The relations of the United States and Spain, diplomacy

Contents

CHAPTEB PAGE

I. The Attitude of Spain in the American Revolution 13

II. Discontent and Intrigue in the South-west and

Introduction

This book is the outcome of a study of the causes of the war of 1898 between the United States and Spain. Beginning as a preliminary chapter of the war, it was soon found that these causes were of such long growth and of such intricate character that it was vain to hope to bring them into short compass. The attempt at compression was abandoned and the book is thus an effort to bring before the reader the story of more than a hundred years of what has been really a racial strife; on the part of one race for actual domination over regions in which apparently it could not brook a division of rule; on the part of the other for the preservation of the status quo.

The late war was thus but the culmination of difficulties which had their seed in the peace of 1763. They sprung into life twenty years later with the advent on the world's stage of the American Union; remained in full vigor for half a century thereafter with scarcely an interval of repose, and waxed and waned for seventy-five years more, until finally war came in 1898 to remove the last cause of friction. Few of the 115 years from 1783 to 1898 were free from bitterness of feeling. The war was thus but a final episode in a century of diplomatic ill-feeling, sometimes dormant but more often dangerously acute.

One of the races involved is essentially practical, untrammeled by the conventions and conservatism natural to an old civilization; protestant in the large sense of ignoring generally the ways of the past, and with its natural and racial protestantism accentuated by a democratic development of nearly three hundred years. The other, offspring of all the ancient races of the ^lediterranean, was in the grip of antiquity, with the inherited traits of the most ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean world and naturally antagonistic in all its ways of thought and action to a people which, from its point of view, was an upstart without traditions; whose ancestors were barbarians when of literature, art and law Spain had possessed for a thousand years all that the ancient world had to give.

But it was more than antiquity, more than an old civilization, which produced the differences which made it impossible for the North American Anglo-Saxon to live near his Spanish neighbor without friction. The chief cause was in the absolute racial unlikeness itself, and though racial differences are somewhat modified by more modern conditions, the basis of this unlikeness, this racial temp>erament, still has an influence over the relations of men, immeasureable in degree, and more potent, though so intangible, than any other force in humanity.

Of the many races which have gone to make up the varying type of men in the Spanish Peninsula, the early Afro-Semitic and the Saracen have made the strongest impress upon the national character, and have given it mainly its qualities, good and bad; its tribal tendencies, its artistic temperament, its courtesy, its fanaticism, its fatalism, its gloomy pride and conservatism, and, not least, its cruelty. For the Iberian, the earliest known occupant of the Peninsula, was a Semite, and we have to-day his counterpart in the men of the Kabyl tribes of the Atlas. Says one who of Anglo-Saxons perhaps knows best the Spanish people: "Not alone in physique do these tribes resemble what the early Iberian must have been, but in the more unchanging peculiarities of character and institutions the likeness is easily traceable to the Spaniards of to-day. . . . The village granary (posito) still stands in the Spanish village as its counterpart does in the Atlas regions; the town pasture and communal tillage land continue on both sides of the straits to testify to the close relationship of the early Iberians with the Afro- Semitic races, which included the Egyptian or Copt, the Kabyl, the Touareg, and the Berber. The language of the Iberian has been lost, but enough of it remains on the coins of the later Celtiberian period to prove that it had a common root with the Egyptian and Saharan tongues, which extend from Senegal to Nubia on the hither side of the negro zone." *

Wave after wave of Semitic blood added itself to the kindred strain of the original Iberian. The Phoenician came for six ' Hume, The Spanish People, 3-4.

hundred years and he again was followed and displaced by his near relative, the Carthagenian, who was dominant in all the coasts of the land for two hundred and fifty more, when their power sank in the final defeat of Hannibal and in the victory of Scipio Africanus, 202 years before Christ. Cadiz, the last stronghold of Carthagenian power, was then abandoned and Rome ruled the land as long as there was Roman power.

In the north the Celt had preceded the Phoenician, and Goth and Vandal and Visigoth had followed the Roman and left marked traces; but all the varied races of the Peninsula were engulfed 300 years after the downfall of the Romans by the last and greatest of the historic invasions from Africa (A. D. 711) when Arab and Berber began a conquest which was for a time to include all Spain, and was to hold its fairest provinces for a longer period than any other race within man's knowledge. Islam did not rule the greater part of Spain for 500 years and these fairest provinces 300 years longer without leaving more than a memory. It made a deep impress on the blood as well as the thought and history of Spain, and, added to the Iberian-Phcenician-Carthagenian strain, accentuated the already strong Semitic qualities of the race, and made the man of the Peninsula closely akin in temperament and mental qualities to the Oriental and very different even from his closest neighbor north of the Pyrenees. During the most of this period, nearly as long as from the conquest of England by the Norman to the present day, the Moor-Berber was the dominant race, physically and intellectually, and after the last remnant of their dominion had passed there continued to live in Spain, subject to the Spanish Christians, a host of men of Moorish blood, a great portion of whom became merged into what came to be known only four centuries since as the Spanish nation.

It is clearly impossible that the great Moorish power which so long ruled the Peninsula, built great cities, reared a great and at the time an unapproached civilization, could have been represented only by the comparatively small remnant of 500,000 Moors driven to Africa in the early part of the XVIIth century by the mad religious fury which came into being with the closing years of Ferdinand and Isabella and reached its acme under Philip II. Says an able historian: *'When we compare the inconsiderable number of exiles with the orif^inal large Moorish population of the lands recovered during the reconqucst we can realize how great a proportion of the Mudejares must have become Christians and have merged indistinguishably with their conquerors. Mediaeval toleration had won them over and its continuance would in time have completed the process. Not only would an infinite sum of human misery have been averted, but Spain would to some extent have escaped the impoverishment and debility which served as so cruel an expiation." *

The impress of the Moor differed from that of the Romans as a national migration differs from military occupancy. The Moors were a resident race; the Romans a governing class. However great the effect of Roman language, laws, and methods upon Iberia, and it was of course very great and lasting, there could not be a blood mixture in any degree commensurable with that due to the presence for so much longer a period of the millions who had so much of race feeling common with the Iberian native to the soil.

It thus could not be otherwise than that this latest comer and longest stayer should leave a great mark, and that we have in the Spaniard, a man in whom so much is not understandable until we reckon with him, not as a European, but as the Moro-Iberian which he is; a man apart, and differentiated from the other races of Europe. Looked at so, much becomes explicable which is otherwise strange, and has defied the effort of the Anglo-Saxon to understand the philosophy of the acts and ways of the conglomerate race of the Peninsula, which, in its incapacity for government, its regionalism, its chronic state of revolution, its religiosity, its fatalism and procrastination, its sloth in material development, have made the Spanish nation an enigma to the northern mind.

But with whatever shortcomings, the race has, or certainly has had, great qualities. It did a work in the exploitation of America which in its energy and its earlier results; in the actual work of building cities; in exploration; in the missionizing of savage races, surpassed for a century and a half that done or even attempted by any other race of the time. Though the basis of this energy was chiefly a james auri of a most sordid type; though no great part of the Spanish migration had for cause such motives as those of the * Lea, The Moriscos of Spain, 360.

founders of New England, or even the more prosaic desire to colonize a new land in a true sense, this energy must remain one of the marvels of accomplishment. One can only wonder to-day at the immensity of the force, whatever its basis, which made, so long since, great and important places of Mexico, Caracas, Lima, Havana; which built the walls of Cartagena and Panama, penetrated to Bogota, to Quito, and to the inmost recesses of Paraguay, when the colonies of France and England were but in their infancy.

The Spaniard left a mighty impress upon the New World; an impress in many ways Roman in character. While so like the Roman in building up a world empire, there is also a striking analogy in Rome's decay. As did Rome, so Spain sent her lieutenants to rule the provinces and build their fortunes in greed and oppression. She laid the heavy band of tribute upon the western world for the benefit of Spain alone and in large degree became the rapacious metropolis as was Rome; and faction and anarchy, as in her great exemplar, ruled at home until she stands to-day shorn of her ancient power, but still, like Rome, preserving to the last her gladiatorial games.

But while leaving this material impress in America, the Spaniard has also left much of the spiritual in the lofty courtesy, temperance, and the strong and kindly family feeling of his race, for which the Anglo-Saxon would be the better man. No one nation has all the virtues, and while the more marked of the Spaniard may not be those of the Anglo-Saxon, he has a large share of those of his own kind, and it is hoped that wherever the one race may be associated with the other, it will be, not to supplant but to unite the admirable qualities of both.

The marriage of Fernando of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, whose destruction of the Moorish power and the establishment of the Inquisition brought them the title of the ''Catholic Kings," was the first step toward solidifying Spain. Until then the Peninsula was a collection of diverse petty kingdoms with its fairest parts still in Moorish control, and all at sword's point with one another. "Castilians hated Aragonese, Catalans detested Castilians, Navarrese had nothing whatever in common with either nation. Oalicians were a race akin to the Portuguese, but had no fellowfeeling with the half-IMoorish Andalusians and Valencians. There was, indeed, still no Spain, either ethnologically or politically, for the countrv consisted of half a score of separate dominions each with its own laws, customs, traditions, prejudices, and racial distinctions," * and much of this remains to this day.

The religious fanaticism instigated and fomented by Fernando and Isahella had for its object chiefly the unification of the Spanish people through the establishment of a great and moving sentiment which should be common to all. It was, in one respect, unfortunately only too successful. It wakened the old Iberic spirit of fanaticism which the race had in common with its African ancestors, whose descendants on the southern shore of the Mediterranean had ranged themselves under the banners of Islam, and developed the spirit of mysticism and religious exaltation which made Spain the depository in its own eyes of the only true religion, and raised it to an exaltation which demanded that it should not only carry this religion to the heathen of newly discovered America, but that it should force the heretic parts of Europe into the true way. Nor was the futility of this felt or in any great degree recognized until the stern lesson of the loss in 1588 of the missionizing fleet known as the Spanish Armada and the defeat in the Netherlands forced the conviction upon the Spanish king and nation that they were unequal to the task.

The elevation of Charles I to the imperial throne as Charles V, while flattering to pride, drew Spain into the innermost whirlpool of European politics and made her merely the money chest of widespread and interminable w'ars in which she had no real concern, and which brought her to the depth of ruin and poverty from which she never had the political or commercial ability to rise. She was trailed in the wake of the so-called Holy Roman Empire, hugging the delusion that she was leading when she was only dragged, bled white by the incessant demands of one who was practically a foreign ruler. Her sons and her treasure were spent in Flanders and Italy, not for the purposes of the King of Spain, but for those of the Roman emperor, who completed the ruin of the country by leaving as a heritage to Spain the Netherlands, which had come to him through his Austrian father, Philip. It was this heirship which continued to Spain her unfortunate linking with a political ' Hume, The Spanish People, 310.

system which was in no sense hers, and which, combined with the economic effects of the expulsion of the Moriscos under the edict of September 22, 1609, by Philip III, and the growth of the Inquisition into the most terrible national flail known in history,^ gave the final blow which sank Spain into the deepest depths of political, moral, and economic ruin.

The extraordinary obliquity of mind which in the thought of many not only of the time but still for centuries to come placed Spain as a great power is illustrated by the remark of James I: "The King of Spain is greater than us all together." This was said not only when her navy had been ruined, and when she .aad been defeated in the Netherlands, but at a tim.e when she was in direst poverty, without commerce, bereft of everything but her fanaticism and spirit of adventure and of her ardor for literature and art, which last were to make her really great in the noblest fields. Jews and Moriscos had been slaughtered and driven from the country of which they were the main wealth producers; the export of gold and silver was prohibited and the use of these metals for any other purposes than as coin forbidden; certain goods could not be sent to America, as it was supposed that the American demand made them dear in Spain; articles of food were taxed an eighth of their value; and above all, trade was ruined by a tax, termed the alcabala, of ten per cent, rising later to fourteen, on every sale and which necessarily crushed commercial movement of every kind. Labor, which had been the perquisite of the Jew and of the Moor, was despised by the ''Old Christian," misery and squalor stalked through the land, while the court was given over to reckless extravagance. Says Hume: *'The religious fervor which first demonstrated itself in Isabel the Catholic, the exaltation induced by the Inquisition, and the ascetic mysticism which was at once the chief characteristic and the main policy of Philip II, provided for the Spanish people the direction for which their spirit yearned. Priests and friars were ever present. In court, in camp, and in every-day life the atmosphere of rigid unified religion enveloped all things and persons. Hard, severe, and ascetic as a protest against Moorish grace, cleanliness, and elegance, and equally against the sensuous beauty with which the Italians * See Lea, History of the Inquisition in Spain, passim.

10 LNTRODUCTION

had invested their worship, the Spanish mind revelled in the painful self-siicrificing side of religion which appealed to their nature. They l>eaime a nation of mystics in w^hich each person felt his community with God, and, as a consequence, capable of any sacrifice, any heroism, any suffering in this cause. The ruling idea was one of celestial knighthood, of daring adventure to rescue the cause of the suffering Christ even as the now-waning knightserrant had undertaken to rescue ill-treated ladies. Saint Teresa de Jesus, Saint Ignatius de Loyola and his marvellous company, and Saint Juan de la Cruz, with their visions and their ecstasies, were merely tN'pes; there was hardly a monastery without its fasting seer or its saintly dreamer, hardly a nunnery without its cataleptic miracle worker, hardly a barren hill-side without its hermit, living in filth and abject misery of the flesh, but with the exalted conviction of his personal community with God. Not churchmen alone, but laymen and soldiers too, were swayed by the strange thought, and went forth to work or war in a spirit of sacrifice, relieved by orgies of hideous immorality. Philip himself, living like a hermit and toiling like a slave in his stone cell, practising rigid mortifications, and undergoing the voluntary suffering in which he gloried, w^as beloved by his people, because he was moved by the same instinct that they were. He led them, it is true, but he did so because they wished to tread the same road."* The three hundred years after Philip II, which so altered most of Europe, wrought but slow changes in Spain, harrowed as was its people by poverty, misrule, and frequent anarchy. Democratic in its impulses as are all its kindred races, the theocratic rule of centuries fitted that of Spain but illy to adjust itself to the realities of democracy as developed in other European countries. Intensely provincialized both by reason of ignorance and by the barriers set by nature between the various kingdoms of Spain; with difficult and infrequent communications; segregated from the rest of Europe by a lofty mountain range; holding with overweening pride the conviction of a superiority of race which, it was felt, only accident had thwarted; unable by race characteristics U) develop a sane and wholesome polity, Spain, almost equally with Turkey, had become a synonym for ineptitude •Hume, The Spanish People, 375-37G.

in government and for maladministration in such governmental systems as the nation was able to form.

It was this inability or slowness of adaptation to the world's new conditions which caused the century just ended to be darkened with struggles in Spain's American dependencies, for what appeared to Anglo-Saxons for generations inherent rights. These dependencies, less enthralled as to thought in the last hundred years than the mother country, demanded more than, unhappily, the mother country could see its way to give. The practical political knowledge which should have developed in Spain as elsewhere in Europe came a century too late, and was acted upon only when the last of the numerous brood to which she had given birth had snapped the ties which had so long been weakening through the misrule which did not vary, in principle or in practice, during a period of three hundred and fifty years.

A notable Spaniard himself says: "If some day a mature judgment of our decadence and fall {vencimiento) be written, there will be placed as first of all their causes the evident injeriority of our aptitude for admiiiistration and government. One will then see how small are the matters which fix the attention of historians and statisticians in the incapacity and small emotions which have been so largely the peculiar attribute of our governors. At the moment when vast territories and complicated interests demand elevated intelligence and large ability we appear before the world with the admirable court of artists, captains, mystics, colonists, navigators, and even political WTiters of value, but without lighting upon a single man skilled in government; a Cromwell, Sully, Richelieu, Colbert, Louvois, etc., in whom the ancient personal strength has happened to be cast in the new moulds of modern nations." ^

But it has not been a Cromwell or Richelieu that has been needed; it has been chiefly a want of political aptitude in the race itself, without which the individual leader is of but small avail.

Great leadership is but the exponent of national feeling and aspiration. There was a nucleus of such in Spain a hundred years since and in its encouragement was Spain's need and safety. But

* Don Pablo de Alzola, quoting Don Fernando de Silvela, Rcvista Contemporanea, V, HI (1898).

this encouragement was denied her. Spanish effort in the earHer part of the nineteenth century to keep step with the spirit of democracy awakened by the French revohition was stifled, not by Spaniards but by the France of Louis XVIII and the Holy Alhance. The utmost evils which could be attributed to the Napoleonic designs of 1808 and the sufferings from the savage devastation of Spanish citie^s and the shameless rapacity of French generals at this melancholy period, could not equal in unhappiness to the Spanish {>eople the results of the atrocity of the French invasion of 1823. This invasion, the only reason for which was the suppression of the liberal movement and the constitution, re-established absolutism in the person of an incapable and degraded monarch, Fernando VII, and dealt Spanish liberalism a blow which rent the country with anarchic strife, stunted the moral and material growth of the kingdom, and fastened upon Cuba the despotic regime embodied in the king's decree of 1825.

It must thus be recognized that the vast evils befalling Spain and her island dependencies throughout the nineteenth century, evils so great that no qualifying words can express their enormity, were not all of her own making. France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia were the culpable partners in a crime which, more than all things else together, fastened woe upon a brave people and made certain the continuance of the evil elements of the country.

Without this action Spain, with her more liberal forces free to develop, might in some degree at least have advanced politically with the rest of Europe. Cuba might have been to-day a Spanish Canada and the Philippines a Spanish India. But these things were not to be. Racial peculiarities, regionalism, religious bigotry, and the ignorance which went hand in hand with fanatical subser\'ience to priestly rule were possibly sufficient to have prevented such a change; but the French invasion, or to speak more truly, the invasion by the Holy Alliance, made this change impossible, and by its reinstallation of absolutism made certain anarchy at home and loss of empire abroad. Spanish history when truly written will recognize this great fact.

Chapter I The Attitude Of Spain In The American Revolution

The difficulties between the United States and Spain began with the advent of the former as an independent power. These difficulties, as already mentioned/ were a heritage of the peace of 1763. By the preliminary articles, dated November 3, 1762, of the definitive treaty signed February 10, 1763, a treaty which ended the great colonial wars of the middle of the eighteenth century, France yielded Canada to Great Britain and the latter took over Florida in exchange for Havana, which had fallen in 1762 to the English and colonial forces under Lord Albemarle and Admiral Pocock. On the same day, with the adoption of the preliminary articles of the treaty, the French king "ceded to his cousin of Spain and to his successors, forever, in full ownership and without exception or reservation whatever, from pure impulse of his generous heart and from the sense of the affection and friendship existing between these two royal persons, all the country known under the name of Louisiana." This act had been so unforeseen that the Spanish ambassador, who had had no instructions in the subject, accepted the gift conditionally, that is, sub spe rati, subject to the ratification of his Catholic Majesty. On the 13th of the same month the latter accepted the donation,' but it was not until by letter of April 21, 1764, to the Governor of Louisiana that the transfer was made public. Thus so easily, and apparently with no other cause than to recompense Spain for the loss of Florida, was signed away an empire.

The definitive treaty gave no indication of this transfer, but proceeded in Article VH to assign limits as if it had not been made: "The limits of the British and French territories in that part of the world shall be fixed irrevocably by a line down the middle of the river Mississippi, from its source to the river Iberville,

* Introduction. 'Gayarr6, History of Louisiana, II, 92.

14 CESSION OF LOUISIANA TO SPAIN [17G3

and from thence by a line drawn along the middle of this river and the lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain to the sea; and for this purpose the Most Christian King cedes in full right, and guarantees to his Britannic Majesty, the river and port of Mobile, and everything he possesses or ought to possess on the left side of the river Mississippi, except the town of New Orleans and the island in which it is situated, which shall remain to France; provided the river Mississippi shall be equally free, as well to the subjects of Great Britain as to those of France, in its whole breadth or length, from its source to the sea, and expressly that part which is between the said island of New Orleans and the right bank of that river, as well as the passage both in and out of its mouth. It is furthermore stipulated that the vessels belonging to the subjects of either nation shall not be stopped, visited, or subjected to the payment of any duty whatsoever."

In this clause rested later the claim of the United States to the right of navigation of the river as successor to all the rights of Great Britain under the treaty of 1763.

Spain in exchange for the restitution of Havana and Cuba ceded "Florida, with Fort St. Augustin and the bay of Pensacola, as well as all that Spain possesses on the continent of North America to the east or to the south east of the river Mississippi, and in general everything that depends on said countries and lands." By this treaty all the North American continent east of the Mississippi, except the island of New Orleans, became British territory.

But this was not the whole of the rearrangement of North American boundaries. By British royal proclamation of October 7, 1763, the ceded territories were divided into four governmental districts — Quebec, East Florida, West Florida, and Granada, which last included the whole of the British West Indies; a fifth district comprising the region between the Alleghany and the Mississippi was set aside for the Indians. In this last vast area British subjects were prohibited from making "any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession of any of the lands above reserved, without our special leave or license." ^ Naturally

' P'or text of thi.s proclamation, see Annual Register, 17G3, Wineor, "Narrative and Critical History," VI, ch. IX, Hart and Channing, American History Leaflets, No. 5.

1776] SPAIN'S APPREHENSIONS 15

the English colonists paid practically no attention to this attempt to set new bounds to the ancient charters, and the westward movement across the Alleghanies, already begun, went forward with constant acceleration/

The provinces known as East Florida and West Florida were divided by the Appalachicola River; both had at first the thirty-first parallel of latitude as a northern boundary, but this, for West Florida, was changed the next year to 32° 28', marking the mouth of the Yazoo, a change which later gave rise to no little discussion.

Spain by the treaty came into the greatest potential heritage with which a nation was ever dowered. Her possessions included three- fourths the habitable parts of North and South America; the richest and greatest islands of the West Indies were hers; she stretched from frozen north to frozen south through 110 degrees of latitude, holding within her grasp the richest mines then known of the world, and far richer which w^ere yet to be discovered. Never had race or nation such opportunities. But this great estate was in hands powerless to use it; the gift from France of half a continent was in itself a cause of terror and foreboding, as bringing Spain into direct and hated contact with the Anglo- Saxon, a contact she had hoped to avoid through the continuance of a buffer state under the dominion of France.

Spain saw in the American Revolution her supposed opportunity for safeguarding her American interests, in weakening the dominion of the English race through the revolt of the colonies, and gave secretly to France 1,000,000 of the 3,000,000 francs handed by the French in 1776 to the American Commissioners. As the war progressed, "and the issue was independence, Spain was no longer inclined to help on a movement which would be a dangerous precedent to her own colonies, and which, if successful, would build up on her borders a sovereignty in its political principles very hostile to her traditions, and occupied by a people whose energy and aggressiveness would be made more formidable by a successful war. This was the second attitude assumed by Spain