The history of American expansion and the story of our new possessions. The Spanish-American war and the heroes of '98...

Front matter

"OO^

X

■ V

Author's Preface

ON the front of the palace at Versailles, is in golden letters the famous inscription, "To All the Glories of France," and the splendor of the sentiment has preserved from the ruthless hands of revolution, and from defacement by enemies in temporary triumph, the marbles of the magnificent edifice and the proud letters of gold. The memories of nations have many forms of expression, and it is not those distinguished by pomp that seem to have been the most certainly preserved and to possess the greater assurance of perpetuity. In the mounds of the ancient cities on the Euphrates, in the hills of desolation that mark the sites of mighty capitals, are found cylinders of burnt clay on which are the records of the dynasties that have otherwise perished, of peoples among whose memorials no tower stands to tell the tale of the race, no arch abides to speak of the vanished ages or locate in the abyss beyond the era of history, the Empires that are lost. It Is the cylinder of clay that has the quality of immortality. Still more in the printed leaves of our time will be found the pages that minister to the pride of people, and on which are inscribed the lessons of the rise and fall of nations that shall enshrine the lives of great men and apply the excellence of good deeds.

It is hoped in this volume to assemble the glories of our country, not alone those of war, but of peace, and especially to celebrate the policies that are executed for the general welfare, and the things that are done with public purpose for the common good. This is to array the events that are luminous on the paths of "Progress we have

passed. Our country is in evidence before the world. Its foundations spanning a continent, its States an arch between the two greater oceans of the globe, its position is a commanding one. To us is committed the leadership of the Freemen of a Hemisphere. We emerged from a colonial State ruled by remote masters, through war to independence, and we have been consolidated and at the same time extended and self-educated through war. The same general outlines of advancement are marked in the other American Republics that have advanced and arisen from the condition of European dependencies to be sovereign States.

In our hundred days of war with Spain we settled questions that had been gathering intensity for a hundred years. We freed peoples — the original purpose of challenging the barbarous misgovernment of Spanish colonies. We conquered the richest islands of the Indies, East and West, and hold them as our possessions by the same title that Texas and California are States of the Union. Where the flag of the nation flies, the grievances identified with Spain's colonial system, whether peopled by her children or not, vanish, and the oppressed, made free, seek the safeguards of our institutions, believing, according to their enlightenment, in our faith, freedom, and honor. They will not be despised and rejected, but received and protected ; not in States but in Territories, under the laws of Congress and the commands of the Chief Executive of the Nation. The irresistible tendency of this emancipation and education is to Americanism — and in every clime and all races, to American citizenship, as the sovereign people of the United States may, in their wisdom, determine.

MURAT HALSTEAD.

Introduction

THE national policy of the people of the United States was simplified by the war of states and sections into which we were drifting forty years ago. War educates and legislates. As we emerged from the conflict of states and nations one and indestructible, many and indivisible, it was into a consciousness that we had underestimated our strength in our Fourth of July literature. We had so adorned ourselves with complacency, were so pleased with compliments, that we had omitted to give our capacity due estimation. We were most appreciative of our splendor, but had an inadequate estimation of the substance that sustained the glittering show. The North and South had confronted each other as great nations, and there was a kindling, on both sides, of pride in the One Nation whose majestic outlines were soon sharply defined, while the combined energies of the people, developed for destruction, were devoted to the works of the soil and shops ; and the marvelous land we have inherited prospered beyond example. There has been much more than our material progress. We have lifted ourselves among the group of the nations of the earth, and are shoulder to shoulder with the loftiest of them. We have a giant's strength, and have not ill-used it. All-absorbing Russia consented to sell us the huge territory of Alaska, and its archipelago that extends across the North Pacific. There were those who shrank from more territory, were feeble-minded about

8 INTRODUCTION.

the natives, and worked up for misuse the phrase " entanghng alhances." That sort of conservatism has been, as always, discredited with results. Russia has not enough money to buy the land that she sold us for seven millions — and yet she has not lost as we have gained. Our enrichment has not been her impoverishment. It is the mighty magic of our fortune that transforms all that becomes ours. It was so with Louisiana, California and the rest. It will be so with Cuba and Hawaii. Mexico never had what we gained, and the land, and the rivers, and the sky she keeps, have a natural opulence that needs many generations of labor for full revelation.

In Our Relations With All Other Nations, we have, since the stalwart unity that the war made, in making us acquainted, more and more manifested ourselves. The empire established by the French in Mexico was offensive to us and disappeared at our command. We called upon England to accept, in the interest of peace, the responsibility for the privateering which she provided in the "Alabama." She comprehended the obligation and had the statesmanship to pay the bill. The world seemed to find out our rank among the great peoples and powers before we did. We are the Dominant Power of the Western Hemisphere — so called because the American continents were found, by those who knew the art of navigation, when voyaging westward. This dominance is not necessarily to be used for our own selfish purposes of increase, but for the good of the American countries that defer to us on account of the seniority of our Republic — and that we insist that European colonies or colonization systems are out of date here. We are not interfering in the Old World, but America must be let alone for Americans. That is the brevity and beauty of the Monroe Doctrine. Spain is losing the last of her American

INTR OD UCTION. ^

islands as she lost all her American continental empires. Look at the map and see whether we are not concerned. We are more interested than either Spain or Cuba in "The Pearl of the Antilles," and we are in such relations with Spain that she is appealing to Europe against us. The effect of this cannot be other than to press us to the front of the nations — to augment our sense of power and the sensibilities of others of it.

The world is a neighborhood. We are one of the big neighbors and our vast possessions have not caused to pale the original spirit of liberty — but heightened that patriotism that was aflame in our country before the forms of political expression were organized. Our country will no longer play a role of meekness because we may or may not have enemies beyond the seas. We shall make our potentiality felt in other lands — not as Jingo or Fillibuster — but as an armed nation that will stand with head among the stars where the red, white and blue are, sword in hand ! We have a glorious record of wars, and this book shall tell of them — and of other wars in the Americas that have broken foreign bonds and helped to Americanize America. We shall celebrate the freedom from the despotism that once kindled baleful fires within sight of our shores, from the misgovernment that compelled Cubans to fight to the death — for the battle of American freedom against Spanish despotism has been won all the way from our own Carolinas to Cape Horn. The manifest destiny of the islands of the American seas is that of the disenthralled continents — with a higher and, we trust, broader and brighter enlightenment of those who have studied the Schools of Sorrow from which come the Teachings of Wisdom.

Chapter I. How We Grew To Be One Of The Great Powers

Our Thirteen Original States the Bulwark of American Independence — The Great West gave us Our Imperial Standing — Our Vast Dominion is an Impregnable Fortress, yet We Must be Prepared for the Greater Wars that are to Come.

From the birth of our great republic it was destined that we should become one of the ruling nations. The centre of civilization, and consequently that of the ruling power, was across the Atlantic from us when we began our existence, and our Thirteen Original States formed the breastwork that defended the great West, soon to be a part of the coming republic of republics, the forerunner of the establishment of freedom throuo-hout the Americas — the great champion of human liberty. In our vast dominion, when we had reached the Pacific, there was established an impenetrable stronghold for the people, safe against the attacks of all the world, and thus we grew to be a great power, not by militarism, like the great powers of Europe, but by our geographically commanding position in the Western Hemisphere and our liberal institutions. Separated, as we were, by oceans and by ages from war as the natural occupation of a people, the elements of strife were lacking in our land of plenty and of liberty. All this led to a belief among us that war was a thing of the past.

What should or could we fear ? Oregfon at the mouth of

2 21

2 2 HO IV WE CREW TO BE ONE OF THE GREAT POWERS.

the Columbia was ours. The mouth of the Mississippi was ours also ; and orators were accustomed to say, as a climax, that our possessions extended from Maine to Florida. We were isolated in our own grandeur; and our free, popular government guaranteed us against the contention of communities. If we wanted anything settled, we had only to take a vote on it, — and there was the infallible Constitution of the United States. As for differences among sections, Andrew Jackson had threatened Calhoun with condign punishment if he crossed the line of national prerogative with the doctrine of nullification. Concerning slavery, Washington owned many slaves ; and the Bible commanded servants to obey their masters. And as for cranks, they should be judged and dealt with according to law. We had liberty that would solve all troubles, though it had not been precisely proclaimed " throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof," according to the inscription on the Declaration of Independence Bell.

It is but half a century since we found ourselves at war with Mexico. Texas and California were added by the sword to our sisterhood of states, and it is one of the happy facts of history that our gains did not turn out to be Mexico's losses. There was a profound disturbance in Europe that sent Continental monarchs Hying. After all, the volcanoes were not extinct. The great wars since those days have been that of the Crimea, in which England, France, Turkey, and Sardinia fought the statesmanship of Russia, and Turkey was preserved as a living Asiatic menace in Europe ,* then the war of France against Austria, culminating at Solferino ; the war of our States that closed at Appomattox ; the French invasion of Mexico ; the war in which Prussia beat down Austria at Sadowa ; the Franco-German war, in which Paris fell and France lost Alsace and Lorraine ; ancj

HOW WE GREW TO BE ONE OF THE GREAT POWERS. 23

the war of Russia against Turkey, that roared around Plevna, There were the wars of the Mutiny in India, of the occupation of Egypt, of the fall of Khartoum, the wars to open the ports of China, the war in which Chili struck down Peru, the civil war in Brazil, the war in which Japan put China to the sword, the wars in Cuba, and the Turco- Grecian war.

No continent has been exempt; and the latest of this series of combats is not the least, so far as we are concerned. The increase of military and naval armaments within this generation has been beyond example. The armed nations, in their equipments for asserting themselves, have consumed the products of industry, and mortgaged the future for money to cover extraordinary expenditures for the machinery of destruction, — expenditures amounting to more than the cost of armies, fleets, fortifications, and the ravages of campaigning, from Bunker Hill to Waterloo. The world is learning war more than ever; and the arbitrament of arms was never so costly as now.

The Turks, Austrians, French, Chinese, Peruvians, and Mexicans lost territory in the wars of the later half of the century. The Turkish losses became small kingdoms ; the Austrians gaining two provinces and the Greeks one. The greater importance of the acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine by the Germans, has been the unquenchable enmity of France ; and the symbol of it is the old statue of Marshal Ney in the park at Metz, musket in hand, as he faced the Russians on the retreat from Moscow. The statue of Strasburg crowned with mourning wreaths, in the Place de la Concorde at Paris, has not such sinister significance as the defiant figure of Ney on German territory. At night, in the electric light that glows near the French field-marshal, he seems to listen and almost to speak.

24 J^OJV WE GREW TO BE ONE OF THE GREAT POWERS.

The greatest gain of land by the sword in modern times was that which we acquired from Mexico. We were particularly fortunate in earlier and later days, in buying Louisiana from the French, and Alaska from the Russians,

In the same period England and Russia have obtained vast landed possessions, Germany has unified German States, and the Italian peninsula has crystallized into one kingdom.

Naturally the tendency of the times has been to the expansion of sovereignties, partly for the same reason that there has been an unexampled growth of cities and augmentation of- popular demonstrations. These things result from the extension and perfection of railway systems ; from telegraphy and cheap papers ; from the manufacture of high-grade steel at low rates, permitting the erection of bridges and buildings otherwise impracticable ; and from the improvement of the condition of the hosts of labor. The victories in peaceful conventions, not less than those on the fields of combat, make for the aggrandizement of empires and the concentration of peoples. Our Confederates fought against the stars when they took up arms against that consolidation which we call nationality, and which, with guarantees of popular liberty in republicanism and democracy, has in it the enduring and dominating substance of imperialism, that overcomes and expands and constructs and goes on to greater destinies. It is the rule of the many, not of the few, that is the stronger government. It is not the Czars and Kaisers, the Sultans, the Emperor-Kings, and the Empress-Queens, who are to be magnified in the future by our higher civilization ; but the millions themselves shall be great, by reason of the conditions of equal opportunity and the discipline of common and inviolable order.

The world is no longer inaccessible and unknown to its

WiV WE GkkW to BE ONE OF THE GREAT FOU^ERS. ii^

inhabitants. It is explored, measured, traversed, until there is instantaneous communication between the old mysteries of the atlas. Some of our States, in cost of time and movement, are farther away from our commercial and political capitals and the clusters of our manufacturing industries than are England and France ; but the States fronting the two great oceans are better acquainted with each other, and have a closer sense of companionship, than the counties of the older States — Virginia and New York, for example — had, before the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, and the telephone came to intensify the application of the ancient and honored motto, '•' E p/urihus unumy If we are of New York, the nations of Europe are now more distinctly our neighbors than were the New-England States when the girl-queen, Victoria, was crowned.

Whether or not it was the pro-slavery ambition that caused the war with Mexico and the magnificent country we appropriated, it was a wise and masterly stroke. Those who delivered it may have builded more wisely than they knew ; but no blame attaches to workmen who do that. The opposition to the annexation of Texas was narrow, even if there was a little speculation in the Texas debt ; and when we accepted as a State Texas, the France of America, the Americanization of the people was justification. New Mex ico has not changed, and developed American characteristics so rapidly as we could desire ; but the example that, above all, vindicates the policy of annexation — not excepting Louisiana, Florida, or Texas — is California. We have nothing more priceless than the Golden Gate ; but some of our statesmen shuddered when we got it.

There were many criticisms when William H. Seward and Charles Sumner accepted the friendly offer of Russia to sell us Alaska. If they had not improved the happy moment,

.<:ir 5s»r!nnK: xr rssc^^ri Tiinr

HOIV WE GRinV TO BE ONE OF THE i.'REAl I'OWEh'S. 27

in Europe that may effect us more seriously than any other event abroad in the closing decade of the century. It is not improbable that the Emperor of Germany — the most restless and enterprising of modern monarchs — was the manager of that war ; that he prepared the theatre, and supplied the actors. He visited Vienna at a critical time in the relations of the Powers ; and then the Emperor of Austria made haste to visit the C/ar of Russia. From that time there was concert between the Kaiser, the Czar, the Sultan, and the Emperor-King of Austria and Hungary, — the masters of the armed nadons in which there is the least public opinion, indeed so little of it, that imperial affairs are decided without reference to the sentiments of the people. The Austrian sovereign does not assert himself absolutely as the others do in their respective dominions. But he has two Turkish provinces ; and, as he wanted more, he maintained the concert. The German Emperor has the greatest military machine the world has ever seen. Next to him in that respect is the Czar, — a young man in the iron grip of a system, with a million thoughtless bayonets. The Sultan has been rehabilitated. It is seen that he has an. immense army, and that there is no better fighting material in Europe than that which composes it.

It is well worth while for us to consider that the combination of emperors growing out of the Greco-Turkish war is the most formidable alliance of military Powers ever formed. There are four great armies in it, — the Turkish, with half a million men, being the smallest, — and three considerable navies. The Kaiser and the Czar are young in experience, and not limited within defined responsibilities. Germany is the leader, and has the colonizing passion. This country is the one that would naturally

2S HOtV tVM GkElV TO BE ONE OF THE GREAT POWERS.

be looked upon and watched with jealous eye as the next great nation to take up the idea of national expansion, owing to our great commercial enterprise.

We may be sure there will be more friction than there has been between us and other nations, because each year brings us closer together. We can send orders for goods to Germany by cable, and have them landed here within ten days of the date of the message. One hundred of the ships of war reviewed at Portsmouth in the course of Queen Victoria's Jubilee could be off our coast in a fortnight. There is ready at Bermuda and Halifax an abundance of docks, stores, provisions, and ammunition, as well as all the machinery for handling and fitting out ships of war ; and away down in the Carribbean Sea the English have another vast station of like character. We should not count England as an enemy ; but she is our only rival on this continent. She holds more continental land and more islands in the American hemisphere than we do. She is prepared for war both in the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The imperialism of England is to-day a considerable fact, and means more to us than to any other people except the English. We say English rather than British ; for the evolution is of England. Already the English colonies are in sharp competition with us in producing food for the metropolitan centres of congested civilization. Australians have broken the markets of New York more than once. A cablegram to Melbourne brings butter by the thousand tons from the other side of our planet, where the grass is green all the year. Australia is not as far away in time and charges as Europe was in the middle of the nineteenth century. The English invested a great deal of capital in Argentina, and seemed to have lost it ; but the railroads they iiOlV JVH GREW TO BE ONE OF 7 HE GREAT POWERS, ^g

built and the ships they subsidized opened immense wheatlands. Besides, the oceans are easy roads.

We have rights as a humane Power, with faith in self-government, and a consciousness of manifest destiny, to do the things counting for freedom and peace and the extension of our just influence in Cuba. Shall we take steps looking to retirement, or must we walk in the ways made familiar by those who established the zone of our national predominance across the continent, took Florida, and, touching the tropical climate of the Southern Seas, moved north and west into the Arctic regions, so that from the eastern border of Maine to the western islands of the Aleutian group, we have in the summer days eighteen hours of sunshine on the land covered by our flag? Shall we not go on where the honors and the glories await us as the Power that is competent, if we will, to speak for half the globe ? Once the Alleghenies were our western horizon; but we have crossed the space that divided the discoveries of Columbus from the lands of his dreams, where the east and the west are blended, like sea and sky, in the boundless blue of the waters and the air.

The objection is made that we neither hav<i nor can have, under our system of States, anything but States and Territories. We, the people of the United States, however, ordained a Constitution to establish "a more perfect Union " ; and that very Union was triumphant, through the conquest of States whose statesmen largely made the Union greater than the States. And the continuance of the policy of annexation only Invites us to be masterful in peace. We need to formulate a colonial system, and then the precedents should be everlasting examples. Thomas Jefferson saw that If the Constitution was not equal to the occasion of the absorption of the Louisiana purchase, there

JO IlOtV WE GREW TO BE ONE OF THE GREAT POWERS.

was a higher and a more fundamental law, that of our Inheritance, written over the continent, in rivers and ranges of mountains, in plains and valleys, and that, therefore, the Constitution would have to be accommodating. No parchment can forbid the march of mankind. Our territorial system has served us well. It has yielded thirty-two States, each as sovereign and inviolable as the others ; and there is no primacy by reason of seniority.

We ought to be armed as becomes a great Power ; not for military aggression, as our volunteers have always been and will prove to be sufficient for that. But, whether we include the American islands in the scope of our sovereignty or not, we need to equip ourselves for international eventualities.

We have become one of the great powers. The ruling nations will henceforth consult with us in decidingr the destiny of empires. We have entered the arena as one of the combatants, and must be reckoned with. Heretofore we had little concern how Africa, Asia, or Oceania were cut up. Our increased commerce, however, demands that we take an interest in the world at large and compete in every market. Already our trade extends to every corner of the globe. Our exports will soon exceed those of England and Germany, and it is our duty that we let the Stars and Stripes follow for the protection of American industry.

To protect our enormous trade will demand of us a powerful navy, and it will be the policy of wisdom that we lose no time in establishing such.

For it is the logic and lesson of current history that the greatest of wars are to come ; for the nations are spending money, time, and toil in learning war, with an extravagance incessantly increasing as the later years of the century are numbered.

Chapter II. Our Early Territorial Prospects

George Washington in his Boyhood Put Our Country in the Saddle — In International Matters Conservative, he was, in his Youth, the Foremost ol the Adventurers of the Gentlemen of his State Invading the Great West — He Knew More of That which is now the Heart of the Country than any other Man of his Generation, and More Wisely Appreciated the Value of the Ohio and the Mississippi Valleys — He was the Chosen Leader when but Twenty two Years of Age, of the First Band of Colonists who took the Field against the French Aggression in the Ohio Country. It was at his Personal Command that the First Guns were Fired and the First Blood Shed in the Great War for the Domination in North America Between England and France, terminating in the Possession, by the People of the United States, of the Soil they now Occupy — • He First Assisted the English to Put Out the French, and then the French Assisted Him in Putting Out the English.

There is hardly to be found in the records of mankind an occasion more grateful and opportune to sweep away a work of historic injustice than that afforded in writing- a history of Our War with Spain and Our Territorial Expansion, by declaring-, at the outset, the splendor of the youthful heroism and achievements of George Washington in laying broader and deeper the foundations of the government by the people, of which he stands in the august and universally ascribed relation as the Father. For more than a century the name of Washington has been used by those who have been opposed to the expansion of our country. No man ever had a more direct hand than himself in expanding it. He was too early to see beyond the Mississippi, for it had not then entered the imagination of man that this Republic was to be bounded only by the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, and the Great Lakes and the Great p dVR MAkLY TEkktTdntAL PMosPEcTS.

Gulf. So far-seeing, however, was Washington, that it is easy to conjecture that he must have had some gHmpses of the glory to come. His personal part, in extreme youth, as the representative of Virginia and the colonies associated with her in resisting the French system of grasping all the lands watered by the tributaries of the Mississippi, is most interesting, little understood, and rarely realized in its full proportions.

About one hundred and fifty years ago the French, under the patronage of their King and court and army, were busily establishing themselves along the waters of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, and by several routes connecting the enormous basins of the greater North American rivers. They first crossed to the Lakes high up the Mississippi, and later discovered the advantages of the Ohio and the Wabash, which they thought would serve their purpose. Therefore they ascended the Ohio, and reaching the shores of Lake Erie, found their true line of communication between the imperial masses of their possessions along the Allegheny River, which was then regarded as the Ohio, the Monongahela, having consideration only as the most important branch of the "beautiful river." The Indian tribes were stirred up from forts of the French who fortified positions in close relations along Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and advancing constructed an important fortification in what is now Erie county. Pa. They also had another place at Venango, where the Allegheny received a considerable affluent, and at this stage of the proceedings. Major Washington, a member of the staff of Governor Dinwiddle, was sent with a letter challenging the French commandant in the Ohio country, on the subject of his aggressions upon the land belonging to the King of England. On the way Washington passed the

OUR EARLY TERRITORIAL PROSPECTS. ^.l

Forks of the Ohio, before there had been a stick cut on the site of the city of Pittsburg-, and when he returned one of the points of his report to the Governor was the extreme importance of that position. Governor Dinwiddie immediately began to organize to head off the French at that point, and Washington was the man selected to take command of the forces. There were great deficiencies, however, in the organization of the colonies, and when in the following- spring he set forth, it was with insufficient forces; and the French were ahead of him, as he had reported they probably would be, unless the utmost speed of enterprise was reached in taking armed possession of the land. There followed the familiar story of Fort Duquesne and Braddock's defeat ; but more interesting- is the fact that, with his little band, Washington moved resolutely into the wilderness, encountered the French, and regarding them as trespassers, ordered them fired upon, resulting in the death of a French officer, De Joinville. Thereupon Washington was forced to fortify himself, but was assailed by overwhelming nurribers, and on the night before the fourth of July, 1 753, he signed articles of capitulation as a prisoner of war. He it was who started the fight, and he it was who saw the French off, when the forces of England at last vindicated her reputation, the French abandoned the Forks of the Ohio, and the Indians sailed away in their canoes down the beautiful river, leaving the colonies north of the posts on the lower Mississippi to the English-speaking people forever. Thus it was, in the days of his youth, that George Washington put the American people in the saddle ; and the result was our national independence.