Henry Nash Smith about the Ostend Manifesto
The only Southern expansionist dream which had
imaginative depth led in a different direction. This was the
notion of a Caribbean slave empire, which found its most
spectacular expression in the Ostend Manifesto of 1854. The
Southern diplomats who in this remarkable document threatened
forcible con quest of Cuba if Spain refused to sell the island to
the United States, were trying to put into effect a geopolitical conception
developed in part from the general notion of manifest destiny and
in part from the idea of the passage to India. The oceanographer
Mathew F. Maury, leading Southern scientist of his day, had
called the Gulf of Mexico the American Mediterranean. Into this
sea emptied the Mississippi, and the archaic Southern tendency to
emphasize the primacy of natural waterways allowed Southern
thinkers to conceive of the Gulf as dominating the whole interior
valley. On the east the Gulf merged into the Caribbean, which
touched the Isthmus of Panama, gateway to the Pacific; control of
the Gulf was said to mean mastery of the dominant commercial
route to the Indies. Southward the Caribbean led to South
America, where the slave empire of Brazil in the fabulous basin
of the Amazon offered the world's most promising theater for
expansion of the plantation system. The key to all
this potential empire was Cuba: ". . . if we hold Cuba," wrote an
editorialist in the Richmond Enquirer, "in the next fifty
years we will hold the destiny of the richest and most increased
commerce that ever dazzled the cupidity of man. And with that
commerce we can control the power of the world. Give us this and
we can make the public opinion of the world."
Well might a Southerner point out that the South had a
manifest destiny different from that of the North. The
conception of a tropical empire occupying the basins of the
Amazon and the Mississippi and controlling the trade of the
Pacific, populated by Negroes brought from Africa through a
reopened slave trade-- "the purple dream," as Stephen Vincent Benet
calls it,
Of the America we have not been,
The tropic empire, seeking the warm sea,
The last foray of aristocracy,--*
*Copyright, 1927, 1938 by Stephen Vincent Benet
offers a glaring contrast with the myth of the garden of the world which
expressed the goals of freesoil expansion into the Mississippi
Valley. But the dream was powerful enough to inflame a young
printer and newspaperman in Keokuk, Iowa, Sam Clemens by name,
who set out down the Mississippi in 1856 on his way to found a
coca plantation on the Amazon.
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Last modified: November 15, 1997