Knowing that the formation and--within a few years--the victory of the Republican Party were near, we sometimes fail to realize how desperate the situation in 1853-4 looked to antislavery men and women. Pierce had won the majority of electoral votes in both the North and South; the Free Soil Party had done very poorly compared with 1848; the Democrats were in firm control of Congress, and many of them made no secret of their desire for southward territorial expansion. To capture the mood of at least some antislavery men in 1854, here is Wendell Phillips:
"The effect of his surrender under this infamous [fugitive slave] law has been, like 'Uncle Tom’ and all such spasms, far less deep and general than thoughtless folks anticipated. We always gain at such times a few hundred and the old friends are strengthened, but the mass settle down very little different from before....
"Indeed, the Government has fallen into the hands of the Slave Power completely. So far as national politics are concerned, we are beaten — there's no hope. We shall have Cuba in a year or two, Mexico in five; and I should not wonder if efforts were made to revive the slave trade, though perhaps unsuccessfully, as the Northern slave States, which live by the export of slaves, would help us in opposing that. Events hurry forward with amazing rapidity: we live fast here. The future seems to unfold a vast slave empire united with Brazil, and darkening the whole west. I hope I may be a false prophet, but the sky was never so dark. Our Union, all confess, must sever finally on this question. It is now with nine-tenths only a question of time."
https://books.google.com/books?id=3gZFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA411
This letter appears in Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison's biography of their father William Lloyd Garrison. In a footnote, they argue that "These pessimistic forebodings had a solid substratum in the signs of the times. Never was the Slave Power more insolent in its consciousness of strength, or wilder in its delirium of empire. See, for the undisguised purpose of President Pierce's Administration to annex Cuba, Lib. 24: 85, 127, 130, 189, 194; and, for the ancillary intrigue to acquire Samana Bay in San Domingo—-a menace also to the independence and liberty of Hayti--Lib. 24: 157, 159; 25:1, 61. Lieut. Herndon's exploration of the Amazon in 1851, by direction of the Navy Department, had distinct reference to a pro-slavery colonization with an ultimate view to annexation (Lib. 24: 62). On the other hand, see the numerous expressions of the Southern press looking to a restoration of the slave trade (Lib. 24: 149, 173), and in particular Henry A. Wise's letter to the Rev. Nehemiah Adams, D. D. (Lib. 24: 150). “I would,” said the Virginian, “recommend the repeal of every act to suppress the slave trade.” In November, 1856, the Governor of South Carolina sent a message to the Legislature advising the re-opening of that traffic (Lib. 26:193, 194). The unparalleled rise in the price of slaves lay at the bottom of this villany. At the date just mentioned, according to the Richmond Enquirer, male negroes were worth “seven hundred dollars around” (Lib. 27:1. Compare 27:58, 63, 72,79, 87, 175, 183, 186; 28:11, 191, 198; 29: 17, 139; 30: 75, 77, 143)."
Question: how much of this nightmare scenario could actually have taken place? My answer is, maybe more than we think. For example, having "Cuba in a year or two" really was a distinct possibility in 1854. To quote an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:
***
My POD is the "Black Warrior affair" leading to war with Spain in 1854. http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0807810.html It might have done so--there were calls for the suspension of the neutrality act, which would mean unleashing filibusters on Cuba--except that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was pending in Congress, and anti-Nebraska forces raised a violent outcry that the administration was looking for war as a way out of its sectional troubles.
The turning point was probably May 30, 1854. On that day, Senators Mason, Douglas, and Slidell--in short, the Democratic majority on the foreign relations committee--met with President Pierce and urged him to support legislation calling for a suspension of the neutrality act. Instead of doing so, Pierce proposed to his callers "the creation of a three-man commission to go to Madrid to present to the government in all seriousness the desire for Cuba and to warn that probably only cession would stop the filibusters. The three visitors accepted this plan, though far from eagerly. As a part of the arrangement, [Secretary of State William] Marcy was called upon to telegraph to the district attorney in New Orleans that decisive measures were on the way. This was to help him hold the filibusters in line. Pierce also promised that before the session ended he would explicitly ask for a big appropriation, big enough for war purposes, in case the commission was unsuccessful. On May 31, i.e., the next day, Pierce issued a proclamation calling for an observance of the neutrality laws." Ivor Debenham Spencer, *The Victor and the Spoils: A Life of William L. Marcy* (Providence, RI: Brown University Press 1959), p. 323.
The result of Pierce's decision was to kill off the filibuster movement. Its leaders, including Mississippi's ex-governor John Quitman, were even required to give bond for their good conduct. Another result was a more conciliatory attitude toward the Black Warrior incident. By midsummer, as it turned out, Pierce had not dared to send Congress the proposal for the commission, though that body was still in session; and the Senate foreign relations committee decided not to ask for an emergency appropriation, though Pierce had indicated his willingness to do so.
This does not by any means indicate that Pierce had given up on Cuba. Something like the originally-planned commission was eventually created and issued the famous "Ostend Manifesto" http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS/Ostend/ostend.html but by that time the Democrats had suffered drastic defeats in elections in the North--due largely to a backlash against the Kansas-Nebraska Act--and even Pierce (let alone the more conservative Marcy) had to repudiate the Manifesto.
So basically my POD for US acquisition of Cuba is *no Kansas-Nebraska Act*. Without this, Pierce and the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress would probably have approved a quick suspension of the neutrality act after the Black Warrior affair. And as I stated in a post a few years ago, organization of Nebraska without repeal of the Missouri Compromise was by no means inconceivable. For a while, even David Rice Atchison, despairing of getting repeal through Congress, was willing to accept this, but when other southerners showed an unwillingness to organize the territory on this basis (giving, among other reasons, their well-known respect for Indian land titles
) and when his bitter enemy Thomas Hart Benton started to mock him for his retreat, he swore that he would see the territory "sink in Hell" before giving it to the free-soilers. If just a few Upper South senators had gone along with Atchison's temporary retreat, there would have been no Kansas-Nebraska Act as we know it. There might still be a controversy over slavery in Kansas--the Missourians there might still try to establish it, arguing the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and a Dred Scott-like test case would make its way to the Supreme Court--but at least the political explosion of 1854 would be delayed. (Of course another way to have the Kansas-Nebraska bill as we know it not come up is to have the Black Warrior affair happen a few months before it did in OTL--in short, have the US get to the brink of war with Spain *before* the Kansas-Nebraska bill is introduced. The war scare would doubtless delay any decision about what to do about Nebraska.)
Secretary of State Marcy, never a great enthusiast for Cuba (and especially opposed to taking it by force) pretty much summed up the situation in a letter to Senator Mason on July 23, 1854:
"To tell you an unwelcome truth, the Nebraska question has sadly shattered our party in all the free states and deprived it of that strength which was needed and could have been much more profitably used for the acquisition of Cuba." Quoted in Spencer, *The Victor and the Spoils*, p. 324
The South in 1854 was strong enough to get Cuba--or to get the Missouri Compromise repealed in a futile effort to make Kansas a slave state. She was not strong enough to get both, and disastrously chose the Kansas shadow over the Cuban substance. (Of course the real disaster of Kansas for the South was that it led to the rise of the Republican Party. I doubt very much that a war with Spain, provoked by the Black Warrior incident, would be enough to do so, even if it led to the acquisition of Cuba as a slave state. Unlike Kansas, Cuba already had slavery, so slavery would not be extended by its acquisition; it was even argued that acquisition of Cuba would help stem the illegal African slave trade to that island. And in any event, unlike Kansas, Cuba was not a place where northern farmers were planning to settle.)
***
What about "Mexico in five [years]"? See
President Buchanan's Proposed Intervention in Mexico
Howard Lafayette Wilson
The American Historical Review
Vol. 5, No. 4 (Jul., 1900), pp. 687-701
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1832775.pdf?refreqid=excelsior:78ec273d6c9965f652610dbb978dd521
"As early as I858, President Buchanan had foreshadowed a determined policy with reference to Mexico; he declared that abundant cause existed for a resort to hostilities against the Conservative government, but that the success of the Constitutional party appeared to offer hopes of a peaceful adjustment of our difficulties with the country. "But for this expectation, I should at once have recommended to Congress to grant the necessary power to the President to take possession of a sufficient portion of the remote and unsettled territory of Mexico, to be held in pledge until our injuries shall be redressed and our just demands be satisfied."' It was therefore only an unfolding of his schemes when Buchanan adopted the conclusions of Forsyth and McLane as his own, that "Nothing but a manifestation of the power of the government of the United States and of its purpose to punish these wrongs will avail." He therefore took the very aggressive step of asking Congress for power to enter Mexico with the military forces of the government at the call of the Constitutional authorities, in order to protect American citizens and enforce the treaty rights of the United States.
"There was still another influence which caused Buchanan to take this step. He described the Mexican Government as a "wreck upon the ocean, drifting about as she is impelled by the different factions." Under these circumstances the President held that it was our duty as a good neighbor to extend to her a helping hand, and significantly added that, " If we do not, it would not be surprising should some other nation undertake the task, and thus force us to interfere at last, under circumstances of increased difficulty, for the maintenance of our established policy." In the light of later events, it is interesting to note that President Buchanan either had a strong conviction that it was the true policy of the United States to intervene in Mexico, or else he held up before the American people the probable European intervention to justify and excuse his own policy towards Mexico. Later, in speaking of the refusal of
Congress to give him power to use the military forces of the United States in Mexico, he said: "European Governments would have been deprived of all pretext to interfere in the territorial and domestic concerns of Mexico. We should thus have been relieved from the obligation of resisting, even by force, should this become necessary, any attempt by these Governments to deprive our neighboring Republic of portions of her territory-a duty from which we could not shrink without abandoning the traditional and established policy of the American people."3
"...Disturbances on the boundary between our country and Mexico added to the grievances already enumerated, and for these Buchanan had equally drastic measures. In 1858 he advised Congress to
take the necessary steps to assume a temporary protectorate over the states of Chihuahua and Sonora by establishing military posts within these states, in order to restrain the predatory bands of Indians. The next year this recommendation was repeated.
"Both of Buchanan's remedies came to naught because Congress was not prepared to authorize intervention in the domestic affairs of a neighboring state ;3 thereupon he worked out another method of accomplishing the same objects. [i.e., by negotiating the McLane-Ocampo Treaty which would have given extraordinary transit and military intervention rights to the US; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLane–Ocampo_Treaty]
By the late 1850's the sectional controversy had poisoned Manifest Destiny, and so Congress did not authorize Buchanan to seize Mexican territory and did not ratify the McLane-Ocampo Treaty. But again this was possible because the Kansas-Nebraska controversy had reignited antislavery sentiment in the North--something that was just beginning when Phillips wrote his letter. And remember that a protectorate or "temporary" seizure of northern Mexico could be an opening wedge to outright annexation--and that of course any Mexican territories acquired by the US would automatically (until they became states) be "slave" territory under the Dred Scott decision.
I won't go into detail on Phillips' other fears, but there was indeed a movement to reopen the African slave trade. Admittedly, that had little chance of passing in Congress due to opposition not only from the North but the Upper South. But there was still a danger some Deep South states might revive the slave trade in disguise--e.g., the proposal in Louisiana to authorize the import of African "apprentices." As for Brazil, see Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade https://nyupress.org/books/9780814736883/ on the interest taken by southerners in the idea of an alliance of the world's two great slaveholding powers.
In short, Phillips' nightmare was not as implausible at the time as it may seem today. Much of its failure to be realized may be due to the blunder of southerners reigniting the sectional conflict by seeking to establish slavery in Kansas--which unlike Cuba or Mexico was a place where northern farmers hoped to settle. (In the end, with all the grandiose talk of southward expansion during the 1850's, all the expansionists got was a scaled-down Gadsden Purchase.)
"The effect of his surrender under this infamous [fugitive slave] law has been, like 'Uncle Tom’ and all such spasms, far less deep and general than thoughtless folks anticipated. We always gain at such times a few hundred and the old friends are strengthened, but the mass settle down very little different from before....
"Indeed, the Government has fallen into the hands of the Slave Power completely. So far as national politics are concerned, we are beaten — there's no hope. We shall have Cuba in a year or two, Mexico in five; and I should not wonder if efforts were made to revive the slave trade, though perhaps unsuccessfully, as the Northern slave States, which live by the export of slaves, would help us in opposing that. Events hurry forward with amazing rapidity: we live fast here. The future seems to unfold a vast slave empire united with Brazil, and darkening the whole west. I hope I may be a false prophet, but the sky was never so dark. Our Union, all confess, must sever finally on this question. It is now with nine-tenths only a question of time."
https://books.google.com/books?id=3gZFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA411
This letter appears in Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison's biography of their father William Lloyd Garrison. In a footnote, they argue that "These pessimistic forebodings had a solid substratum in the signs of the times. Never was the Slave Power more insolent in its consciousness of strength, or wilder in its delirium of empire. See, for the undisguised purpose of President Pierce's Administration to annex Cuba, Lib. 24: 85, 127, 130, 189, 194; and, for the ancillary intrigue to acquire Samana Bay in San Domingo—-a menace also to the independence and liberty of Hayti--Lib. 24: 157, 159; 25:1, 61. Lieut. Herndon's exploration of the Amazon in 1851, by direction of the Navy Department, had distinct reference to a pro-slavery colonization with an ultimate view to annexation (Lib. 24: 62). On the other hand, see the numerous expressions of the Southern press looking to a restoration of the slave trade (Lib. 24: 149, 173), and in particular Henry A. Wise's letter to the Rev. Nehemiah Adams, D. D. (Lib. 24: 150). “I would,” said the Virginian, “recommend the repeal of every act to suppress the slave trade.” In November, 1856, the Governor of South Carolina sent a message to the Legislature advising the re-opening of that traffic (Lib. 26:193, 194). The unparalleled rise in the price of slaves lay at the bottom of this villany. At the date just mentioned, according to the Richmond Enquirer, male negroes were worth “seven hundred dollars around” (Lib. 27:1. Compare 27:58, 63, 72,79, 87, 175, 183, 186; 28:11, 191, 198; 29: 17, 139; 30: 75, 77, 143)."
Question: how much of this nightmare scenario could actually have taken place? My answer is, maybe more than we think. For example, having "Cuba in a year or two" really was a distinct possibility in 1854. To quote an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:
***
My POD is the "Black Warrior affair" leading to war with Spain in 1854. http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0807810.html It might have done so--there were calls for the suspension of the neutrality act, which would mean unleashing filibusters on Cuba--except that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was pending in Congress, and anti-Nebraska forces raised a violent outcry that the administration was looking for war as a way out of its sectional troubles.
The turning point was probably May 30, 1854. On that day, Senators Mason, Douglas, and Slidell--in short, the Democratic majority on the foreign relations committee--met with President Pierce and urged him to support legislation calling for a suspension of the neutrality act. Instead of doing so, Pierce proposed to his callers "the creation of a three-man commission to go to Madrid to present to the government in all seriousness the desire for Cuba and to warn that probably only cession would stop the filibusters. The three visitors accepted this plan, though far from eagerly. As a part of the arrangement, [Secretary of State William] Marcy was called upon to telegraph to the district attorney in New Orleans that decisive measures were on the way. This was to help him hold the filibusters in line. Pierce also promised that before the session ended he would explicitly ask for a big appropriation, big enough for war purposes, in case the commission was unsuccessful. On May 31, i.e., the next day, Pierce issued a proclamation calling for an observance of the neutrality laws." Ivor Debenham Spencer, *The Victor and the Spoils: A Life of William L. Marcy* (Providence, RI: Brown University Press 1959), p. 323.
The result of Pierce's decision was to kill off the filibuster movement. Its leaders, including Mississippi's ex-governor John Quitman, were even required to give bond for their good conduct. Another result was a more conciliatory attitude toward the Black Warrior incident. By midsummer, as it turned out, Pierce had not dared to send Congress the proposal for the commission, though that body was still in session; and the Senate foreign relations committee decided not to ask for an emergency appropriation, though Pierce had indicated his willingness to do so.
This does not by any means indicate that Pierce had given up on Cuba. Something like the originally-planned commission was eventually created and issued the famous "Ostend Manifesto" http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS/Ostend/ostend.html but by that time the Democrats had suffered drastic defeats in elections in the North--due largely to a backlash against the Kansas-Nebraska Act--and even Pierce (let alone the more conservative Marcy) had to repudiate the Manifesto.
So basically my POD for US acquisition of Cuba is *no Kansas-Nebraska Act*. Without this, Pierce and the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress would probably have approved a quick suspension of the neutrality act after the Black Warrior affair. And as I stated in a post a few years ago, organization of Nebraska without repeal of the Missouri Compromise was by no means inconceivable. For a while, even David Rice Atchison, despairing of getting repeal through Congress, was willing to accept this, but when other southerners showed an unwillingness to organize the territory on this basis (giving, among other reasons, their well-known respect for Indian land titles
) and when his bitter enemy Thomas Hart Benton started to mock him for his retreat, he swore that he would see the territory "sink in Hell" before giving it to the free-soilers. If just a few Upper South senators had gone along with Atchison's temporary retreat, there would have been no Kansas-Nebraska Act as we know it. There might still be a controversy over slavery in Kansas--the Missourians there might still try to establish it, arguing the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and a Dred Scott-like test case would make its way to the Supreme Court--but at least the political explosion of 1854 would be delayed. (Of course another way to have the Kansas-Nebraska bill as we know it not come up is to have the Black Warrior affair happen a few months before it did in OTL--in short, have the US get to the brink of war with Spain *before* the Kansas-Nebraska bill is introduced. The war scare would doubtless delay any decision about what to do about Nebraska.)Secretary of State Marcy, never a great enthusiast for Cuba (and especially opposed to taking it by force) pretty much summed up the situation in a letter to Senator Mason on July 23, 1854:
"To tell you an unwelcome truth, the Nebraska question has sadly shattered our party in all the free states and deprived it of that strength which was needed and could have been much more profitably used for the acquisition of Cuba." Quoted in Spencer, *The Victor and the Spoils*, p. 324
The South in 1854 was strong enough to get Cuba--or to get the Missouri Compromise repealed in a futile effort to make Kansas a slave state. She was not strong enough to get both, and disastrously chose the Kansas shadow over the Cuban substance. (Of course the real disaster of Kansas for the South was that it led to the rise of the Republican Party. I doubt very much that a war with Spain, provoked by the Black Warrior incident, would be enough to do so, even if it led to the acquisition of Cuba as a slave state. Unlike Kansas, Cuba already had slavery, so slavery would not be extended by its acquisition; it was even argued that acquisition of Cuba would help stem the illegal African slave trade to that island. And in any event, unlike Kansas, Cuba was not a place where northern farmers were planning to settle.)
***
What about "Mexico in five [years]"? See
President Buchanan's Proposed Intervention in Mexico
Howard Lafayette Wilson
The American Historical Review
Vol. 5, No. 4 (Jul., 1900), pp. 687-701
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1832775.pdf?refreqid=excelsior:78ec273d6c9965f652610dbb978dd521
"As early as I858, President Buchanan had foreshadowed a determined policy with reference to Mexico; he declared that abundant cause existed for a resort to hostilities against the Conservative government, but that the success of the Constitutional party appeared to offer hopes of a peaceful adjustment of our difficulties with the country. "But for this expectation, I should at once have recommended to Congress to grant the necessary power to the President to take possession of a sufficient portion of the remote and unsettled territory of Mexico, to be held in pledge until our injuries shall be redressed and our just demands be satisfied."' It was therefore only an unfolding of his schemes when Buchanan adopted the conclusions of Forsyth and McLane as his own, that "Nothing but a manifestation of the power of the government of the United States and of its purpose to punish these wrongs will avail." He therefore took the very aggressive step of asking Congress for power to enter Mexico with the military forces of the government at the call of the Constitutional authorities, in order to protect American citizens and enforce the treaty rights of the United States.
"There was still another influence which caused Buchanan to take this step. He described the Mexican Government as a "wreck upon the ocean, drifting about as she is impelled by the different factions." Under these circumstances the President held that it was our duty as a good neighbor to extend to her a helping hand, and significantly added that, " If we do not, it would not be surprising should some other nation undertake the task, and thus force us to interfere at last, under circumstances of increased difficulty, for the maintenance of our established policy." In the light of later events, it is interesting to note that President Buchanan either had a strong conviction that it was the true policy of the United States to intervene in Mexico, or else he held up before the American people the probable European intervention to justify and excuse his own policy towards Mexico. Later, in speaking of the refusal of
Congress to give him power to use the military forces of the United States in Mexico, he said: "European Governments would have been deprived of all pretext to interfere in the territorial and domestic concerns of Mexico. We should thus have been relieved from the obligation of resisting, even by force, should this become necessary, any attempt by these Governments to deprive our neighboring Republic of portions of her territory-a duty from which we could not shrink without abandoning the traditional and established policy of the American people."3
"...Disturbances on the boundary between our country and Mexico added to the grievances already enumerated, and for these Buchanan had equally drastic measures. In 1858 he advised Congress to
take the necessary steps to assume a temporary protectorate over the states of Chihuahua and Sonora by establishing military posts within these states, in order to restrain the predatory bands of Indians. The next year this recommendation was repeated.
"Both of Buchanan's remedies came to naught because Congress was not prepared to authorize intervention in the domestic affairs of a neighboring state ;3 thereupon he worked out another method of accomplishing the same objects. [i.e., by negotiating the McLane-Ocampo Treaty which would have given extraordinary transit and military intervention rights to the US; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLane–Ocampo_Treaty]
By the late 1850's the sectional controversy had poisoned Manifest Destiny, and so Congress did not authorize Buchanan to seize Mexican territory and did not ratify the McLane-Ocampo Treaty. But again this was possible because the Kansas-Nebraska controversy had reignited antislavery sentiment in the North--something that was just beginning when Phillips wrote his letter. And remember that a protectorate or "temporary" seizure of northern Mexico could be an opening wedge to outright annexation--and that of course any Mexican territories acquired by the US would automatically (until they became states) be "slave" territory under the Dred Scott decision.
I won't go into detail on Phillips' other fears, but there was indeed a movement to reopen the African slave trade. Admittedly, that had little chance of passing in Congress due to opposition not only from the North but the Upper South. But there was still a danger some Deep South states might revive the slave trade in disguise--e.g., the proposal in Louisiana to authorize the import of African "apprentices." As for Brazil, see Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade https://nyupress.org/books/9780814736883/ on the interest taken by southerners in the idea of an alliance of the world's two great slaveholding powers.
In short, Phillips' nightmare was not as implausible at the time as it may seem today. Much of its failure to be realized may be due to the blunder of southerners reigniting the sectional conflict by seeking to establish slavery in Kansas--which unlike Cuba or Mexico was a place where northern farmers hoped to settle. (In the end, with all the grandiose talk of southward expansion during the 1850's, all the expansionists got was a scaled-down Gadsden Purchase.)
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