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4. Cora Montgomery, The Benefits of Annexing Cuba , pages 125-127, Martin Delany, Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent ,
4. Cora Montgomery, The Benefits of Annexing Cuba, pages 125-127, Martin Delany, Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent, pages 137-140, and William Waters Boyce, Why Southerners Should Oppose Territorial Expansion, pages 148-149:
According to these three authors, what were the benefits and dangers of acquiring territory in the 1850s?
CORA MONTGOMERY The Benefits of Annexing Cuba 1850xxxiv Jane McManus Storm Cazneau — better known by her pen name, Cora Montgomery — was one of the few female journalists who wrote openly about political topics during the decades before the Civil War. Born in Troy, New York, in 1807, she and her father, William McManus, a businessman and veteran of the War of 1812, attempted to establish a settlement in Texas in the early 1830s. She later moved to New York City, where she supported herself as a journalist. Fluent in Spanish, Montgomery traveled throughout the Caribbean and Mexico, including on a government-sponsored secret peace mission to Mexico City in 1846, and lobbied in her writing for the annexation of Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic (a cause her husband, William Cazneau, also championed). The essay excerpted here, directed primarily to a northern audience, was published in 1850 not long after a group of Americans under the leadership of Narciso López was expelled from Cuba following an aborted attempt to filibuster the island. Notice the similarities and differences between this appeal and Robert J. Walker's 1844 letter in favor of the "reannexation" of Texas (Document 21), particularly in terms of race and the rise of sectionalism. Will the Annexation of Cuba Benefit the Domestic Interests of the Union? Cuba seems placed, by the finger of a kindly Providence, between the Atlantic and the Mexican seas, at the crossing point of all the great lines of our immense coasting trade, to serve as the centre of exchange for a domestic commerce as extensive as our territory, and as free as our institutions. It is only after a careful study of the incredible extent and variety of the products of our thirty States, with all their grades of climate, and in the whole circumference of their natural and manufactured wealth, and then only with the map of North America distinctly before the eye, that the importance of Cuba, as a point of reception and distribution, can be fairly understood. If her matchless harbors were not locked up by foreign jealousies, and our ships could but find themselves always at home for shelter, water, and refreshment, at this commodious halting place, it would be worth a round purchase sum to our traders, independent of the safe keeping of the Gulf, and the command of her precious staples... As an open, safe, and reliable haven of rest, aid, and supply, beyond any fear of foreign hostility or interference, standing midway as she does on the path from the Atlantic to the Gulf . . . the control of this Island is of immense, of incomputable importance to the dignity and independence of our coast commerce . . . It is the priceless jewel that clasps into one magnificent unbroken chain, the vast circle of our Pacific, Gulf, and Atlantic trade. We only require this one link to belt 5,000 miles of sea-board in close and continuous mart and commercial unity, presenting, on every side, a well connected defence against the pretensions of rival or enemy. Whenever the trembling, restless Seal of the Gulf drops from the nerveless finger of Spain, there will be some envy in Europe, but little open resistance made to its passing into the grasp of our Eagle. When this republic assumes the charge, Europe will retire from this continent, and thenceforth on all our coasts we will ask nothing but our steam marine, and the splendor of our flag, to command the respect of the world for our commerce. . . . How Will Cuba Influence Slavery? It is difficult to steer truly and justly between the Scylla and Charybdis of Northern and Southern prejudices, but we may safely aver this much: If England settles the destiny of Cuba, her lot is prefigured in the story of Jamaica, Hayti and Martinico.39 . . . All the territory now held in common — sufficient in area to make forty of the largest States — must inevitably come in free, with or without the interference of Congress, as the climate and character of production will make slave labor unprofitable. To balance this wide domain of free soil, there is but a comparatively small band of States along the extreme South, and to which the Island of Cuba can make no frightful addition. Our immigration from Europe in a single year amounts to as much as the whole total of the slave inhabitants of Cuba, and after that last fragment of thraldom is brought within the pale of light and freedom, there can be no farther additions. The eighteen millions of whites will enlarge their ranks by emigration as well as births, and make stronger every year the disproportion of numbers, but the blacks and African servitude can draw no recruits from abroad. While State after State supplants and drives out unprofitable slave labor by the low wages of sound, mature, and intelligent white industry, hereditary servitude must contract its limits, until it is compressed into those regions of hot, unhealthy marsh in which negroes thrive, but which the constitution of the white man is unequal to the charge of redeeming from jungle and morass — and there slavery will end its mission and depart forever. The non-slaveholding States would show a most ungenerous sectional spirit if they object to the addition of Cuba to the political weight of the South, for her vote will not give the South an even, much less a controlling voice.
