate the inhabitants. In the case of the
Philippines, on the other hand, it was fully recognized that Americans
could at most be only a small governing class, and that even Porto Rico,
accessible as it was, would prove too thickly settled to give hopes of
Americanization.
The terms of the treaty with Spain, indeed, recognized these
differences. In all previous instances, except Alaska, the added
territory had been incorporated into the body of the United States with
the expectation, now realized except in Hawaii, of reaching the position
of self-governing and participating States of the Union. Even in the
case of Alaska it had been provided that all inhabitants remaining in
residence, except uncivilized Indians, should become citizens of the
United States. In the case of these new annexations resulting from the
war with Spain, provision was made only for the religious freedom of
the inhabitants. "The civil rights and political status of the native
inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States shall
be determined by the Congress." There could therefore be no doubt that
for the first time the United States had acquired colonies and that the
question whether they should develop into integral parts of the country
or into dependencies of an imperialistic republic was left to the future
to decide.
It was but natural that such striking events and important decisions
should loom large as factors in the following presidential campaign. The
Republicans endorsed the Administration, emphatically stated that the
independence and self-government of Cuba must be secured, and, with
reference to the other islands, declared that "the largest measure of
self-government consistent with their welfare and our duties shall be
secured to them by law." The Democrats asserted that "no nation can
long endure half republic and half empire," and favored "an immediate
declaration of the Nation's purpose to give the Filipinos, first, a
stable form of government; second, independence; and third, protection
from outside interference such as has been given for nearly a century
to the republics of Central and South America." The Democrats were at a
disadvantage owing to the fact that, since so much had been irrevocably
accomplished, they could not raise the whole issue of colonial expansion
but only advocate a different policy for the handling of what seemed to
most people to be details. The distrust which their financial program
of 1896 had excited, moreover, still hung over them and repelled
many voters who might have supported them on questions of foreign and
colonial policies. Nevertheless the reflection of President McKinley
by a greatly increased majority must be taken as indicating that the
American people generally approved of his policies and accepted the
momentous changes which had been brought about by the successful
conclusion of the war with Spain.
CHAPTER XIII. A Peace Which Meant War
In a large way, ever since the Spanish War, the United States has been
adjusting its policy to the world conditions of which that struggle
first made the people aware. The period between 1898 and 1917 will
doubtless be regarded by the historian a hundred years from now as
a time of transition similar to that between 1815 and 1829. In that
earlier period John Marshall and John Quincy Adams did much by their
wisdom and judgment to preserve what was of value in the old regime for
use in the new. In the later period John Hay performed, though far less
completely, a somewhat similar function.
John Hay had an acquaintance with the best traditions of American
statesmanship which falls to the lot of few men. He was private
secretary to Lincoln during the Civil War, he had as his most intimate
friend in later life Henry Adams, the historian, who lived immersed in
the memories and traditions of a family which has taken a distinguished
part in the Government of the United States from its beginning.
Possessed of an ample fortune, Hay had lived much abroad and in the
society of the men who governed Europe. He was experienced in newspaper
work and in diplomacy, and he came to be Secretary of State fresh from a
residence in England where as Ambassador he had enjoyed wide popularity.
With a lively wit and an engaging charm of manner, he combined
a knowledge of international law and of history which few of our
Secretaries have possessed. Moreover he knew men and how to handle
them. Until the death of McKinley in 1901 he was left almost free in the
administration of his office. He once said that the President spoke to
him of his office scarcely once a month. In the years from 1901 to
1905 he worked under very different conditions, for President Roosevelt
discussed affairs of state with him daily and took some matters entirely
into his own hands.
Hay found somewhat better instruments to work with than most Americans
were inclined to believe probable. It is true that the American
diplomatic service abroad has not always reflected credit upon the
country. It has contained extremely able and distinguished men but
also many who have been stupid, ignorant, and ill-mannered. The State
Department in Washington, however, has almost escaped the vicissitudes
of politics and has been graced by the long and disinterested service of
competent officials. From 1897 to 1913, moreover, the service abroad was
built up on the basis of continuity and promotion.
One sign of a new epoch was the changed attitude of the American public
toward annexation. While the war was in progress the United States
yielded to the desires of Hawaii, and annexed the islands as a part of
the United States, with the hope of their eventual statehood. In 1899
the United States consented to change the cumbrous and unsuccessful
arrangement by which, in partnership with Great Britain and Germany, it
had supervised the native government of Samoa. No longer unwilling to
acquire distant territories, the United States took in full possession
the island of Tutuila, with its harbor of Pago Pago, and consented
to Germany's taking the remainder of the islands, while Great Britain
received compensation elsewhere. In 1900 the Government paid over to
Spain $100,000 for Sibutu and Cagayan Sulu, two islands really belonging
to the Philippines but overlooked in the treaty. Proud of the navy and
with a new recognition of its necessities, the United States sought
naval stations in those areas where the fleet might have to operate. In
the Pacific the Government obtained Midway and Wake islands in 1900. In
the West Indies, the harbor of Guantanamo was secured from Cuba, and
in 1903 a treaty was made with Denmark for the purchase of her
islands--which, however, finally became American possessions only in
1917.
By her policy toward Cuba, the United States gave the world a striking
example of observing the plighted word even when contrary to the
national interest. For a century the United States had expected to
acquire the "Pearl of the Antilles." Spain in the treaty of peace
refused to recognize the Cuban Government and relinquished the island
into the hands of the United States. The withdrawal of the Spanish
troops left the Cuban Government utterly unable to govern, and the
United States was forced to occupy the island. Nevertheless the
Government had begun the war with a recognition of Cuban independence
and to that declaration it adhered. The country gave the best of its
talent to make the islands self-governing as quickly as possible.
Harvard University invited Cuban teachers to be its guests at a summer
session. American medical men labored with a martyr's devotion to stamp
out disease. General Wood, as military governor, established order and
justice and presided over the evolution of a convention assembled
to draft a constitution for the people of Cuba and to determine the
relations of the United States and Cuba. These relations, indeed, were
already under consideration at Washington and were subsequently embodied
in the Platt Amendment. * This measure directed the President to leave
the control of Cuba to the people of the island as soon as they should
agree to its terms. It also required that the Government of Cuba should
never allow a foreign power to impair its independence; that it would
contract no debt for which it could not provide a sinking fund from
the ordinary revenue; that it would grant to the United States "lands
necessary for coaling or naval stations"; that it would provide for the
sanitation of its cities; and that the United States should have the
right to intervene, "for the preservation of Cuban independence,
the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of
life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging" certain
obligations with respect to Spanish subjects which the United States
had assumed in the treaty signed at Paris. After some hesitation the
convention added these provisions to the new constitution of Cuba.
On May 20, 1902, the American troops withdrew, leaving Cuba in better
condition than she had ever been before. Subsequently the United States
was forced to intervene to preserve order, but, though the temptation
was strong to remain, the American troops again withdrew after they had
done their constructive work. The voluntary entrance of Cuba into the
Great War in cooperation with the United States was a tribute to the
generosity and honesty of the American people.
* An amendment to the Army Appropriation Bill of March 2, 1901.
Porto Rico presented a problem different from that which the United
States had to solve in Cuba. There existed no native organization which
could supply even the basis for the formation of a government. The
people seemed, indeed, to have no desire for independence, and
public sentiment in the United States generally favored the permanent
possession of the island. After a period of rule entirely at the
discretion of the President, Congress established in 1900 a form
of government based on that of the American territories. Porto Rico
remained, however, unincorporated into the Union, and it was long
doubtful whether it would remain a dependency or would ultimately
attain statehood. In 1917, however, the degree of self-government was
increased, and the inhabitants were made American citizens. It now seems
probable that the island will ultimately become a State of the Union.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world the United States had a more
unpleasant task. The revolted Filipinos, unlike the Cubans, had not
declared themselves for independence but for redress of grievances. The
United States had assisted Aguinaldo, at the moment in exile, to return
to the islands after the Battle of Manila Bay but had not officially
recognized him as having authority. When he saw Spanish power
disappearing under American blows, he declared himself in favor of the
abolition of all foreign rule. This declaration, of course, in no
way bound the United States, to whom the treaty with Spain, the only
recognized sovereign, ceded the island absolutely. There was no flaw
in the title of the United States, and there were no obligations, save
those of humanity, to bind the Americans in their treatment of the
natives. Nevertheless, the great majority of Americans would doubtless
have gladly favored a policy similar to that pursued in the case of
Cuba, had it seemed in any way practicable. Unfortunately, however, the
Filipinos did not constitute a nation but only a congeries of peoples
and tribes of differing race and origin, whom nearly four centuries of
Spanish rule had not been able to make live at peace with one another.
Some were Christians, some Mohammedans, some heathen savages; some wore
European clothes, some none at all. The particular tribe which formed
the chief support of Aguinaldo, the Tagalogs, comprised less than one
half of the population of the island of Luzon. The United States had
taken the islands largely because it did not see any one else to whom it
could properly shift the burden. The shoulders of the Tagalogs did not
seem broad enough for the responsibility.
The United States prepared, therefore, to carry on the task which it
had assumed, while Aguinaldo, with his army circling Manila, prepared to
dispute its title. On February 4, 1899, actual hostilities broke out.
By this time Aguinaldo had a capital at Malolos, thirty miles north of
Manila, a government, thirty or forty thousand troops, and an influence
which he was extending throughout the islands by means of secret
organizations and superstitious appeals. This seemed a puny strength to
put forth against the United States but various circumstances combined
to make the contest less unequal than it seemed, and the outcome was
probably more in doubt than that in the war with Spain.
The United States had at the moment but fourteen thousand men in
the islands, under the command of General Otis. Some of these were
volunteers who had been organized to fight Spain and who could not be
held after the ratification of peace. Congress had, indeed, provided
for an increase in the regular army, but not sufficient to provide the
"40,000 effectives for the field," whom Otis had requested in August,
1899. There were, of course, plenty of men available in America for
service in the Philippines, and finally twelve regiments of volunteers
were raised, two of which were composed of negroes. Aguinaldo's strength
lay in the configuration of the country, in its climate, which for four
centuries had prevented a complete conquest by the Spaniards, and in
the uncertainty which he knew existed as to how far the American people
would support a war waged apparently for conquest, against the wishes of
the Filipinos. On the other hand, the chief advantages of the American
forces lay in Aguinaldo's lack of arms and in the power of the American
Navy, which confined the fighting for the most part to Luzon.
In March, General MacArthur began to move to the north, and on the last
day of that month he entered Malolos. On the 23d of April he pushed
farther northward toward Calumpit, where the Filipino generalissimo,
Luna, had prepared a position which he declared to be impregnable. This
brief campaign added a new favorite to the American roll of honor, for
it was here that Colonel Funston, at the head of his gallant Kansans,
crossed the rivers Bag-bag and Rio Grande, under circumstances that gave
the individual American soldier a prestige in the eyes of the Filipinos
and a reputation which often ran far ahead of the army.
General Luna had torn up the ties and rails of the steel railroad bridge
over the Bag-bag, and had let down the span next the far bank. Thus
cut off from attack by a deep river two hundred feet wide, the Filipino
commander had entrenched his forces on the farther side. Shielded by
fields of young corn and bamboo thickets, the Americans approached
the bank of the river. A naval gun on an armored train bombarded
the Filipinos but could not silence their trenches. It was therefore
necessary to cross an the bridge, and under fire. General Wheaton
ordered Colonel Funston to seize the bridge. With about ten men Funston
rushed the nearer end which stood in the open. Working themselves along
the girders, the men finally reached the broken span. Beyond that,
swimming was the only method of reaching the goal. Leaving their guns
behind them, Colonel Funston and three others swung themselves off the
bridge and into the stream. Quite unarmed, the four landed and rushed
the nearest trenches. Fortunately these had been abandoned under
American fire, and rifles and cartridges had been left behind. Thus
this aquatic charge by unarmed men secured the bridge and enabled the
American troops to cross.
Not far beyond was the Rio Grande, four hundred feet broad and crossed
by another railroad bridge that must be taken. Here again the task was
entrusted to Colonel Funston and the Twentieth Kansas. This time they
found an old raft. Two privates stripped and swam across with a rope.
Landing unarmed on the enemy's side of the river, they fastened their
rope to a part of the very trench works of the Filipinos. With this
connection established, Colonel Funston improvised a ferry and was soon
on the enemy's side with supports. A stiff, unequal fight remained,
as the ferry carried but six men on each trip. The bank was soon won,
however, and the safe crossing of the army was assured. Such acts gave
the natives a respect for Americans as fighting men, which caused it to
be more and more difficult for the Filipino commanders to bring their
forces to battle in the open.
General Lawton in the meantime was conducting a brilliant movement to
the eastward. After breaking the enemy forces, he returned to Manila and
then marched southward into the Tagalog country, where on the 13th of
June, at Zapoti Bridge, he won the most stoutly contested battle of the
insurrection. The successful conclusion of these operations brought the
most civilized part of the island under American control.
The fighting now became scattered and assumed gradually a guerrilla
character. The abler commanders of the American forces found their way
to the top, and the troops, with their natural adaptability, constantly
devised new methods of meeting new situations. A war of strangely
combined mountain and sea fighting, involving cavalry and infantry and
artillery, spread over the islands in widening circles and met with
lessening resistance. An indication of the new character of the war was
given by the change of the military organization, in April, 1900, from
one of divisions and brigades, to a geographical basis. Each commander
was now given charge of a certain area and used his men to reduce this
district to order.
The insurgents fought in small groups and generally under local
chieftains. Their advantage lay in their thorough knowledge of the
country and in the sympathy of a part of the population and the fear of
another part, for outlaws living in concealment and moving in the dark
can often inspire a terror which regular troops under discipline fail
to engender. The Americans could not trust the natives, as it was
impossible to tell the truthful from the treacherous. Nevertheless
it was a kind of fighting which gave unusual scope for that American
individualism, so strongly represented in the army, to which the romance
of precisely this sort of thing had drawn just the class of men best
fitted for the work. Scouting, counter scouting, surprise attacks, and
ambuscades formed the daily news transmitted from the front--affairs not
of regiments and companies but of squads and individuals. When face to
face, however, the Filipinos seldom stood their ground, and the American
ingenuity and eager willingness to attempt any new thing gradually got
the better of the local knowledge and unscrupulousness as to the laws
of war which had at first, given the natives an advantage. Funston, now
Brigadier General, and his "suicide squad" continued to play an active
part, but a similar spirit of daring and ingenuity pervaded the whole
army.
Broken as were the Filipino field forces and widening as was the area of
peace, the result of the island campaign was still uncertain. It rested
upon two unknown quantities. The first was the nature of the Filipinos.
Would they remain irreconcilable, ever ready to take advantage of a
moment of weakness? If such were to be the case, we could look for no
real conquest, but only a forcible occupation, which the people of
the United States would never consent to maintain. The second unknown
quantity was the American people themselves. Would they sustain
the occupation sufficiently long to give a reasonable test of the
possibilities of success?
Two events brought these uncertainties to an end. In the first place,
William Jennings Bryan was defeated for the presidency in November,
1900, and President McKinley was given four more years in which to
complete the experiment. In the second place, on March 23, 1901,
Aguinaldo, who had been long in concealment, was captured. Though there
had long been no possibility of really commanding the insurgent forces
as a whole, Aguinaldo had remained the center of revolt and occasionally
showed his hand, as in the attempt to negotiate a peace on the basis of
independence. In February an intercepted letter had given a clue to his
hiding place. Funston, in spite of his new rank, determined personally
to undertake the capture. The signature of Lacuna, one of the insurgent
leaders, was forged and letters were sent to Aguinaldo informing him
of the capture of five Americans, who were being sent to headquarters.
Among the five was Funston himself. The "insurgent" guard, clad in
captured uniforms, consisted for the most part of Macabebes, hereditary
enemies of the Tagalogs--for the Americans had now learned the Roman
trick of using one people against another. The ruse succeeded perfectly.
The guard and its supposed prisoners were joyfully received by
Aguinaldo, but the tables were quickly turned and Aguinaldo's capture
was promptly effected.
On the 19th of April, Aguinaldo wrote: "After mature deliberation, I
resolutely proclaim to the world that I cannot refuse to heed the voice
of a people longing for peace, nor the lamentations of thousands of
families yearning to see their dear ones enjoying the liberty and
promised generosity of the great American nation. By acknowledging and
accepting the sovereignty of the United States throughout the Philippine
Archipelago, as I now do, and without any reservation whatsoever, I
believe that I am serving thee, my beloved country."
On the 19th of May, General Wheaton, Chief of Staff in the Philippines,
sent the following dispatch to Washington: "Lacuna having surrendered
with all his officers and men today, I report that all insurrectionary
leaders in this department have been captured or have surrendered. This
is the termination of the state of war in this department so far as
armed resistance to the authority of the United States is concerned."
There was subsequent fighting with other tribes and in other islands,
particularly with the Moros of the Sulu group, but by the time Aguinaldo
had accepted American rule, the uncertainty of the American people
had been resolved, and the execution of the treaty with Spain had been
actually accomplished. As seventy thousand troops were no longer needed
in the islands, the volunteers and many of the regulars were sent home,
and there began an era of peace such as the Philippines had never before
known.
During the suppression of the insurrection the American Army had
resorted to severe measures, though they by no means went to the
extremes that were reported in the press. It was realized, however, that
the establishment of a permanent peace must rest upon an appeal to
the good will and self-interest of the natives. The treatment of the
conquered territories, therefore, was a matter of the highest concern
not only with reference to the public opinion at home but to the lasting
success of the military operations which had just been concluded.
There was as yet no law in the United States relating to the government
of dependencies. The entire control of the islands therefore rested, in
the first instance, with the President and was vested by him, subject to
instructions, in the Military Governor. The army fortunately reflected
fully the democratic tendencies of the United States as a whole. In
June, 1899, General Lawton encouraged and assisted the natives in
setting up in their villages governing bodies of their own selection.
In August, he issued a general order, based upon a law of the islands,
providing for a general system of local government into which there was
introduced for the first time the element of really popular election.
In 1900, a new code of criminal procedure, largely the work of Enoch
Herbert Crowder, at that time Military Secretary, was promulgated, which
surrounded the accused with practically all the safeguards to which the
Anglo-Saxon is accustomed except jury trial, for which the people were
unprepared.
To advise with regard to a permanent system of government for the
Philippines President McKinley appointed in January, 1899, a commission
consisting of Jacob G. Schurman, President of Cornell University, Dean
C. Worcester, who had long been engaged in scientific research in the
Philippines, Colonel Charles Denby, for many years previously minister
to China, Admiral Dewey, and General E. S. Otis. Largely upon their
recommendation, the President appointed a second commission, headed
by Judge William Howard Taft to carry on the work of organizing
civil government which had already begun under military direction and
gradually to take over the legislative power. The Military Governor was
to continue to exercise executive power. In 1901, Congress at length
took action, vesting all military, civil, and judicial powers in such
persons as the President might appoint to govern the islands.
McKinley immediately appointed Judge Taft to the new governorship thus
authorized. In 1901 in the "Insular Cases" the Supreme Court also gave
its sanction to what had been done. In legislation for the territories,
it held that Congress was not bound by all the restrictions of the
Constitution, as, for instance, that requiring jury trial; that Porto
Rico and the Philippines were neither foreign countries nor completely
parts of the United States, though Congress was at liberty to
incorporate them into the Union.
There was, however, no disposition to incorporate the Philippines into
the United States, but there has always been a widespread sentiment
that the islands should ultimately be given their independence, and
this sentiment has largely governed the American attitude toward them.
A native Legislature was established in 1907 under Governor Taft, * and
under the Wilson Administration the process toward independence has
been accelerated, and dates begin to be considered. The process of
preparation for independence has been threefold: the development of the
physical well-being of the islands, the education of the islanders, and
the gradual introduction of the latter into responsible positions of
government. With little of the encouragement which might have come from
appreciative interest at home, thousands of Americans have now labored
in the Philippines for almost twenty years, but with little disposition
to settle there permanently. Their efforts to develop the Filipinos have
achieved remarkable success. It has of late been found possible to turn
over such a large proportion of the governmental work to the natives
that the number of Americans in the islands is steadily diminishing.
The outbreak of the war with Germany found the natives loyal to American
interests and even saw a son of Aguinaldo taking service under the Stars
and Stripes. Such a tribute, like the services of Generals Smuts and
Botha to Great Britain, compensates for the friction and noise
with which democracy works and is the kind of triumph which carries
reassurance of its ultimate efficiency and justice.
* By the Act of July 1, 1902, the Legislature was to consist of
two houses, the Commission acting as an upper house and an elective
assembly constituting a lower house. The Legislature at its first
session was to elect two delegates who were to sit, without the right
to vote, in the House of Representatives at Washington. An Act of August
29, 1916, substituted an elective Senate for the Philippine Commission
as the upper house of the Legislature.
CHAPTER XIV. The Open Door
The United States arrived in the Orient at a moment of high excitement.
Russia was consolidating the advance of two centuries by the building of
the trans-Siberian railroad, and was looking eagerly for a port in
the sun, to supplement winter-bound Vladivostok. Great Britain still
regarded Russia as the great enemy and, pursuing her policy of placing
buffer states between her territories and her enemies, was keenly
interested in preventing any encroachment southward which might
bring the Russian bear nearer India. France, Russia's ally, possessed
IndoChina, which was growing at the expense of Siam and which might grow
northwards into China. Germany saw in eastern Asia the richest prize
remaining in the world not yet possessed by her rivals, and it was
for this that she was seeking power in the Pacific. Having missed the
Philippines, she quickly secured Samoa and purchased from Spain the
Caroline Islands, east of the Philippines, and all that the United
States had not taken of Spain's empire in the Pacific.
These latent rivalries had been brought into the open by the
Chino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, which showed the powerlessness of
China. The western world was, indeed, divided in opinion as to whether
this colossus of the East was essentially rotten, old, decrepit,
and ready to disintegrate, or was merely weak because of arrested
development, which education and training could correct. At any rate,
China was regarded as sick and therefore became for the moment even more
interesting than Turkey, the traditional sick man of Europe. If
China were to die, her estate would be divided. If she were really to
revitalize her vast bulk by adapting her millions to modern ways,
she had but to stretch herself and the toilfully acquired Asiatic
possessions of the European powers would shiver to pieces; and if she
awoke angry, Europe herself might well tremble. The really wise saw that
the important thing was to determine the kind of education which China
should receive, and in solving this problem the palm of wisdom must be
given to the missionaries who represented the great Christian societies
of Europe and America. To small-minded statesmen it seemed that the
situation called for conquest. No nation was willing to be late at the
division, if division it was to be; while if China was to awake, the
European powers felt that she should awake shackled. By no one was
this latter view so clearly held as by the Kaiser. With his accustomed
versatility, he designed a cartoon showing the European powers, armed
and with Germania in the forefront, confronting the yellow peril. On
sending his troops to China in 1900, he told them to imitate the methods
of the Huns, in order to strike lasting terror to the hearts of the
yellow race. By such means he sought to direct attention to the menace
of the Barbarian, when he was himself first stating that doctrine of
Teutonic frightfulness which has proved, in our day at least, to be the
real world peril.
It was Japan who had exposed the weakness of the giant, but her victory
had been so easy that her own strength was as yet untested. Japan had
come of age in 1894 when, following the example of Great Britain, the
various powers had released her from the obligation of exterritoriality
imposed upon her by treaties when their subjects were unwilling to trust
themselves to her courts. It was still uncertain, however, whether the
assumption of European methods by Japan was real, and her position as a
great power was not yet established. In the very moment of her triumph
over China she was forced to submit to the humiliation of having the
terms of peace supervised by a concert of powers and of having many of
the spoils of her victory torn from her.
The chief fruits that remained to Japan from her brilliant military
victory were Formosa and the recognition of the separation of Korea from
China: These acquisitions gave her an opportunity to show her capacity
for real expansion, but whether she would be able to hold her prize
was yet to be proven. The European states, however, claimed that by the
Japanese victories the balance of power in the Orient had been upset
and that it must be adjusted. The obvious method was for each power
to demand something for itself. In 1898 Germany secured a lease of
Kiao-chau Bay across the Yellow Sea from Korea, which she at once
fortified and where she proceeded to develop a port with the hope of
commanding the trade of all that part of China. Russia in the same way
secured, somewhat farther to the north, Port Arthur and Talien-wan,
and proceeded to build Dalny as the commercial outlet of her growing
railroad. Great Britain immediately occupied Wei-hai-wei, which was
midway between the German and Russian bases and commanded from the south
the entrance to Pekin, and also, much farther to the south, Mirs Bay,
which gave security to her commercial center at Hong-kong. France took
Kwang-chau, still farther to the south, and Italy received Sanmen,
somewhat to the south of the Yangtszekiang. From these ports each power
hoped to extend a sphere of influence. It was axiomatic that such a
sphere would be most rapidly developed and most solidly held if special
tariff regulations were devised to throw the trade into the hands of the
merchants of the nation holding the port. The next step, therefore, in
establishing the solidity of an Asiatic base, would be the formulation
of special tariffs. The result would be the practical division of China
into districts having different and opposed commercial interests.
The United States did not arrive in this energetic company as an entire
stranger. With both China and Japan her relations had long been intimate
and friendly. American merchants had traded ginseng and furs for China
silks and teas ever since the United States had been a nation. In 1786
the Government had appointed a commercial agent at Canton and in 1844
had made one of the first commercial treaties with China. In 1854 the
United States had been the point of the foreign wedge that opened Japan
to western civilization and inaugurated that amazing period of national
reorganization and assimilation which has given the Japanese Empire her
place in they world today. American missionaries had labored long and
disinterestedly for the moral regeneration of both China and Japan with
results which are now universally recognized as beneficial, though in
1900 there was still among the Chinese much of that friction which is
the inevitable reaction from an attempt to change the fundamentals of an
ancient faith and long-standing habits. American merchants, it is
true, had been of all classes, but at any rate there had always been a
sufficient leaven of those of the highest type to insure a reasonable
reputation.
The conduct of the American Government in the Far East had been most
honorable and friendly. The treaty with Japan in 1858 contained the
clause: "The President of the United States, at the request of the
Japanese Government, will act as a friendly mediator in such matters of
difference as may arise between the Government of Japan and any European
power." Under Seward the United States did, indeed, work in concert with
European powers to force the opening of the Shimonoseki Straits in 1864,
and a revision of the tariff in 1866. Subsequently, however, the United
States cooperated with Japan in her effort to free herself from certain
disadvantageous features of early treaties. In 1883 the United
States returned the indemnity received at the time of the Shimonoseki
affair--an example of international equity almost unique at the time
but subsequently paralleled in American relations with China. The one
serious difficulty existing in the relationships of the United States
with both China and Japan resulted from an unwillingness to receive
their natives as immigrants when people of nearly every other country
were admitted. The American attitude had already been expressed in the
Chinese Exclusion Act. As yet the chief difficulty was with that nation,
but it was inevitable that such distinctions would prove particularly
galling to the rising spirit of the Japanese.
John Hay was keenly aware of the possibilities involved in these Far
Eastern events. Of profound moment under any circumstances, they were
doubly so now that the United States was territorially involved. To
take a slice of this Eastern area was a course quite open to the United
States and one which some of the powers at least would have welcomed.
Hay, however, wrote to Paul Dana on March 16, 1899, as follows: "We are,
of course, opposed to the dismemberment of that empire [China], and we
do not think that the public opinion of the United States would justify
this Government in taking part in the great game of spoliation now going
on." He felt also that the United States should not tie its hands by
"formal alliances with other Powers interested," nor was he prepared "to
assure China that we would join her in repelling that demand by armed
force."
It remained, then, for the Secretary of State to find a lever for
peaceful interference on the part of his country and a plan for future
operations. The first he found in the commercial interest of the United
States. Since the Government refrained from pressing for special favors
in any single part of the Chinese Empire, it could demand that American
interests be not infringed anywhere. The Secretary of State realized
that in a democracy statesmen cannot overlook the necessity of
condensing their policies into popular catchwords or slogans. Today
such phrases represent in large measure the power referred to in the old
saying: "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its
laws." The single phrase, "scrap of paper," probably cost Germany more
than any one of her atrocious deeds in the Great War. Hay's policy
with regard to China had the advantage of two such phrases. The "golden
rule," however, proved less lasting than the "open door," which was
coined apparently in the instructions to the Paris Peace Commission.
This phrase expressed just what the United States meant. The precise
plan of the American Government was outlined and its execution
undertaken in a circular note of September 6, 1899, which the Secretary
of State addressed to London, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. In this
he asked the powers to agree to respect all existing open ports and
established interests within their respective spheres, to enforce the
Chinese tariff and no other, and to refrain from all discrimination
in port and railroad charges. To make such a proposal to the European
powers required courage. In its essential elements the situation in the
Far East was not unlike the internal economic condition prevailing at
the same time in the United States. In this country great transportation
monopolies had been built up, having an enormous capitalization, and
many of them were dependent for their profits on the advantage of price
fixing that monopoly may be expected to bring. Then state and nation
stepped in and asserted their right to fix prices in the interest of the
consumer. The consequent political struggles illustrate the difficulties
besetting the Secretary of State in his somewhat similar attempt to
take the chief fruits from the powers which had just acquired Chinese
territory--an undertaking in which he had none of the support of legal
powers effective in the United States.
That Hay so promptly succeeded in putting at least a toe in the door
which he wished to open was due to a number of circumstances. Great
Britain, devoted to the principle of free trade, heartily approved of
his proposal and at once accepted its terms. The other powers expressed
their sympathy with the ideas of the note, but, in the case of Russia
at least, without the faintest intention of paying any heed to it. Hay
promptly notified each power of the others' approval and stated that,
with this unanimous consent, he would regard its acceptance of the
proposals as "final and definitive."
The force which Hay had used was the moral influence of world opinion.
None of the powers dared, with its hands fresh filled with Chinese
plunder, openly to assert that it had taken the spoils for selfish
reasons alone--at least, after another power had denied such purpose.
Hay saw and capitalized the force of conventional morality which,
however superficial in many cases, had influenced the European powers,
particularly since the time of the Holy Alliance. Accustomed to clothe
their actions in the garb of humanitarianism, they were not, when caught
thus red-handed, prepared to be a mark of scorn for the rest of the
world. The cult of unabashed might was still a closet philosophy which
even Germany, its chief devotee, was not yet ready to avow to the world.
Of course Hay knew that the battle was not won, for the bandits still
held the booty. He was too wise to attempt to wrench it from them, for
that indeed would have meant battle for which the United States was
not prepared in military strength or popular intention. He had merely
pledged these countries to use their acquisitions for the general good.
Though the promises meant little in themselves, to have exacted them was
an initial step toward victory.
In the meantime the penetration of foreign influences into China was
producing a reaction. A wave of protest against the "foreign devils"
swept through the population and acquired intensity from the acts of
fanatic religious leaders. That strange character, the Dowager Empress,
yielded to the "Boxers," who obtained possession of Pekin, cut off the
foreigners from the outside world, and besieged them in the legations.
That some such movement was inevitable must have been apparent to
many European statesmen, and that it would give them occasion, by
interference and punishment, to solidify their "spheres of influence"
must have occurred to them. The "open door" was in as immediate peril as
were the diplomats in Pekin.
Secretary Hay did not, however, yield to these altered circumstances.
Instead, he built upon the leadership which he had assumed. He promptly
accepted the international responsibility which the emergency called
for. The United States at once agreed to take its share, in cooperation
with the Great Powers, in whatever measures should be judged necessary.
The first obvious measure was to relieve the foreign ministers who were
besieged in Pekin. American assistance was active and immediate. By the
efforts of the American Government, communication with the legations
was opened; the American naval forces were soon at Tientsin, the port
of Pekin; and five or six thousand troops were hastily sent from the
Philippines. The United States therefore bore its full proportion of
the task. The largest contingent of the land forces was, indeed, from
Germany, and the command of the whole undertaking was by agreement given
to the German commander, Graf von Waldersee. Owing, however, to his
remoteness from the scene of action, he did not arrive until after Pekin
had been reached and the relief of the legations, which was the first
if not the main object of the expedition, had been accomplished. After
this, the resistance of the Chinese greatly decreased and the country
was practically at the mercy of the concert of powers.
By thus bearing its share in the responsibilities of the situation, the
United States had won a vote in determining the result. Secretary Hay,
however, had not waited for the military outcome, and he aimed not at
a vote in the concert of powers but at its leadership. While the
international expedition was gathering its forces, he announced in a
circular note that "the policy of the Government of the United States is
to seek a solution which may bring about permanent safety and peace to
China, preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity, protect
all rights guaranteed to friendly powers by treaty and international
law, and safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial
trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire." To this position he
requested the powers to assent.
Again Hay had hit upon a formula which no self-respecting power could
deny. Receiving from practically all a statement of their purpose to
preserve the "integrity" of China and the "Open Door" just when they
were launching the greatest military movement ever undertaken in the Far
East by the western world, he made it impossible to turn punishment into
destruction and partition. The legations were saved and so was China.
After complicated negotiations an agreement was reached which exacted
heavy pecuniary penalties, and in the case of Germany, whose minister
had been assassinated, a conspicuous and what was intended to be
an enduring record of the crime and its punishment. China, however,
remained a nation--with its door open.
Once more in 1904 the fate of China, and in fact that of the whole Far
East, was thrown into the ring. Japan and Russia entered into a war
which had practically no cause except the collision of their advancing
interests in Chinese territory. Every land battle of the war, except
those of the Saghalien campaign, was fought in China, Chinese ports were
blockaded, Chinese waters were filled with enemy mines and torpedoes,
and the prize was Chinese territory or territory recently taken from
her. To deny these facts was impossible; to admit them seemed to involve
the disintegration of the empire. Here again Secretary Hay, devising a
middle course, gained by his promptness of action the prestige of having
been the first to speak. On February 8, 1904, he asked Germany, Great
Britain, and France to join with the United States in requesting
Japan and Russia to recognize the neutrality of China, and to localize
hostilities within fixed limits. On January 10, 1905, remembering how
the victory of Japan in 1894 had brought compensatory grants to all the
powers, he sent out a circular note expressing the hope on the part of
the American Government that the war would not result in any "concession
of Chinese territory to neutral powers." Accustomed now to these
invitations which decency forbade them to refuse, all the powers
assented to this suggestion. The results of the war, therefore, were
confined to Manchuria, and Japan promised that her occupation of that
province should be temporary and that commercial opportunity therein
should be the same for all. The culmination of American prestige came
with President Roosevelt's offer of the good offices of the United
States, on June 8, 1905. As a result, peace negotiations were
concluded in the Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire) in 1905. For
this conspicuous service to the cause of peace President Roosevelt was
awarded the Nobel prize.
Secretary Hay had therefore, in the seven years following the real
arrival of the United States in the Far East, evolved a policy which was
clear and definite, and one which appealed to the American people.
While it constituted a variation from the precise methods laid down
by President Monroe in 1823, in that it involved concerted and equal
cooperation with the great powers of the world, Hay's policy rested upon
the same fundamental bases: a belief in the fundamental right of nations
to determine their own government, and the reduction to a minimum
of intervention by foreign powers. To have refused to recognize
intervention at all would have been, under the circumstances, to abandon
China to her fate. In protecting its own right to trade with her, the
United States protected the integrity of China. Hay had, moreover, so
ably conducted the actual negotiations that the United States enjoyed
for the moment the leadership in the concert of powers and exercised
an authority more in accord with her potential than with her actual
strength. Secretary Hay's death in 1905 brought American leadership
to an end, for, though his policies continued to be avowed by all
concerned, their application was thereafter restricted. The integrity of
Chinese territory was threatened, though not actually violated, by
the action of Great Britain in Tibet and of Japan in Manchuria. Japan,
recognized as a major power since her war with Russia, seemed in the
opinion of many to leave but a crack of the door open in Manchuria, and
her relationship with the United States grew difficult as she resented
more and more certain discriminations against her citizens which
she professed to find in the laws of some of the American States,
particularly in those of California.
In 1908 Elihu Root, who succeeded Hay as Secretary of State, effected
an understanding with Japan. Adopting a method which has become rather
habitual in the relationship between the United States and Japan, Root
and the Japanese ambassador exchanged notes. In these they both pointed
out that their object was the peaceful development of their commerce in
the Pacific; that "the policy of both governments, uninfluenced by any
aggressive tendencies, is directed to the maintenance of the existing
status quo in the region above mentioned, and to the defense of the
principle of equal opportunity for commerce and industry in China"; that
they both stood for the independence and integrity of China; and that,
should any event threaten the stability of existing conditions, "it
remained for the two governments to communicate with each other in order
to arrive at an understanding as to what measures they may consider it
useful to take."
The immigration problem between Japan and the United States was even
more serious than that of the open door and the integrity of China. The
teeming population of Japan was swarming beyond her island empire, and
Korea and Manchuria did not seem to offer sufficient opportunity. The
number of Japanese immigrants to this country, which before the Spanish
War had never reached 2000 in any one year, now rose rapidly until in
1907 it reached 30,226. American sentiment, which had been favorable
to Japan during her war with Russia, began to change. The public
and particularly the laboring classes in the West, where most of the
Japanese remained, objected to this increasing immigration, while a
number of leaders of American opinion devoted themselves to converting
the public to a belief that the military ambitions of Japan included the
Philippines and possibly Hawaii, where the Japanese were a formidable
element in the population. As a consequence there arose a strong demand
that the principles of the Chinese Exclusion Act be applied to the
Japanese. The situation was made more definite by the fact that the
board of education in San Francisco ruled in 1906 that orientals should
receive instruction in special schools. The Japanese promptly protested,
and their demand for their rights under the treaty of 1894 was supported
by the Tokio Government. The international consequences of thus
discriminating against the natives of so rising and self-confident a
country as Japan, and one conscious of its military strength, were bound
to be very different from the difficulties encountered in the case of
China. The United States confronted a serious situation, but fortunately
did not confront it alone. Australia and British Columbia, similarly
threatened by Japanese immigration, were equally opposed to it.
Out of deference to Great Britain, with which she had been allied since
1902, Japan consented that her immigrants should not force their way
into unwilling communities. This position facilitated an arrangement
between the United States and Japan, and an informal agreement was
made in 1907. The schools of San Francisco were to be open to oriental
children not over sixteen years of age, while Japan was to withhold
passports from laborers who planned to emigrate to the United States.
This plan has worked with reasonable success, but minor issues have kept
alive in both countries the bad feeling on the subject. Certain States,
particularly California, have passed laws, especially with regard to the
ownership and leasing of farm lands, apparently intended to discriminate
against Japanese who were already residents. These laws Japan has held
to be violations of her treaty provision for consideration on the "most
favored nation" basis, and she has felt them to be opposed in spirit
to the "gentlemen's agreement" of 1907. The inability of the Federal
Government to control the policy of individual States is not accepted
by foreign countries as releasing the United States from international
obligations, so that, although friendly agreements between the two
countries were reached on the major points, cause for popular irritation
still remained.
Philander C. Knox, who succeeded Root as Secretary of State, devoted his
attention rather to the fostering of American interests in China than
to the development of the general policies of his Department. While he
refrained from asking for an American sphere of influence, he insisted
that American capitalists obtain their fair share of the concessions
for railroad building, mining, and other enterprises which the Chinese
Government thought it necessary to give in order to secure capital for
her schemes of modernization. As these concessions were supposed to
carry political influence in the areas to which they applied, there
was active rivalry for them, and Russia and Japan, which had no surplus
capital, even borrowed in order to secure a share. This situation led to
a tangled web of intrigue, perhaps inevitable but decidedly contrary to
the usual American diplomatic habits; and at this game the United States
did not prove particularly successful. In 1911 there broke out in
China a republican revolution which was speedily successful. The new
Government, as yet unrecognized, needed money, and the United States
secured a share in a six-power syndicate which was organized to float
a national loan. The conditions upon which this syndicate insisted,
however, were as much political as they were pecuniary, and the new
Government refused to accept them.
On the accession of President Wilson, the United States promptly led
the way in recognizing the new republic in China. On March 18, 1913,
the President announced: "The conditions of the loan seem to us to
touch nearly the administrative independence of China itself; and this
administration does not feel that it ought, even by implication, to be
a party to those conditions." The former American policy of
non-interference was therefore renewed, but it still remained uncertain
whether the entrance of the United States into Far Eastern politics
would do more than serve to delay the European dominance which seemed to
be impending in 1898.
CHAPTER XV. The Panama Canal
While American troops were threading the mountain passes and the
morasses of the Philippines, scaling the walls of Pekin, and sunning
themselves in the delectable pleasances of the Forbidden City, and while
American Secretaries of State were penning dispatches which determined
the fate of countries on the opposite side of the globe, the old
diplomatic problems nearer home still persisted. The Spanish War,
however, had so thoroughly changed the relationship of the United States
to the rest of the world that the conditions under which even these old
problems were to be adjusted or solved gave them entirely new aspects.
The American people gradually but effectually began to take foreign
affairs more seriously. As time went on, the Government made
improvements in the consular and diplomatic services. Politicians found
that their irresponsible threatenings of other countries had ceased
to be politically profitable when public opinion realized what was at
stake. Other countries, moreover, began to take the United States more
seriously. The open hostility which they had shown on the first entrance
of this nation into world politics changed, on second thought, to a
desire on their part to placate and perhaps to win the support of this
new and formidable power.
The attitude of Germany in particular was conspicuous. The Kaiser sent
his brother, Prince Henry, to visit the United States. He presented the
nation with a statue of Frederick the Great and Harvard with a Germanic
museum; he ordered a Herreshoff yacht, and asked the President's
daughter, Alice Roosevelt, to christen it; he established exchange
professorships in the universities; and he began a campaign aimed
apparently at securing for Germany the support of the entire American
people, or, failing that, at organizing for German purposes the
German-born element within the United States. France sought to revive
the memory of her friendship for the United States during the Revolution
by presenting the nation with a statue of Rochambeau, and she also
established exchange professorships. In England, Cecil Rhodes, with
his great dream of drawing together all portions of the British race,
devoted his fortune to making Oxford the mold where all its leaders of
thought and action should be shaped; and Joseph Chamberlain and other
English leaders talked freely and enthusiastically of an alliance
between Great Britain and the United States as the surest foundation for
world peace.
It need not be supposed, however, that these international amenities
meant that the United States was to be allowed to have its own way in
the world. The friendliness of Great Britain was indeed sincere.
Engaged between 1899 and 1901 in the Boer War, she appreciated ever
more strongly the need for the friendship of the United States, and she
looked with cordial approbation upon the development of Secretary
Hay's policy in China. The British, however, like the Americans, are
legalistically inclined, and disputes between the two nations are likely
to be maintained to the limit of the law. The advantage of this legal
mindedness is that there has always been a disposition in both peoples
to submit to judicial award when ordinary negotiations have reached
a deadlock. But the real affection for each other which underlay the
eternal bickerings of the two nations had as yet not revealed itself to
the American consciousness. As most of the disputes of the United States
had been with Great Britain, Americans were always on the alert to
maintain all their claims and were suspicious of "British gold."
It was, therefore, in an atmosphere by no means conducive to yielding
on the part of the United States, though it was one not antagonistic to
good feeling, that the representatives of the two countries met. John
Hay and Sir Julian Pauncefote, whose long quiet service in this country
had made him the first popular British ambassador, now set about
clearing up the problems confronting the two peoples. The first question
which pressed for settlement was one of boundary. It had already taken
ninety years to draw the line from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and now
the purchase of Alaska by the United States had added new uncertainties
to the international boundary. The claims of both nations were based on
a treaty of 1825 between Great Britain and Russia. Like most attempts
to define boundaries running through unexplored territories, the treaty
terms admitted of two interpretations. The boundary line from Portland
Channel to Mount St. Elias was stipulated to run everywhere a distance
of ten marine leagues from the coast and to follow its sinuosities. This
particular coast, however, is bitten into by long fiords stretching far
into the country. Great Britain held that these were not part of the sea
in the sense of the treaty and that the line should cut across them ten
marine leagues from the outer coast line. On the other hand, the United
States held that the line should be drawn ten marine leagues from the
heads of these inlets.
The discovery of gold on the Yukon in 1897 made this boundary question
of practical moment. Action now became an immediate necessity. In 1899
the two countries agreed upon a modus Vivendi and in 1903 arranged an
arbitration. The arbitrating board consisted of three members from each
of the two nations. The United States appointed Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge, ex-Senator George Turner, and Elihu Root, then Secretary of
War. Great Britain appointed two Canadians, Louis A. Jette and A.
B. Aylesworth, and Lord Alverstone, Chief Justice of England. Their
decision was in accordance with the principle for which the United
States had contended, though not following the actual line which it had
sketched. It gave the Americans, however, full control of the coast and
its harbors, and the settlement provided a mutually accepted boundary on
every frontier.
With the discovery of gold in the far North, Alaska began a period of
development which is rapidly making that territory an important economic
factor in American life. Today the time when this vast northern coast
was valuable only as the breeding ground for the fur seal seems long
past. Nevertheless the fur seal continued to be sought, and for years
the international difficulty of protecting the fisheries remained.
Finally, in 1911, the United States entered into a joint agreement with
Great Britain, Japan, and Russia, which is actually serving as a sort of
international game law. The problems of Alaska that remain are therefore
those of internal development.
Diplomacy, however, is not concerned solely with sensational episodes.
American ministers and the State Department are engaged for the most
part in the humdrum adjustment of minor differences which never find
their way into the newspapers. Probably more such cases arise with Great
Britain, in behalf of Canada, than with any other section of the globe.
On the American continent rivers flow from one country into the other;
railroads carry goods across the border and back again; citizens labor
now in one country, now in the other; corporations do business in
both. All these ties not only bind but chafe and give rise to constant
negotiation. More and more Great Britain has left the handling of
such matters to the Canadian authorities, and, while there can be no
interchange of ministers, there is an enormous transaction of business
between Ottawa and Washington.
While there has of late years been little talk of annexation, there have
been many in both countries who have desired to reduce the significance
of the boundary to a minimum. This feeling led in 1911 to the
formulation of a reciprocity agreement, which Canada, however, was
unwilling to accept. Yet, if tariff restrictions were not removed, other
international barriers were as far as possible done away with. In 1898 a
commission was appointed to agree upon all points of difference. Working
slowly but steadily, the commissioners settled one question after
another, until practically all problems were put upon a permanent
working basis. Perhaps the most interesting of the results of this
activity was the appointment in 1908 of a permanent International
Fisheries Commission, which still regulates that vexing question.
Another source of international complication arose out of the Atlantic
fisheries off Newfoundland, which is not part of Canada. It is off
these shores that the most important deep-sea fishing takes place. This
fishery was one of the earliest American sources of wealth, and for
nearly two centuries formed a sort of keystone of the whole commercial
life of the United States. When in 1783 Great Britain recognized
American independence, she recognized also that American fishermen
had certain rights off these coasts. These rights, however, were not
sufficient for the conduct of the fisheries, and so in addition certain
"liberties" were granted, which allowed American fishers to land for the
purpose of drying fish and of doing other things not generally
permitted to foreigners. These concessions in fact amounted to a joint
participation with the British. The rights were permanent, but the
privileges were regarded as having lapsed after the War of 1812. In 1818
they were partially renewed, certain limited privileges being conceded.
Ever since that date the problem of securing the additional privileges
desired has been a subject for discussion between Great Britain and the
United States. Between 1854 and 1866 the American Government secured
them by reciprocity; between 1872 and 1884 it bought them; after 1888
it enjoyed them by a temporary modus vivendi arranged under President
Cleveland.
In 1902 Hay arranged with Sir Robert Bond, Prime Minister of
Newfoundland, a new reciprocity agreement. This, however, the Senate
rejected, and the Cleveland agreement continued. Newfoundland, angry at
the rejection of the proposed treaty, put every obstacle possible in the
way of American fishermen and used methods which the Americans claimed
to be contrary to the treaty terms. After long continued and rather
acrimonious discussions, the matter was finally referred in 1909 to the
Hague Court. As in the Bering Sea case, the court was asked not only
to judge the facts but also to draw up an agreement for the future. Its
decision, on the whole, favored Newfoundland, but this fact is of little
moment compared with the likelihood that a dispute almost a century and
a half old has at last been permanently settled.
None of these international disputes and settlements to the north,
however, excited anything like the popular interest aroused by one which
occurred in the south. The Spanish War made it abundantly evident that
an isthmian canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific must be built.
The arguments of naval strategy which Captain Mahan had long been urging
had received striking demonstration in the long and roundabout voyage
which the Oregon was obliged to take. The pressure of railroad rates on
the trade of the country caused wide commercial support for a project
expected to establish a water competition that would pull them down. The
American people determined to dig a canal.
The first obstacle to such a project lay in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty
with Great Britain. That obstacle Blaine had attempted in vain to
remove; in fact his bungling diplomacy had riveted it yet more closely
by making Great Britain maintain it as a point of honor. To this subject
Hay now devoted himself, and as he encountered no serious difficulties,
a treaty was drawn up in 1900 practically as he wished it. It was not,
however, popular in the United States. Hay preferred and arranged for a
canal neutralized by international guarantee, on the same basis as the
Suez Canal; but American public sentiment had come to insist on a canal
controlled absolutely by the United States. The treaty was therefore
rejected by the Senate, or rather was so amended as to prove
unacceptable to Great Britain.
Hay believed that he had obtained what was most desirable as well as all
that was possible, that the majority of the American people approved,
and that he was beaten only because a treaty must be approved by
two-thirds of the Senate. He therefore resigned. President McKinley,
however, refused to accept his resignation, and he and Lord Pauncefote
were soon at work again on the subject. In 1901 a new treaty was
presented to the Senate. This began by abrogating the Clayton-Bulwer
Treaty entirely and with it brushing away all restrictions upon the
activity of the United States in Central America. It specifically
permitted the United States to "maintain such military police along
the canal as may be necessary to protect it against lawlessness
and disorder." By interpreting this clause as allowing complete
fortification, the United States has made itself the guardian of the
canal. In return for the release from former obligations which
Great Britain thus allowed, the United States agreed that any canal
constructed should be regulated by certain rules which were stated in
the treaty and which made it "free and open to the vessels of commerce
and of war of all nations observing these Rules, on terms of entire
equality," in time of war as well as of peace. This time the treaty
proved satisfactory and was accepted by the Senate. Thus one more source
of trouble was done away with, and the first obstacle in the way of the
canal was removed.
The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was, however, only a bit of the tangled jungle
which must be cleared before the first American shovel could begin its
work. For over twenty years a contest had been waged between experts
in the United States as to the relative merits of the Panama and the
Nicaragua routes. The latter was the more popular, perhaps because
it seemed at one time that Panama was preempted by De Lesseps' French
company. This contest as to the better route led to the passage of a
law, in 1902, which authorized the President to acquire the rights and
property needed to construct a canal by the Panama route, on condition
that he could make satisfactory arrangements "within a reasonable time
and upon reasonable terms." Otherwise, Nicaragua was to be chosen.
Theodore Roosevelt was now President and, though at one time not
favoring Panama, he decided that there the canal should be constructed
and with his accustomed vigor set himself to the task.
The first difficulty presented by this route was the prior right which
the French company still retained, although it had little, if any, hope
of carrying on the construction itself. It possessed not only rights but
also much equipment on the spot, and it had actually begun excavation
at certain points. The purchase of all its properties complete for
$40,000,000 was, therefore, not a bad investment on the part of the
Government. By this purchase the United States was brought directly into
relation with Colombia, through one of whose federal states, Panama, the
canal was to be cut.
While the French purchase had removed one obstacle, the De Lesseps
charter alone would not suffice for the construction of the canal,
for the American Government had definite ideas as to the conditions
necessary for the success of the work. The Government required a zone
which should be under its complete control, for not otherwise could
satisfactory sanitary regulations be enforced. It insisted also on
receiving the right to fortify the canal. It must have these and
other privileges on a long time grant. For them, it was willing to pay
generously. Negotiations would be affected, one could not say how,
by the Treaty of 1846 with Colombia, * by which the United States
had received the right of free use of the isthmus, with the right of
maintaining the neutrality of the district and in return had guaranteed
to Colombia sovereignty over the isthmus.
* Then known as the Republic of New Granada.
Hay took up the negotiations with the Colombian charge d'affaires, Dr.
Herran, and arranged a treaty, which gave the United States a strip of
land six miles wide across the isthmus, on a ninety-nine year lease,
for which it should pay ten million dollars and, after a period of nine
years for construction, a quarter of a million a year. This treaty,
after months of debate in press and Congress, was rejected by the
Colombian Senate on August 12, 1903, though the people of Panama,
nervously anxious lest this opportunity to sit on the bank of the
world's great highway should slip into the hands of their rivals of
Nicaragua, had urged earnestly the acceptance of the terms. The majority
of the Colombians probably expected to grant the American requests in
time but were determined to force the last penny from the United States.
As Hay wrote: "The Isthmus is looked upon as a financial cow to be
milked for the benefit of the country at large. This difficulty might be
overcome by diplomacy and money."
President Roosevelt at this point took the negotiations into his own
hands. Knowing that the price offered was more than just, he decided to
depend no longer on bartering. He ordered the American minister to
leave Colombia, and he prepared a message to Congress proposing that the
Americans proceed to dig the canal under authority which he claimed to
find in the Treaty of 1846. It was, however, doubtful if Congress
would find it there, particularly as so many Congressmen preferred the
Nicaragua route. The President therefore listened with pleased attention
to the rumors of a revolution planned to separate Panama from Colombia.
Most picturesquely this information was brought by M. Philippe
Bunau-Varilla, a former engineer of the De Lesseps company, who glowed
with the excitement of coming events. Roosevelt, however, relied more
upon the information furnished by two American officers, who reported
"that various revolutionary movements were being inaugurated."
On October 10, 1903, the President wrote to Dr. Albert Shaw, of the
"Review of Reviews":
"I enclose you, purely for your own information, a copy of a letter of
September 5th, from our minister to Colombia. I think it might interest
you to see that there was absolutely not the slightest chance
of securing by treaty any more than we endeavored to secure. The
alternatives were to go to Nicaragua against the advice of the great
majority of competent engineers--some of the most competent saying that
we had better have no canal at this time than go there--or else to take
the territory by force without any attempt at getting a treaty. I
cast aside the proposition made at the time to foment the secession of
Panama. Whatever other governments can do, the United States cannot go
into the securing, by such underhand means, the cession. Privately,
I freely say to you that I should be delighted if Panama were an
independent state; or if it made itself so at this moment; but for me
to say so publicly would amount to an instigation of a revolt, and
therefore I cannot say it."
Nothing, however, prevented the President from keeping an attentive eye
on the situation. On the 16th of October he directed the Navy Department
to send ships to the Isthmus to protect American interests in case of a
revolutionary outbreak. On the 2d of November, he ordered the squadron
to "maintain free and uninterrupted transit.... Prevent the landing of
any armed force with hostile intent, either government or insurgent,
at any point within fifty miles of Panama." At 3:40 P.M., on the 3d of
November, the acting Secretary of State telegraphed to the Isthmus for
confirmation of a report to the effect that an uprising was in progress.
A reply dated 8:15 P.M. stated that there had been none as yet, but
that it was rumored one would take place during the night. On the 4th of
November independence was proclaimed. The only fatality was a Chinaman
killed in the City of Panama by a shell from the Colombian gunboat
Bogota. Its commander was warned not to fire again. On the 6th of
November, Secretary Hay instructed our consul to recognize the new
republic, and on the 13th of November, President Roosevelt received
Bunau-Varilla as its representative at Washington.
This prompt recognition of a new state, without waiting to allow the
parent Government time to assert itself, was contrary to American
practice. The United States had regarded as a most unfriendly act
Great Britain's mere recognition of the belligerency of the Southern
Confederacy. The right of the United States to preserve the neutrality
of the isthmus, as provided by the Treaty of 1846, certainly did
not involve the right to intervene between the Government and
revolutionists. On the other hand, the guarantee of possession which
the United States had given to Colombia did involve supporting her
Government to a reasonable extent; yet there could be little doubt that
it was the presence of American ships which had made the revolution
successful.
The possible implications of these glaring facts were cleverly met by
President Roosevelt in his message to Congress and by the Secretary of
State in the correspondence growing out of the affair. The Government
really relied for its justification, however, not upon these technical
pleas but upon the broad grounds of equity. America has learned in the
last few years how important it is for its safety that "scraps of
paper" be held sacred and how dangerous is the doctrine of necessity.
Nevertheless it is well to observe that if the United States did, in
the case of Panama, depart somewhat from that strict observance of
obligations which it has been accustomed to maintain, it did not seek
any object which was not just as useful to the world at large as
to itself, that the situation had been created not by a conflict of
opposing interests but by what the Government had good reason to believe
was the bad faith of Colombia, and that the separation of Panama was
the act of its own people, justly incensed at the disregard of their
interests by their compatriots. This revolution created no tyrannized
subject population but rather liberated from a galling bond a people who
had, in fact, long desired separation.
With the new republic negotiation went on pleasantly and rapidly, and
as early as November 18, 1903, a convention was drawn up, in which
the United States guaranteed the independence of Panama and in return
received in perpetuity a grant of a zone ten miles wide within which to
construct a canal from ocean to ocean.
CHAPTER XVI. Problems Of The Caribbean
As the acquisition of the Philippines made all Far Eastern questions of
importance to the United States, so the investment of American millions
in a canal across the Isthmus of Panama increased popular interest in
the problems of the Caribbean. That fascinating sheet of water, about
six hundred miles from north to south by about fifteen hundred from east
to west, is ringed around by the possessions of many powers. In 1898 its
mainland shores were occupied by Mexico, British Honduras, Guatemala,
Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela; its islands
were possessed by the negro states of Hayti and the Dominican Republic,
and by Spain, France, Great Britain, Holland, and Denmark. In the
Caribbean had been fought some of the greatest and most significant
naval battles of the eighteenth century and, when the canal was opened,
across its waters would plough a great share of the commerce of the
world. As owner of the canal and professed guardian of its use, the
United States was bound to consider its own strategic relation to this
sea into which the canal opened.
Gradually the situation which existed in 1898 has changed. Spain has
been removed from the Caribbean. Of her former possessions the United
States holds Porto Rico; Cuba is independent, but is in a way under the
protection of the United States, which possesses on her coast the naval
station of Guantanamo. The American treaty with the new republic of
Panama practically created another American protectorate, and the
fortification of the canal gave the United States another strategic
position. The negotiation for the purchase of the Danish islands has
been completed successfully. But these obvious footholds are of less
importance than the more indirect relationships which the United States
has been steadily establishing, through successive Administrations, with
the various other powers located on the borders of the Caribbean.
The Spanish War did not lull the suspicions of the United States
regarding the dangerous influence which would be exerted should the
ambitions of European powers be allowed a field of action in the
American continents, and the United States remained as intent as ever
on preventing any opportunity for their gaining admittance. One such
contingency, though perhaps a remote one, was the possibility of a rival
canal, for there are other isthmuses than that of Panama which might
be pierced with the aid of modern resources of capital and genius.
To prevent any such action was not selfish on the part of the United
States, for the American canal was to have an open door, and there was
no economic justification for another seaway from the Atlantic to the
Pacific.
There might, however, be some temptation in the political and
military influence which such a prospective second canal could exert.
Negotiations were begun, therefore, with all the transcontinental powers
of Central America, offering liberal compensation for the control of all
possible canal routes. These negotiations have been long drawn out and
are only lately coming to fruition. They have served, however, to taboo
all projects by other nations, and one of these treaties negotiated with
Colombia, but not yet ratified, holds out the prospect of winning back
her friendship which was so seriously alienated by the recognition of
the republic of Panama by the United States.
In one respect the changing world has rendered quite obsolete the
pronouncements of President Monroe. In the case of Japan there has grown
up a great power which is neither European nor American. American policy
in the Far East has made it abundantly evident that the United States
does not regard the self-imposed limitations upon its activity as
extending to Asia. In her case there is lacking the quid pro quo by
which the United States has justified its demand that European powers
refrain from interfering in America. By no means, however, has the
Government admitted the right of Asia to impinge on the American
continents.
In 1912 Washington heard that Japan was negotiating with Mexico for
a concession on Magdalena Bay. Senator Lodge promptly introduced a
resolution in the Senate, declaring that "when any harbor or other place
in the American continents is so situated that the occupation thereof
for naval or military purposes might threaten the communication or the
safety of the United States, the Government of the United States could
not see, without grave concern, the possession of such harbor or other
place by any corporation or association which has such relation to
another government, not American, as to give that government practical
power of control for naval or military purposes--" This resolution,
which passed the Senate by a vote of 51 to 4, undoubtedly represented
American sentiment, at least with regard to the foreign occupation
of any territory bordering on the Caribbean or on the Pacific between
Panama and California.
A more subtle danger lay in the financial claims of European powers
against the various states in Central America, and the possibility of
these claims being used as levers to establish permanent control. Most
of these foreign demands had a basis in justice but had been exaggerated
in amount. They were of two kinds: first, for damage to persons
or property resulting from the numerous revolutions and perpetual
brigandage which have scourged these semitropic territories; second, for
debts contracted in the name of the several countries for the most part
to conduct revolutions or to gild the after-career of defeated rulers in
Paris,--debts with a face value far in excess of the amount received by
the debtor and with accumulated interest in many cases far beyond
the capacity of the several countries to pay. The disputes as to the
validity of such claims have been without end, and they have furnished
a constant temptation to the cupidity of individuals and the ambition of
the powers.
In 1902 Germany induced Great Britain and Italy to join her in an
attempt to collect the amount of some of these claims from Venezuela.
A joint squadron undertook a "pacific blockade" of the coast. Secretary
Hay denied that a "pacific blockade" existed in international law and
urged that the matter be submitted to arbitration. Great Britain
and Italy were willing to come to an understanding and withdrew;
but Germany, probably intent on ulterior objects, was unwilling and
preferred to take temporary possession of certain ports. President
Roosevelt then summoned the German Ambassador, Dr. Holleben, and told
him that, unless Germany consented to arbitrate, Admiral Dewey would be
ordered at noon ten days later to proceed to Venezuela and protect its
coast. A week passed with no message. Holleben called on the President
but rose to go without mentioning Venezuela. President Roosevelt
thereupon informed the Ambassador that he had changed his mind and had
decided to send Admiral Dewey one day earlier than originally planned;
he further explained that in the event the Kaiser should decide to
arbitrate, as not a word had been put on paper, there would be nothing
to indicate coercion. Within thirty-six hours Holleben reported that
Germany would arbitrate. Only once before, when Seward was dealing with
Napoleon III concerning Mexico, had forcible persuasion been used to
maintain the Monroe Doctrine.
It was perfectly clear that if the United States sat idly by and allowed
European powers to do what they would to collect their Latin American
debts, the Monroe Doctrine would soon become a dead letter. It was not,
however, so plain how American interference could be justified. The
problem was obviously a difficult one and did not concern the United
States alone. Latin America was even more vitally concerned with it, and
her statesmen, always lucid exponents of international law, were active
in devising remedies. Carlos Calvo of Argentina advanced the doctrine
that "the collection of pecuniary claims made by the citizens of one
country against the government of another country should never be made
by force." Senior Drago, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the same country
in 1902, urged upon the United States a modification of the same view by
asserting that "the public debt cannot occasion armed intervention."
President Roosevelt handled the matter in his messages of 1903 and 1904.
"That our rights and interests are deeply concerned in the maintenance
of the [Monroe] Doctrine is so clear as hardly to need argument. This
is especially true in view of the construction of the Panama Canal. As
a mere matter of self defense we must exercise a close watch over the
approaches to this canal, and this means we must be thoroughly alive to
our interests in the Caribbean Sea." "When we announce a policy... we
thereby commit ourselves to the consequences of the policy." "Chronic
wrongdoing or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the
ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately
require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western
Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may
force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such
wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police
power."
To prevent European intervention for the purpose of securing just claims
in America, then, the United States would undertake to handle the case,
and would wield the "Big Stick" against any American state which should
refuse to meet its obligations. This was a repetition, in a different
tone, of Blaine's "Elder Sister" program. As developed, it had elements
also of Cleveland's Venezuela policy. In 1907 the United States
submitted to the Hague Conference a modified form of the Drago doctrine,
which stated that the use of force to collect contract debts claimed
from one government by another as being due to its citizens should be
regarded as illegal, unless the creditor nation first offered to submit
its claims to arbitration and this offer were refused by the nation
against which the claim was directed. The interference of the United
States, therefore, would be practically to hale the debtor into court.
Around the Caribbean, however, were several nations not only unwilling
but unable to pay their debts. This inability was not due to the fact
that national resources were lacking, but that constant revolution
scared away conservative capital from seeking constructive investment or
from developing their natural riches, while speculators loaned money
at ruinous rates of discount to tottering presidents, gambling on the
possibility of some turn in fortune that would return them tenfold. The
worst example of an insolvent and recalcitrant state was the Dominican
Republic, whose superb harbors were a constant temptation to ambitious
powers willing to assume its debts in return for naval stations, and
whose unscrupulous rulers could nearly always be bribed to sell their
country as readily as anything else. In the case of this country
President Roosevelt made a still further extension of the Monroe
Doctrine when, in 1905, he concluded a treaty whereby the United States
agreed to undertake the adjustment of the republic's obligations and the
administration of its custom houses, and at the same time guarantee
the territorial integrity of the republic. This arrangement was hotly
attacked in the United States as an indication of growing imperialism,
and, though it was defended as necessary to prevent the entrance of new
foreign influences into the Caribbean, the opposition was so strong that
the treaty was not accepted by the Senate until 1907, and then only in a
modified form with the omission of the territorial guarantee.
For the United States thus to step into a foreign country as an
administrator was indeed a startling innovation. On the other hand,
the development of such a policy was a logical sequence of the Monroe
Doctrine. That it was a step in the general development of policy on
the part of the United States and not a random leap is indicated by the
manner in which it has been followed up. In 1911 treaties with Nicaragua
and Honduras somewhat similar to the Dominican protocol were negotiated
by Secretary Knox but failed of ratification. Subsequently under
President Wilson's Administration, the treaty with Nicaragua was
redrafted and was ratified by both parties. Hayti, too, was in financial
difficulties and, at about the time of the outbreak of the Great War, it
was reported that Germany was about to relieve her needs at the price
of harbors and of control. In 1915, however, the United States took
the island under its protection by a treaty which not only gave the
Government complete control of the fiscal administration but bound it to
"lend an efficient aid for the preservation of Haitian independence and
the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life,
property, and individual liberty."
Since 1898, then, the map of the Caribbean has completely changed its
aspect. The sea is not an American lake, nor do the Americans wish it
to be such. In time, as the surrounding countries become better able to
stand alone, direct interference on the part of the United States will
doubtless become less than it is today. There is, however, practically
no present opportunity for a non-American power to establish itself and
to threaten the commerce or the canal of the United States.
Few people in the United States and perhaps fewer in the countries
involved realize from what American influence has saved these small
states. A glance at Africa and Asia will suggest what would otherwise
have been the case. Without the United States and its leadership,
there can be little doubt that giant semi-sovereign corporations owing
allegiance to some great power would now possess these countries. They
would bristle with forts and police, and their populations would be in a
state of absolute political and of quasi-economic servitude. They might
today be more orderly and perhaps wealthier, but unless the fundamental
American belief in democracy and self-government is wrong they would be
infinitely farther from their true goal, which involves the working out
of their own civilization.
The Caribbean is but a portion of the whole international problem of
the Americas, and the methods used by the United States in solving its
problems seemed likely to postpone that sympathetic union of the whole
to which it has been looking forward for a century. Yet this country
has not been unappreciative of the larger aspects of Pan-Americanism.
In 1899 President McKinley revived Blaine's project and proposed
a Pan-American congress. To popularize this idea, a Pan-American
Exposition was arranged at Buffalo in 1901. Here, just after he had
expounded his views of the ties that might bind the continents together,
McKinley was assassinated. The idea, however, lived and in the same year
a congress was held at the City of Mexico, where it was proposed that
such meetings be held regularly. As a result, congresses were held at
Rio de Janeiro in 1906 and at Buenos Aires in 1910, at which various
measures of common utility were discussed and a number of projects were
actually undertaken.
The movement of Pan-Americanism has missed achieving the full hopes of
its supporters owing not so much to a difference of fundamental ideas
and interests as to suspicion and national pride. The chief powers of
southern South America--Argentina, Brazil, and Chili--had by the end of
the nineteenth century in large measure successfully worked out their
own problems. They resented the interference of a power of alien race
such as the United States, and they suspected its good intentions in
wielding the "Big Stick," especially after the cavalier treatment which
Colombia had received. They observed with alarm the strengthening of the
grip of the United States about the Caribbean. United in a group, known
from their initials as the "A.B.C." powers, they sought to assume the
leadership of Latin America, basing their action, indeed, upon the
fundamentals of the Monroe Doctrine--the exclusion of foreign influence
and the independence of peoples--but with themselves instead of the
United States as chief, guardians.
Many of the publicists of these three powers, however, doubted their
capacity to walk entirely alone. On the one hand they noted the growing
influence of the Germans in Brazil and the indications of Japanese
interest in many places, and on the other they divined the fundamental
sincerity of the professions of the United States and were anxious to
cooperate with this nation. Not strong enough to control the policy of
the various countries, these men at least countered those chauvinists
who urged that hostility to the United States was a first duty compared
with which the danger of non-American interference might be neglected.
Confronted by this divided attitude, the United States sought to win
over but not to compel. Nothing more completely met American views than
that each power should maintain for itself the principles of the Monroe
Doctrine by excluding foreign influences. Beyond that the United States
sought only friendship, and, if it were agreeable, such unity as should
be mutually advantageous. In 1906 Elihu Root, the Secretary of State,
made a tour of South America with a view of expressing these sentiments;
and in 1913-1914 ex-President Roosevelt took occasion, on the way to his
Brazilian hunting trip, to assure the people of the great South American
powers that the "Big Stick" was not intended to intimidate them.
Pan-American unity was still, when President Taft went out of office
in 1913, an aspiration rather than a realized fact, though the tangible
evidences of unity had vastly multiplied since 1898, and the recurring
congresses provided a basis of organization upon which some substantial
structure might be built.
The United States had sincerely hoped that Mexico, like the "A.B.C."
powers, was another Latin American power which had found itself. Of all
it was certainly the most friendly and the most intimate. The closeness
of its relations with the United States is indicated by the fact that in
the forty years between 1868 and 1908, forty agreements, treaties,
and conventions had been concluded between the two countries. Nor was
intimacy confined to the Governments. The peace arranged by President
Diaz had brought foreign capital by the billion to aid the internal
development of the country, and of this money more had come from the
United States than from any other nation. Nor was it financial aid
alone which had gone across the border. There was but little American
colonization, it is true, but business managers, engineers, mine
foremen, and ranch superintendents formed thousands of links binding the
nations together. The climax of intimacy seemed reached when, in 1910,
a general treaty of arbitration was made after President Taft and
President Diaz had met at El Paso on the Mexican border in a personal
conference. A personal interview between the President of the United
States and the chief of a foreign state was almost unique in American
history, owing to the convention that the President should not depart
from the national territory.
It was, therefore, with a bitter sense of disappointment that Americans
heard of the revolution inaugurated in 1910 by Francisco Madero. In
common with France, Spain, Great Britain, and Germany, the United States
was disturbed for the safety of the investments and persons of its
citizens. The Government was also concerned because the points of first
and most persistent fighting were where the various railroads crossed
the American boundary. This circumstance brought the whole border within
the range of disturbance. The Government was apprehensive, too, as to
the effect of long-continued war upon territories within the circle of
its chief interest, the Caribbean area. Yet, when the first surprise
caused by the revolution had passed and the reason for the outbreak was
perceived,--the fact that the order and apparent prosperity of the Diaz
regime had been founded upon the oppression and exploitation of the
masses,--public sympathy in the United States went out to Madero and his
supporters.
The Diaz Government collapsed with surprising suddenness. The
resignation of President Diaz in May, 1911, was accepted as a proof of
the popular character and the success of the revolution, and Madero,
who was elected president in October, was promptly recognized as the
constitutional head of the Mexican Government. The revolution, however,
aroused the United States to the fact that there still persisted the
era of disturbance which it had hoped was drawing to a close in Latin
America. With this disturbing revelation in mind, Congress took another
step in the development of American policies consequent upon the Monroe
Doctrine by passing an act authorizing the President, whenever he should
"find that in any American country conditions of domestic violence exist
which are promoted by the use of arms and munitions of war procured
from the United States," to prohibit trade in such articles. Under this
authority, President Taft promptly forbade the export of such articles
to Mexico except to the Government.
Real revolutions, however, seldom result simply in the transfer of
authority from one group to another. The breaking of the bonds of
recognized authority releases all sorts of desires, represented in the
state by separate groups, each of which sees no reason for accepting
the control of another. All seek to seize the dropped reins. The
inauguration of Madero, therefore, did not result in a new and popular
government but in continued disturbance. Factions with differing creeds
raised revolts in various sections of the country until, in February,
1913, Madero was overthrown by one of these groups, led by Felix Diaz
and General Victoriano Huerta, and representing a reactionary tendency.
Madero and his vice president Pino Suarez were killed, it was believed
by order of Huerta, and on the 27th of February, in the City of Mexico,
Huerta was proclaimed President. Don Venustiano Carranza, Governor of
the State of Coahuila, straightway denied the constitutionality of
the new Government and led a new revolution under the banner of the
Constitution.
It was in such a condition that President Wilson found the affairs of
the continent when he took office on March 4, 1913. The American policy
in the Caribbean was well defined and to a large extent in operation.
Pan-American sentiment was developing, but its strength and direction
were yet to be determined. Mexico was in chaos, and upon the
Government's handling of it would depend the final success of the United
States in the Caribbean and the possibility of effecting a real and
fruitful cooperation of the Americas.
CHAPTER XVII. World Relationships
It became increasingly evident that the foreign policy of the United
States could not consist solely of a Caribbean policy, a Pan-American
policy, and a Far Eastern policy, but that it must necessarily involve
a world policy. During the years after the Spanish War the world was
actively discussing peace; but all the while war was in the air.
The peace devices of 1815, the Holy and the Quadruple Alliances, had
vanished. The world had ceased to regard buffer states as preventives of
wars between the great nations, although at the time few believed that
any nation would ever dare to treat them as Germany since then has
treated Belgium. The balance of power still existed, but statesmen
were ever uncertain as to whether such a relation of states was really
conducive to peace or to war. A concert of the Great Powers resembling
the Quadruple Alliance sought to regulate such vexing problems as were
presented by the Balkans and China, but their concord was not loud
enough to drown the notes of discord.
The outspoken word of governments was still all for peace; their
proposals for preserving it were of two kinds. First, there was
the time-honored argument that the best preservative of peace was
preparation for war. Foremost in the avowed policies of the day, this
was urged by some who really believed it, by some who hoped for war and
intended to be ready for it, and by the cynical who did not wish for
war but thought it inevitable. The other proposal was that war could
and should be prevented by agreements to submit all differences between
nations to international tribunals for judgment. In the United States,
which had always rejected the idea of balance of power, and which only
in Asia, and to a limited degree, assented to the concert of powers, one
or the other of these two views was urged by all those who saw that
the United States had actually become a world power, that isolation no
longer existed, and that a policy of nonintervention could not keep us
permanently detached from the current of world politics.
The foremost advocates of preparedness were Theodore Roosevelt and
Admiral Mahan. It was little enough that they were able to accomplish,
but it was more than most Americans realize. The doubling of the regular
army which the Spanish War had brought about was maintained but was less
important than its improvement in organization. Elihu Root and William
H. Taft, as Secretaries of War, profiting by the lessons learned
in Cuba, established a general staff, provided for the advanced
professional training of officers, and became sufficiently acquainted
with the personnel to bring into positions of responsibility those who
deserved to hold them. The navy grew with less resistance on the part
of the public, which now was interested in observing the advance in the
rank of its fleet among the navies of the world. When in 1907 Roosevelt
sent the American battleship squadron on a voyage around the world,
the expedition not only caused a pleased self-consciousness at home but
perhaps impressed foreign nations with the fact that the United States
now counted not only as a potential but as an actual factor in world
affairs.
Greater popular interest, if one may judge from relative achievement,
was aroused by the proposal to substitute legal for military battles.
The United States had always been disposed to submit to arbitration
questions which seemed deadlocked. The making of general arrangements
for the arbitration of cases that might arise in the future was now
advocated. The first important proposal of this character was made to
the United States by Great Britain at the time of the Venezuela affair.
This proposal was rejected, for it was regarded as a device of Great
Britain to cover her retreat in that particular case by suggesting a
general provision. The next suggestion was that made by the Czar, in
1899, for a peace conference at The Hague. This invitation the
United States accepted with hearty good will and she concurred in the
establishment of a permanent court of arbitration to meet in that city.
Andrew Carnegie built a home for it, and President Roosevelt sent to it
as its first case that of the "Pious Fund," concerning which the United
States had long been in dispute with Mexico.
The establishment of a world court promoted the formation of treaties
between nations by which they agreed to submit their differences to
The Hague or to similar courts especially formed. A model, or as it
was called a "mondial" treaty was drawn up by the conference for this
purpose. Secretary Hay proceeded to draw up treaties on such general
lines with a number of nations, and President Roosevelt referred them
to the Senate with his warm approval. That body, however, exceedingly
jealous of the share in the treaty-making power given it by the
Constitution, disliked the treaties, because it feared that under such
general agreements cases would be submitted to The Hague Court without
its special approval. * Yet, as popular sentiment was strongly behind
the movement, the Senate ventured only to amend the procedure in such
a way as to make every "agreement" a treaty which would require its
concurrence. President Roosevelt, however, was so much incensed at this
important change that he refused to continue the negotiations.
* The second article in these treaties read: "In each individual
case the high contracting parties, before appealing to the Permanent
Court of Arbitration, shall conclude a special agreement defining
clearly the matter in dispute."
President Taft was perhaps more interested in this problem than in any
other. His Secretary of State, Elihu Root, reopened negotiations and,
in 1908 and 1909, drew up a large number of treaties in a form which met
the wishes of the Senate. Before the Administration closed, the United
States had agreed to submit to arbitration all questions, except those
of certain classes especially reserved, that might arise with Great
Britain, France, Austro-Hungary, China, Costa Rica, Italy, Denmark,
Japan, Hayti, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Spain, Sweden,
Peru, San Salvador, and Switzerland.
Such treaties seemed to a few fearsome souls to be violations of the
injunctions of Washington and Jefferson to avoid entangling alliances,
but to most they seemed, rather, to be disentangling. It was, indeed,
becoming increasingly apparent that the world was daily growing smaller
and that, as its parts were brought together by rail and steamships, by
telegraph and wireless, more and more objects of common interest
must become subject to common regulation. General Grant can hardly
be regarded as a visionary, and yet in 1873 in his second inaugural
address, he had said: "Commerce, education, and rapid transit of thought
and matter by telegraph and steam have changed all this.... I believe
that our Great Maker is preparing the world in His own good time, to
become one nation, speaking one language, and when armies and navies
will be no longer required."
Quietly, without general interest, or even particular motive, the United
States had accepted its share in handling many such world problems. As
early as 1875 it had cooperated in founding and maintaining at Paris an
International Bureau of Weights and Measures. In 1886 it joined in an
international agreement for the protection of submarine cables; in 1890,
in an agreement for the suppression of the African slave trade; in 1899,
in an agreement for the regulation of the importation of spirituous
liquors into Africa; in 1902, in a convention of American powers for the
Arbitration of Pecuniary Claims. In 1903 it united with various American
powers in an International Sanitary Convention; in 1905 it joined
with most countries of the world in establishing and maintaining an
International Institute of Agriculture at Rome. It would surprise
most Americans to know that five hundred pages of their collection of
"Treaties and Conventions" consist of such international undertakings,
which amount in fact to a body of international legislation. It is
obvious that the Government, in interpreting the injunction to avoid
entangling alliances, has not found therein prohibition against
international cooperation.
In 1783 the United States had been a little nation with not sufficient
inhabitants to fill up its million square miles of territory. Even in
1814 it still reached only to the Rockies and still found a troublesome
neighbor lying between it and the Gulf of Mexico. Now with the dawn of
the twentieth century it was a power of imperial dimensions, occupying
three million square miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific,
controlling the Caribbean, and stretching its possessions across the
Pacific and up into the Arctic. Its influence was a potent factor in the
development of Asia, and it was bound by the bonds of treaties, which it
has ever regarded sacred, to assist in the regulation of many matters of
world interest.
Nor had the only change during the century been that visible in the
United States. The world which seemed so vast and mysterious in 1812 had
opened up most of its dark places to the valor of adventurous explorers,
of whom the United States had contributed its fair share. The facilities
of intercourse had conquered space, and along with its conquest had
gone a penetration of the countries of the world by the tourist and the
immigrant, the missionary and the trader, so that Terence's statement
that nothing human was alien to him had become perforce true of the
world.
Nor had the development of governmental organization stood still. In
1812 the United States was practically the only democratic republic in
the world; in 1912 the belief in a government founded on the consent of
the governed, and republican in form, had spread over all the Americas,
except such portions as were still colonies, and was practically true
of even most of them. Republican institutions had been adopted by France
and Portugal, and the spirit of democracy had permeated Great Britain
and Norway and was gaining yearly victories elsewhere. In 1912 the giant
bulk of China adopted the form of government commended to he; by the
experience of the nation which, more than any other, had preserved her
integrity. Autocracy and divine right, however, were by no means dead.
On the contrary, girt and prepared, they were arming themselves for a
final stand. But no longer, as in 1823, was America pitted alone against
Europe. It was the world including America which was now divided against
itself.
It was chiefly the Spanish War which caused the American people slowly
and reluctantly to realize this new state of things--that the ocean was
no longer a barrier in a political or military sense, and that the fate
of each nation was irrevocably bound up with the fate of all. As
the years went by, however, Americans came to see that the isolation
proclaimed by President Monroe was no longer real, and that isolation
even as a tradition could not, either for good or for ill, long endure.
All thoughtful men saw that a new era needed a new policy; the wiser,
however, were not willing to give up all that they had acquired in
the experience of the past. They remembered that the separation of the
continents was not proclaimed as an end in itself but as a means of
securing American purposes. Those national purposes had been: first,
the securing of the right of self-government on the part of the United
States; second, the securing of the right of other nations to govern
themselves. Both of these aims rested on the belief that one nation
should not interfere with the domestic affairs of another. These
fundamental American purposes remained, but it was plain that the
situation would force the nation to find some different method of
realizing them. The action of the United States indicated that the hopes
of the people ran to the reorganization of the world in such a way as
would substitute the arbitrament of courts for that of war. Year by year
the nation committed itself more strongly to cooperation foreshadowing
such an organization. While this feeling was growing among the people,
the number of those who doubted whether such a system could ward off
war altogether and forever also increased. Looking forward to the
probability of war, they could not fail to fear that the next would
prove a world war, and that in the even of such a conflict, the
noninterference of the United States would not suffice to preserve it
immune in any real independence.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:
Each President's "Annual Message" always gives a brief survey of the
international relations of the year and often makes suggestions of
future policy. Of these the most famous is Monroe's message in 1823.
Since 1860 they have been accompanied by a volume of "Foreign Relations",
giving such correspondence as can be made public at the time. The
full correspondence in particular cases is sometimes called for by the
Congress, in which case it is found in the "Executive Documents" of
House or Senate. A fairly adequate selection of all such papers before
1828 is found in "American State Papers, Foreign Affairs." Three volumes
contain the American "Treaties, Conventions, International Acts," etc.,
to 1918. A. B. Hart's "Foundations of American Foreign Policy" (1901)
gives a good bibliography of these and other sources.
More intimate material is found in the lives and works of diplomats,
American and foreign. Almost all leave some record, but there are
unfortunately fewer of value since 1830 than before that date. The
"Memoirs" of John Quincy Adams (1874-1877), and his "Writings," (1913-),
are full of fire and information, and W. C. Ford, in his "John Quincy
Adams and the Monroe Doctrine," in the "American Historical Review,"
vol. VII, pp. 676-696, and vol. VIII, pp. 28-52, enables us to sit at
the council table while that fundamental policy was being evolved. The
most interesting work of this kind for the later period is "The Life and
Letters of John Hay," by W. R. Thayer, 2 vols. (1915).
Treatments of American diplomacy as a whole are few. J. W. Foster's
"Century of American Diplomacy" (1901) ends with 1876. C. R. Fish in
"American Diplomacy" (1915) gives a narrative from the beginning to the
present time. W. A. Dunning's "The British Empire and the United States"
(1914) is illuminating and interesting. Few countries possess so firm a
basis for the understanding of their relations with the world as J.
B. Moore has laid down in his "Digest of International Law," 8 vols.
(1906), and his "History and Digest of International Arbitrations," 6
vols. (1898).
Particular episodes and subjects have attracted much more the attention
of students. Of the library of works on the Monroe Doctrine, A. B.
Hart's "The Monroe Doctrine, an Interpretation" (1916) can be most
safely recommended. On the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, M. W. Williams's
"Anglo-American Isthmian Diplomacy," 1815-1915 (1916) combines scholarly
accuracy with interest. A. R. Colquhoun's "The Mastery of the Pacific"
(1902) has sweep; and no one will regret reading R. L. Stevenson's "A
Footnote to History" (1892), though it deals but with the toy kingdom of
Samoa.
The most important history of the Spanish War is Admiral F. E.
Chadwick's "The Relations of the United States and Spain," one volume of
which, "Diplomacy" (1909), deals with the long course of relations which
explain the war; and two volumes, "Spanish-American War" (1911), give
a narrative and critical account of the war itself. E. J. Benton's
"International Law and Diplomacy of the Spanish-American War" (1908)
is a good review of the particular aspects indicated in the title. The
activity of the navy is discussed from various angles by J.D. Long,
"The New American Navy," 2 vols. (1903), and by H. H. Sargent in "The
Campaign of Santiago de Cuba," 3 vols. (1907), in which he gives a very
valuable documentary and critical history of the chief campaign. General
Joseph Wheeler has told the story from the military point of view in
"The Santiago Campaign" (1899), and Theodore Roosevelt in "The Rough
Riders" (1899). A good military account of the whole campaign is H.W.
Wilson's "The Downfall of Spain" (1900). Russell A. Alger in "The
Spanish-American War"(1901) attempts to defend his administration of the
War Department. General Frederick Funston, in his "Memories of Two Wars"
(1911) proves himself as interesting as a writer as he was picturesque
as a fighter. J.A. LeRoy, in "The Americans in the Philippines," 2 vols.
(1914), gives a very careful study of events in those islands to the
outbreak of guerrilla warfare. C.B. Elliott's "The Philippines," 2 vols.
(1917), is an excellent study of American policy and its working up
to the Wilson Administration. W.F. Willoughby discusses governmental
problems in his "Territories and Dependencies of the United States"
(1905).
On the period subsequent to the Spanish War, J.H. Latane's "America as a
World Power" (in the "American Nation Series," 1907) is excellent. A.C.
Coolidge's "The United States as a World Power" (1908) is based on a
profound understanding of European as well as American conditions.
C.L. Jones's "Caribbean Interests of the United States" (1916) is a
comprehensive survey. The "Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt"
(1913) is indispensable for an understanding of the spirit of his
Administration. W.H. Taft's "The United States and Peace" (1914) is a
source, a history, and an argument.
The "International Year Book" and the "American Year Book" contain
annual accounts written by men of wide information and with great
attention to accuracy. Such periodic treatments, however, are intended
to be, and are, valuable for fact rather than for interpretation.
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