The Ostend Manifesto was a statement prepared in 1854 by U. S. ministers to Great Britain, France, and Spain meeting in Ostend, Belgium. The statement recommended that the United States either buy the island of Cuba from Spain or, if Spain refused to sell, take the island by force.
While most of the rest of Latin America had gained its independence in the revolutions of the 1810s and 1820s, Cuba had remained a Spanish colony. The island’s value to Spain was in its sugar PLANTATIONS. Worked by 400,000 African-Cuban slaves, the plantations produced one-third of the world’s sugar, with considerable profit both for planters and the Spanish government.
Advocates of U. S. expansionism had set their sights on Cuba as early as the 1810s. For these Americans, Spanish control was an affront to the independence movements that had swept the Western Hemisphere between 1776 and 1830. Some also argued that Cuba, a mere 90 miles from Florida, might at some future date pose a threat to United States security. The greatest enthusiasm for Cuba came from pro-slave Southerners, who saw the island as a stepping stone toward U. S. control of a “golden circle” of SLAVERY extending around the entire Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. All these views were summed up by a contributor to De Bow’s Review, who in 1850 declared, “[T]he possession of Cuba is indispensable. . . . Call it the lust of dominion, the relentlessness of democracy, the passion for land and gold, or the desire to render our interior impregnable by commanding the keys of the Gulf—the possession of Cuba is still an American sentiment.”
With U. S. victory in the Mexican-American War, expansionists insisted that the United States annex Cuba.
This political cartoon singles out James Buchanan, U. S. minister to Britain, for his role in the Ostend Manifesto controversy. (Library of Congress)
In 1848 President J ames K. Polk offered Spain $100 million for the island, earning an angry Spanish rejection. In 1849, 1850, and 1851, filibustering expeditions were organized to drive the Spanish from Cuba. Some senators criticized Southern “marauding” from U. S. shores, but Southerners such as Louisiana senator Pierre Soule defended the expeditions.
When President Franklin Pierce appointed Senator Soule his minister to Spain, Soule immediately set out to negotiate Cuba’s purchase on behalf of the United States. However, Soule’s blusters, threats, and blunt diplomacy angered Spanish government officials. In the wake of Soule’s failure, Pierce’s secretary of state, William Marcy, instructed James Buchanan, U. S. minister to Britain, and John Mason, U. S. minister to France, to discuss the matter with Soule. The three met in the Belgian city of Ostend in October 1854 and soon drafted a statement that they then sent home to the United States.
The ministers argued first that U. S. purchase of Cuba would prevent the island from failing into the hands of stronger European powers and more deadly potential enemies than Spain. In addition, they painted a bleak picture of a Cuba torn by slave revolts and creating an “Africanized” republic that would present a challenge to the United States. “We should. . . be unworthy of our gallant forefathers,” they wrote, “should we permit Cuba to. . . become a second St. Domingo [Haiti], with all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our own neighboring shores, seriously to endanger or actually to consume the fair fabric of our Union.” Outside U. S. control, Cuba represented an “unceasing danger, and a permanent cause of anxiety and alarm.”
Buchanan, Mason, and Soule depicted Cuban white people as desperate for liberation from the “extreme oppression” of Spain’s “corrupt, arbitrary, and unrelenting” colonial government. They also noted that Spain had proven too weak to halt the illegal importation of slaves from Africa. This, they claimed, was a job only the United States could accomplish. In seizing Cuba, the ministers argued, the United States would be advancing the cause of human rights.
Published throughout the United States and Europe, the Ostend message, called a “manifesto” by its detractors, failed to persuade Spain. The Spanish government, far from being intimidated into selling Cuba, opened discussions with potential European allies to defend Cuba against U. S. attack. At home, antislavery activists used the manifesto to justify the creation of the new Republican Party and defeat Southern efforts to extend its “slaveocracy” into Latin America.
With the Ostend Manifesto shaping up as a disaster for U. S. foreign relations and for the Democratic Party, Secretary of State William Marcy disavowed the entire statement, blamed Soule for the debacle, and forced his resignation as minister to Spain.
Though the United States made no further effort to acquire Cuba during the 1850s, the Democratic Party supported annexation of Cuba until the eve of the Civil War. In 1898 the United States went to war against Spain over Cuba. As a result of the Spanish-American War, Cuba won its independence; however, U. S. involvement in Cuban affairs continued well into the 20th century.
Further reading: David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
—Tom Laichas
World History
