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integrity of the Union. Even then did Adams also assert that the transfer of Cuba to some other power was a danger obtruding itself upon our councils. But the plan of leaving the island with Spain prevailed. Cuba had come near to both independence and annexation, but both gave way before the slave power, and for twenty years the policy of 1825 had sway. As late as 1843, indeed, Webster said that negro emancipation in Cuba would strike a death-blow to slavery in the United States, thus giving cynically and frankly the bad and true reason for the policy steadily pressed since 1825. Never at rest, however, the slave power itself, a few years after Webster's lucid definition of its Cuban policy, changed its own attitude completely. From desiring to keep Cuba in the hands of Spain, in order that the Cuban negroes might remain slaves, it passed, as dangers thickened round it at home, to the determination to secure Cuba, in order that more slave territory might be added to the United States. Hence a continuous effort to get the island by annexation, and various projects, all fallen into more or less oblivion now, to bring that result about, were devised by American. slaveholders and their allies. Their schemes ranged from Buchanan's offer to purchase, rejected with deep scorn by Spain the intelligent, to the Ostend Manifesto -a barefaced argument for conquest-and included attempts to bring about Cuban independence by exciting insurrections and landing filibustering expeditions. But the time was fast drawing near, even while the American slaveholders were thus seeking new territory, when the slave power would be thinking not of extension, but of existence. In 1861 American slavery in

voked the ordeal of battle, and perished utterly. With it died its political power, and the policies, foreign and domestic, which it had so long imposed upon the United States. But slavery also left a number of debts to humanity which were not buried with it, but which required payment at the hands of the American people, who had been responsible for slavery living, and could not avoid settling its debts when it was dead. Among these debts was Cuba. Nobody had thought of it much since the Ostend Manifesto. If anybody chanced to remember it during or after the Civil War, the thought probably was that Cuba at last was well out of the way, together with the slave power which had been forever meddling with it, and talking about it, and casting covetous eyes upon its rich lands and forests.

None the less, although the slave power of America had undertaken to fix the destiny of Cuba, and, spurred by its own sense of weakness to eternal restlessness, had kept the question constantly alive, it was not the question itself. Cuba and Spain and Spanish oppression remained, even if American slavery was dead. Moreover, the slaveholders who had caused the United States to force Cuba back under Spanish rule had gone a step beyond this, and had warned off all other nations. In a word, the United States had become responsible for Cuba, and had drawn a ring-fence around the island to exclude all other nations. In this way we undertook and sought to maintain a wrong settlement of a great question, and wrong settlements are equivalent to none at all. So, after the inconsiderate fashion of unsettled problems, the Cuban question would not stay quiet. The slave power kept stirring it; and when

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the slave power perished and men thought it was all over, the ancient wrong reared its head again, and turning to the power responsible for its existence, demanded redress.

This time the movement came from the island itself. Cuba, although uninvaded, had not been untouched by the revolutionary movement in the first quarter of the century. Societies were formed to support Bolivar and the Mexicans; and after the movement was checked, Spain, acting in her usual fashion, instead of ignoring the indications of revolutionary sympathy, proceeded to give the Captain-General the powers of the governors of besieged towns, or, in other words, put the whole island under martial law. With this piece of sweeping and needless tyranny, resistance to Spain began in Cuba, and has continued at intervals to the present day, each successive outbreak becoming more formidable and more desperate than the one which preceded it.

The first rising came at once. In 1826, only a year after the intervention of the United States, an insurrection broke out, and its two chiefs were executed. Soon after came another, known as the "Conspiracy of the Black Eagle," which was also harshly repressed, and those engaged in it were imprisoned, banished, or executed. In 1837 the representatives of Cuba and Puerto Rico were excluded from the Cortes, on the ground that the colonies were to be governed by special law. In 1850 and 1851 occurred an expedition for the liberation of Cuba, and the death of its leader, Narciso Lopez. There were also expeditions under General Quitman and others, and in 1855 Ramon Pinto was put

to death, and many other patriots banished. These last raids were part of the slaveholders' movement intended to bring about the independence of the island, and subsequent annexation to the United States, but they failed like their predecessors. After this, for a number of years, the Cubans attempted by peaceful methods. to secure from the government at Madrid some relief from the oppression which weighed upon them, and some redress for their many wrongs. All their efforts came to naught, and such changes as were made were for the worse rather than for the better.

The result of all this was that in 1869 a revolution broke out under the leadership of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, and the United States was aroused to the fact that the Cuban question was as unsettled as ever. The existence of slavery in Cuba dulled the edge of American sympathy, for the bitterness of our own conflict was still upon us. Still there was much interest in the United States, and a strong feeling in behalf of men struggling for freedom. The old American sentiment against the domination of Europe in the New World, which slavery for its own objects had for a time suppressed, woke again and found active and ardent expression. The revolutionists, it is true, did not succeed in getting beyond the eastern part of the island, but they were successful in many engagements, they crippled still further the already broken power of Spain, and they could not be put down by force of arms. first the United States held carefully aloof; but the war went on; Spain was in the throes of revolution at home; and the administration of President Grant, however reluctant, was compelled to take notice of the fire burning

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