American History Intertwined with Cuba

On this Presidents Day An article from the New York Times recalls Cuban History through the prism of Filibustering expeditions by the south and their effects upon President Abraham Lincoln In his pondering over the future of  America's  Peculiar Institution vis a vis Cuba.

Via Capitol Hill Cubans for full article

"Going back to the republic's dawn, American political leaders had believed that geographical proximity and shared interests would eventually pull that island colony of Spain into the federal union to its north. As early as 1805, President Thomas Jefferson pondered a military conquest of the island. Presidents James Madison and James Monroe also favored acquisition. Still later Presidents James Polk, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan attempted to purchase the island from Spain

In his reference to Cuba, Lincoln had touched on one of the great, if often downplayed, issues of that day. Most conversations about the future of American slavery focused on the interior of the West—realms already under American title, but in which the "peculiar institution" had not yet been introduced, nor its legal status determined. But at the same time, many Northerners and Southerners alike doubted whether slave-based agriculture could ever be established in the arid West.

By the late 1840s, as debates over slavery reached fever levels in the nation's political discourse, American acquisition of Cuba—because the island was a bastion of plantation slavery—had become widely identified with Southern partisans. As a consequence, the quest for Cuba lost much of its national appeal, even as it gained currency in the South.

In late 1848, in the wake of Polk's failed effort to purchase Cuba, many Southerner leaders turned toward a charismatic political exile from Cuba named Narciso López to realize that vision. López had fled Cuba in the summer of 1848 in the wake of a failed uprising against the colonial government.

On American soil, López soon committed himself to organizing a new conspiracy. He sought political and financial backers, and soldiers for a filibuster army. And he offered the command of his envisioned army to several prominent Southerners, including John Quitman, governor of Mississippi; Jefferson Davis, then a senator representing Mississippi; and Robert E. Lee, then an Army captain and widely admired for his service in the Mexican War. All declined.