 In 1843, a series of slave uprisings took place in Cuba. Slave revolts were hardly unheard of in the Spanish colony, but they seemed to be getting worse. On March 26th, a slave uprising took place on one of the largest sugar plantations on the island, in which three white employees were killed and the plantation was ransacked. The revolt spread to a neighboring plantation and then to another, creating a wave of destruction by the revolting slaves. In Cuba, slaves were forced to work on the railroad, and the owners of the Cardenas Yukaro line – please forgive me if I'm mispronouncing anything, that is probably going to be common place in this in the next episode – the owners of that line worried that their slaves might join the revolt, so they took 200 of their slaves to Cardenas and locked them inside a wood building, which their slaves ended up escaping from and doing exactly what their owners were afraid of. They joined the rebellion. The Spanish authorities, aided by white citizens who feared the revolutionary violence of slaves, were able to drive the revolting slaves into the hills. 25 white people were killed in the uprising, but more than half of the nearly 1,000 slaves who participated in the revolt were killed, mostly by being hanged from trees in the woods. In the next few months, slave rebels continued to conduct guerrilla-style raids on various plantations to free slaves. Both the slave-owning and non-slave-honing Europeans were terrified of insurrection. The worst uprising of the year, or probably of any year in Cuba, occurred on November 5th. The slaves of one sugar estate rebelled and went to a neighboring estate where previous insurrectionists were still in shackles as punishment for their own rebellion. Six whites were killed, and several others were injured, and the uprising spread from plantation to plantation in the surrounding area. Finally, the small band of about 300 slaves were ambushed by Spanish troops, and after a battle that lasted several hours, the survivors fled. The European population in Cuba was now terrified of slave revolt, even more so than they had been before. They saw Spain as an increasingly weak European power, no longer able to effectively suppress rebellious slaves. And furthermore, people started to suspect that Britain was pressuring Spain to emancipate the slaves in the Spanish colonies, and a conspiracy theory started to circulate that a British consul named David Turnbull was encouraging slave mutiny. One Cuban slave won her freedom by testifying that the conspiracy was real. In 1844, the Military Commission of Mentanzis claimed to have uncovered a well-organized conspiracy to free the Cuban slaves driven by the British abolitionists. Turnbull was implicated in the conspiracy, and although he was an abolitionist, it is by no means clear that he was part of any actual conspiracy to generate slave rebellion or even that such a conspiracy actually existed. However, while historians debate the issue, and this is something I have not read heavily into so don't put too much weight into my explanation, there is at least some evidence that Turnbull had promised to provide rebel slaves with arms and ammunition. But whether the conspiracy is true or not isn't important for our purposes in studying the sexual crisis in the United States in the 1850s, what is important is that in the wake of the conspiracy, which became known as la escalera conspiracy, and increasing number of Cuba's wealthy plantation owners and other Europeans and Creoles started to support US annexation of Cuba, the United States, they believed, was less likely to emancipate slaves than Spain. The belief that Spain was under British pressure to free its slaves and was preparing to do so was unfounded, but the belief was real, and the US was also more capable of suppressing slave revolt. At least this is what Cuban slave owners believed. In the United States, many Southerners also supported the annexation of Cuba, including President Polk, who authorized his minister to Spain to offer $100 million for the island. Though this offer was rejected, and Spain's foreign minister responded that Spain would rather see Cuba sunk into the ocean than to sell it to the US. But the hopes of the US acquiring Cuba survived, and would continue to survive until the Spanish American War of course. But in 1848, a man named Narciso Lopez arrived in the United States with the hopes of finding volunteers to help him liberate Cuba from Spain. Lopez almost certainly could not have cared less about US annexation of the island, but the hopes of Cuban annexation motivated US citizens to support him. Many volunteers simply wanted adventure and glory. Further support was driven by expansionist desires, including John O'Sullivan, the man who coined the term Manifest Destiny, and had been urging Polk to acquire Cuba. But among Southerners, much of his support came from the desire to create a new slave territory that, in the case of Cuba, was large enough to possibly result in the introduction of not one, but two or more new slave states. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. We've pretty much covered the sectional crisis up to the beginnings of John Brown's plan to raid Harper's Ferry. But before we get to that fascinating bit of history, I want to back up a bit and cover some aspects of this history that are often overlooked. And that's the filibustering episodes that took place in the 1850s and were supported, in part, by Southerners hoping to achieve an expansion of slavery in the Caribbean, Mexico and Latin America. Now, first, it's worth briefly defining a filibuster in the 19th century since. These were private military expeditions into other countries or territories. After 1818, such expeditions were a violation of the neutrality law. But the enforcement of this law was weak at best. Most importantly, filibustering was not an activity driven by any kind of pro or anti-slavery north or south beliefs. There were some filibusters such as Texas expeditions into Mexico that were conducted in attempts to reclaim fugitive slaves. But for the most part, the various filibusters were motivated by expansionist desires and the simple search for adventure. The filibusters of the 1850s then are a tough topic to tackle because they don't really fit cleanly into the antebellum history. Historian David Potter once warned against treating the entire antebellum period as a prelude to the Civil War, which is fair. But on the other hand, it's hard to separate any U.S. event of the 1850s from the sectional crisis. So many historians have omitted the filibusters of the 1850s altogether. The only broad history of the antebellum in Civil War years that I know of that has included the filibusters is James McPherson's The Battlecry of Freedom, which devotes a few pages to it. But McPherson's overview, though accurate, is a bit of an oversimplification. And you almost get the impression that the filibusters were motivated by pro-slavery zealots. This was not the case, and I want to be clear on that so there isn't any confusion. The two filibusters I'm going to talk about over the next few episodes are the expeditions led by Narciso Lopez and William Walker. Neither of these guys were overly concerned with slavery one way or the other. But when they were seeking support for their campaigns, pro-slavery Southerners saw these expeditions as possible opportunities to expand slavery for southern political gain. And this is what makes them worth including in this series. By the end of the decade, a southern group called the Knights of the Golden Circle would form that had explicitly pro-slavery expansionist filibustering goals. But they would end up acting more as advocates for secession and serving as something of a paramilitary group during the Civil War. But the filibustering activities of Lopez and Walker seem to have paved the way to their formation. So with this very brief introduction, the next two episodes are going to be devoted to Cuba. Narciso Lopez was born in Venezuelan in 1797. In 1813, Simon Bolivar led the independence movement and the ensuing war brought about the destruction of the Lopez family plantation. So Narciso's father moved the family to Caracas not long before Bolivar faced defeat during the Battle of La Puerta. In 1814, Narciso and his father were in the town of Valencia conducting business when word came of Bolivar's defeat during the Battle of La Puerta. Valencia was a rebel stronghold and Bolivar's messengers were pleading for the town to defend itself from the coming royal troops. They promised that Bolivar would bring reinforcements so the town shouldn't surrender. But Bolivar actually fled to Nugrenada. And when the town resisted the invasion, thanking Bolivar was going to come and help them, Narciso Lopez's father was killed along with 86 other people massacred at the hands of the Spanish troops. Valencia fell to the Spanish army. But during the resistance, the 15 year old Narciso picked up a rifle. Somebody had dropped and rallied the resistance, essentially taking unofficial lead in the doomed struggle. He was nearly killed himself, but he was able to escape. He hid out in the town for a while. But he decided that the only way to stay safe was to actually enlist in the army if you can't beat him, join him, kind of thinking, I guess. So the young Narciso didn't really care about Spain, but he didn't really care about Bolivar after the betrayal at Valencia either. If we fast forward to the year 1823, Bolivar had returned to Venezuela and he and his men defeated the royalists there. At this time, Lopez was a colonel in the Spanish army. But with Bolivar's victory, he and the men under his command left for Cuba. In Cuba, still in 1823, he married a woman whose brother was a wealthy Creole planner who had been educated in the United States and agitated for liberal reform as a member of the club de la Habana. Lopez joined the reform movement and resigned his post in the Spanish army. A few years later, he and his wife moved to Spain where they lived for six years. But after King Ferdinand's death and insurrection evolved into a civil war, Lopez joined the fight, commanding a 3,000-man cavalry unit and he earned himself a general ship in the Spanish military by the end of the war. But this and other personal failures caused him marital problems and he and his wife separated by 1836. They didn't technically divorce because they were Roman Catholics, so they just separated. So by 1840, Lopez returned to Cuba. In Cuba, he enjoyed various government positions until in 1843, Lopez's friends in high places, his former military commander, who gave him his cozy government jobs, fell out of power and Lopez was given the boot along with them. So he tried a handful of business ventures and he wasn't successful at any of them. So frustrated with his personal failures as a businessman, Lopez started to resent the Spanish governance of Cuba and he started to think about revolution. He started to hatch a conspiracy. Lopez bought an abandoned iron mine near Cienfuegos. He made friends with the horsemen there in the hopes of turning them into a Cuban cavalry since he had experience as a cavalry commander. He traveled frequently, searching for peasants. He might be able to convert into revolutionary fighters. Most importantly, in 1848, he met a novelist named Cirillo Villarete and with him were many members of Club de la Habana. Lopez had heard rumors of a plan concocted by the club to recruit a general from the US Army to lead an invasion of Cuba. And the members of the club confirmed the rumors to Lopez, recognizing him as an ally. The next day, the club members introduced Lopez to the US consul, who told Lopez the US couldn't assist in the revolt because President Polk was committed to neutrality. But the club convinced Lopez to delay his planned revolt for two weeks until they heard back from William Jenkins Worth. The US general they were hoping would lead the invasion. The club had sent an agent offer worth three million dollars to recruit an army of five thousand men for the invasion. The results of Lopez's meeting with the club was to compromise rather than help his revolt. The US consul sent word to Polk Secretary of State James Buchanan about the planned revolt. And around the same time, John O'Sullivan, Americans leading champion of territorial expansion, was urging the president to support such an invasion. But Polk was determined to acquire Cuba through peaceful negotiations. Polk figured he could use the information about the planned revolt as leverage to convince Spain to sell Cuba. He sent letters informing of the revolt to Spain and the leaders of the country were grateful. But Polk's man in Madrid, Romulus Saunders, spoke no Spanish. And this was the man in charge of the negotiations. Through a translator, Saunders hinted that if Spain didn't sell the US Cuba that if a revolt were to occur, the US might not be able to stay neutral. In other words, he made a veiled threat of war, completely screwing up the negotiations and angering Spanish officials. But Polk's letter was already in Spanish hands and the letter from Washington was followed up by another leak brought about by the mother of one of the conspirators named Jose Isnaga, who was worried about her son's safety after he told her about the plan. So she told her husband and her husband told his attorney and his attorney advised him to tell the Spanish government. So with this information, one conspirator was arrested and Narciso Lopez, as the leader of the conspiracy, was ordered to appear before the Cienfuegos governor. Instead, Lopez fled to the US. Since he didn't show up for his trial, he was tried in absentia and the Spanish officials sentenced him to death. This seemed like a meaningless sentence for a man they did not have in custody. But many years later, as we will see at the end of the next episode, this sentence would catch up with Lopez in a very unexpected way. In the United States, Lopez started recruiting from Cuba. The club de la Habana was still working to overthrow Spanish rule in Cuba. And they sent a man named Ambrosio Gonzalez to the United States to continue trying to recruit General Wirth, who had backed out of their previous plan under the orders of President Paul. So Gonzalez went to New Orleans. He actually had to travel as a stowaway because he couldn't get a passport. So Lopez was working from New York and Gonzalez was traveling from New Orleans. But the two met each other in Washington, D.C. After Wirth turned down Gonzalez's offer, the club turned to Lopez promising to fund his expedition to the tune of $60,000. And Gonzalez became Lopez's adjudant general and translator since Lopez didn't speak English himself. While in D.C., the pair started talking to southern politicians. John C. Calhoun, who years earlier had opposed annexation of the Yucatan, a Mexican state, was more interested in Cuba. And when talking to Gonzalez, the senator said of Cuba, quote, two or more southern states could be carved out of it and added, you have my best wishes. But whatever the results as the pair when ripe falls by the law of gravity into the lap of the husband, Vin, so will Cuba eventually drop into the lap of the union. The south ought to flock down there in open boats. The moment they hear the toxin, end quote, a toxin, since that word isn't very common anymore, was a signaling bell spelled T-O-C-S-I-N if you're not familiar with that word. But Calhoun was speaking metaphorically, of course. The pair also met privately with Jefferson Davis, where they offered him $100,000 to lead the invasion of Cuba. Davis had Cuban friends he had met during the Mexican-American war, and they encouraged President Polk to support Lopez. But Davis declined the invitation to lead the expedition, saying, quote, the only man I could indicate to you just now is one in whom I have implicit confidence, Robert E. Lee, end quote. Like Davis, Lee was intrigued by the offer, but he believed that his duty to the United States precluded him from accepting. So he politely declined and wished the pair well. The southern political and military leaders were interested in Cuba, and they would have liked to see the filibusters succeed so the U.S. could annex the island, but the men in positions of power were unwilling to brazenly defy the U.S. neutrality law of 1818, essentially. So the pair went back to New York, where they made one important ally, John O. Sullivan, the leading propagandist for manifest destiny. O'Sullivan was a Democrat who had thrown his lot in with the barn burners, which, if you remember from a previous episode, was the free soil wing of the Democrat Party. But he was an expansionist above all else. And his justification for annexing Cuba was that he didn't technically count it as an expansion of slavery because slavery already existed on the island. Lopez was entirely unaware that O'Sullivan had been involved in revealing the previous conspiracy to the president, helping to foil a plan by giving the information to Spain. Although Sullivan in his corner, Lopez now had an outlet to advertise his campaign to help find recruits, which kind of put him in an odd situation because he was a secret and illegal conspirator. But it depended on public advertisement to gain funds and volunteers. So the secret conspiracy became not so secret. And the advertising helped bring Lopez recruits. According to one newspaper report of a pro Lopez rally, his supporters were made up, quote, chiefly of the hardfisted working class, fired with a contagious enthusiasm that seems spreading all over the land, end quote. So at this point, it is worth noting, even though Lopez had some well wishers among the southern politicians who had an interest in seeing additional slave states, the Lopez expedition was quite clearly not motivated by anything related to slavery or the sectional crisis. In fact, historian Tom Chaffin in his book on Lopez remarks about how remarkable it was that Lopez was able to create a group that consisted of both northerners and southerners and avoided the sectional divide altogether. But this was still prior to the compromise of 1850. So Chaffin may be overstating how remarkable this feat was. More importantly for the moment was that O'Sullivan's advertisement of the conspiracy while helping to bring in support and volunteers also made it impossible for the new president, Zachary Taylor, to ignore. Polk did not support the filibuster, preferring to seek Cuban annexation through diplomacy with Spain, but he was an expansionist Democrat who was not overly concerned with enforcement of the neutrality law. Taylor, a wig, was more willing to take action. Shortly prior to Lopez's first attempted evading Cuba, the filibusters became bedfellows with the southern nationalists. Lopez had decided that northerners were too timid and slow to act, so he went to New Orleans to find better recruits among the quote, bold west and chivalric south. There they met General John Henderson, who Lopez and Gonzalez had previously met in Washington, and Henderson introduced them to John Quipman. Quipman was a leading Mississippi secessionist. He advocated Mississippi secession a decade before the state would actually do so. Quipman renewed Lopez's hopes of finding a U.S. military leader to command his forces in the Cuban invasion. He led a regiment to Texas to help the Republic gain independence from Mexico in 1836, winning him the adoration of both Texas and Mississippi. When Lopez and Gonzalez met with him, he was a few months into his second term as governor of Mississippi. His first term as governor taking place just prior to his entering the Texas War for Independence, so they weren't consecutive terms. Meeting with him in the governor's mansion in Jackson, Lopez offered Quipman one million dollars to lead his troops. Lopez didn't actually have a million dollars, but the sum was to be paid in Cuban land holdings following the successful conquest. So Quipman seemed to very seriously consider the offer. In a private letter he wrote after the meeting, he seemed to express a desire to have taken Lopez up on the offer. But he had a duty to Mississippi, so he declined and offered instead to lead a second assault if Lopez's initial invasion showed success. In the meantime, he agreed to raise money for Lopez's cause. Now, all this is worth mentioning to illustrate a few things about the sectional dispute in slavery. Lopez was quietly supported by several southern political leaders because there was a political interest in expanding slavery. The two new slave states Calhoun envisioned would mean four additional pro-slavery senators, as well as a number of new pro-slavery representatives in the House that the South had the most trouble gaining control of. So slavery was distinctly a political issue. But Southerners, even southern slave owners, did not uniformly agree that Cuban annexation was a good thing. Many southern planters opposed the acquisition of Cuba. Extending slavery in the west was far more agreeable to southern planters as a whole than adding Cuba for various reasons. One was that Cuba actually represented competition for predominantly Louisiana planners and Texas planners to a lesser degree. Cuba was a sugar producing island. Most of the south focused on King Cotton, of course, but the upper south was better suited for tobacco. But Louisiana predominantly grew sugar. Cuba was more suited for sugar than Louisiana, though. And in a small bit of irony and something that is often not mentioned, Louisiana planners actually benefited from the economic protection of the sugar tariff. Sugar tariffs and in modern times, import quotas, have the longest history of agricultural protectionism in our country. People like to point out the tariff opposition in the south, and it is certainly true that northern politicians supported higher tariffs than the south. The distinction made is between protectionist tariffs and revenue raising tariffs. But this is purely a rhetorical distinction. There was never any clear definition as to what made a tariff one kind or the other. And economically, there is no difference, of course. The Louisiana planners enjoyed the economic protection of the sugar tariff. Cuban planters enjoyed soil that could produce about twice the sugar per acre and acquiring Cuba would threaten the protection of Louisiana planters. So for the most part, Louisiana did not agitate much over the tariff, never fighting to lower the sugar tariff, and only advocating an increase in the sugar tariff following the recession of 1857, which was still in the future at this point. But it's clear that Louisiana planters recognize the tariff as a protectionist measure that they benefited from. One planter, Alexander Porter, said, quote, the duty on sugar is a question of life and death with us in Louisiana. But other southerners saw no problem with sugar competition. In South Carolina, where rice planting was common, a planter named R. F. W. Alston complained of the tariff saying that, quote, the present tariff, being the one from 1842, operates very unfavorably to us by levying high duties on such articles as would best suit for shipment to the state in lieu of remittances. For example, the rice shipped to Cuba would partly be paid for by the return cargos of sugar, but for the almost prohibitory duty on sugar, end quote. So the tariff on sugar was a matter of dispute in the South as most southerners opposed it as they did any protective tariff, but the Louisiana planters, and to a lesser degree the Texas planters, enjoyed it enough to make them softer on the Cuba question as a whole. But other southerners worried that the acquisition of Cuba would actually hurt the institution of slavery, because upper South slave states would flock to Cuba, rendering places like Virginia and Maryland free states. So the slave question was at the forefront of a lot of Southern minds when thinking about Cuba and the filibusters, but they didn't necessarily agree as to how Cuba's annexation would affect the institution of slavery. These factors end up having little effect on the filibusters themselves, other than hampering Lopez's ability to recruit in the South, but they are instructive in helping us to understand the sectional controversy that was taking place in the country. And they make it easy to recognize why some historians ignore the filibuster role in the sectional controversy, while other historians seem to overstate it. Southern slave interests were simply divided on the matter. But when Lopez and his crew went to New Orleans, they found a city full of expansionists, with a tradition of filibustering in places like Mexico in previous years. So Lopez did enjoy more eager support in the South than he'd found in the North. His support was stronger among the city's merchants, though, than it was among the planters. The merchants stood to gain more from free trade with Cuba as a potential export market than the sugar planters who enjoyed the economic protectionism. In the city, Lopez found two Mexican war veterans, Colonel Chatham Roberto Wheat and Colonel W.J. Bunch to help recruit volunteers for his filibuster army. General John Henderson also paid $16,000 for a ship named the Creole to transport the men from New Orleans to Cuba. Lopez also got a hold of two other ships, the Georgiana and the Susan Loud. The editor of a paper called The Delta, used contacts he had in the Democrat party to obtain a stock of arms and ammunition from the Louisiana State Arsenal to help equip the filibusters. Lopez also found plenty of people willing to purchase bonds he was issuing, which would prove profitable in the event that Cuba was successfully conquered. Lopez had been issuing bonds for a while, but it was in New Orleans that he finally found a lively market for them. His bonds were pledged against public lands and property in Cuba, so his plan was to redeem them and lands taken from the government, but not private planters whose support he expected to have once his invasion was underway. From bond sales, Lopez raised somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000, nearly half of which came from John Henderson alone, who was turning out to be Lopez's greatest American supporter. But all the publicity in New Orleans worked against Lopez at least as much as it helped him. Spain had an extensive espionage network in the United States, and New Orleans had a sizable Hispanic population, so Spanish spies relayed information back to the Spanish consul in the city, who kept the Spanish government informed of Lopez's activities. In response, Spain funded some U.S. newspapers that published anti-Philibuster pieces to counter the pro-Philibuster newspaper articles and advertisements that helped Lopez recruit. More importantly, they also sent thousands of new troops to Cuba to help stop the coming invasion. Finally, at 9 p.m. on April 25th, 1850, Lopez, Gonzales, and Henderson, along with their volunteers, started to load into the three ships. The tickets that were provided to the recruits to board the ships claimed that the destination was Chagras, a stopover in Panama that travelers to California passed through during the gold rush. But of course, this was simply misdirection as the real destination was the southern Mexican state of Yucatán in the peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico, and the fake tickets were meant to throw off U.S. federal troops who might attempt to enforce the neutrality act as well as possible Spanish forces. Some of the recruits, though they knew what the expedition was really about, thought that Chagras was the genuine destination, and they only signed up to get a free ride to Chagras so they could travel to California more cheaply. Between these and a handful of other recruits who got cold feet, the filibusters lost about 42 men to desertion and 21 more to illness. So when they left Yucatán for Cuba, Lopez had roughly 500 men, all of whom loaded onto the Creole now to head to Cuba. They departed on May 17th. The crew approached Cardenas Cuba at about 10 o'clock at night on May 18th, and they distributed weapons to the men under the light of a full moon, which one soldier noted was so bright you could almost read by it. Privates were issued muskets while the officers were given a saber and a Jennings rifle, one of the early repeating rifles that wasn't very successful commercially but was a very new piece of technology at this point. Two-thirds of the men were also given bowy knives and revolvers. At 2.30 a.m., the Creole grounded on a sandbar about 20 yards from the Cardenas Pier. For the next 30 minutes, the men struggled to move the steamer until finally the first mate named Colander Faisu, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, grabbed a rope, dived into the base, swam to the dock and tied up the ship. The men disembarked. One regiment followed the railroad tracks into the city planning to take possession of the locomotives. The rest of the men moved toward the city's garrison which contained about 400 Spanish army regulars. The leader of this group, Theodore O'Hara, took captives on the way into the city and demanded they give directions to the garrison, but the captives were too terrified to speak. Lopez, leading another regiment, caught up with them and led the way instead. As the filibusters approached to the garrison on the north side of the city, a sentinel spotted them and yelled out for them to stop asking who they were. O'Hara answered, friends and Lopez. Then fighting broke out. In the gunfire, O'Hara took a bullet and was left lying out in the street bleeding while one group of the filibusters hung back to protect him. The rest of them, now taking orders from Major John Hawkins, ran toward the garrison as they faced a hell of bullets from the Spanish troops firing through three iron barred windows set into the stone walls. But the filibusters had superior numbers in this battle and the Spanish soldiers retreated to the house of the Lieutenant Governor on the other side of the city plaza. The filibuster army took the plaza and then stormed the governor's residence. While some of the remaining troops continued to fire on the filibusters, Lopez charged in amidst the hell of bullets in an attempt to speak to the Spaniards inside the garrison. The fighting continued for three hours. Finally at dawn, the filibusters successfully broke down the garrison's door. When Lopez's men rushed in, the Spanish soldiers threw down their weapons and surrendered. On the other side of the plaza, the Lieutenant Governor was taken prisoner, but the men inside his house continued to fire, so Lopez set fire to the building. While the building went up in flames, the roof collapsed on the second story, but the soldiers inside continued to fire their weapons from one corner of the house that wasn't burning. They killed several more of Lopez's men until 15 filibusters broke in through the rear entrance of the home and started to bayonet the soldiers inside, killing several of them until the rest finally waved a white flag at around 8 a.m. The fire didn't destroy the entire two-story house, and after the battle, Lopez and his men raised their flag over the building to mark their victory. They had more than 40 prisoners, including the Lieutenant Governor and three other high-ranking officials. Lopez's men estimated that they had six to eight men killed and 12 to 15 wounded, with the wounded including Gonzales, O'Hara, and Wheat. Lopez established his headquarters inside the captured garrison, and he appealed to the prisoner soldiers hoping to get them to join his cause in liberating Cuba. Part of Lopez's plan rested on the idea that Cuban citizens would join his rebellion once they saw the revolution was underway. After John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, people compared him to the filibusters, and there are certainly some parallels here, as Brown was expecting slaves to rise up and join his raid, and Lopez expected Cuban citizens to join his invasion. Both men would be disappointed. Lopez ordered his men not to loot the town, which they mostly obeyed except to take food and alcohol. The men got drunk. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Pickett's regiment succeeded in taking the train station outside of Cardenas, which they hoped would prevent word of the invasion from leaking out to the rest of the island, as there was no telegraph line in Cuba yet. The city seemed to have been secured. What they didn't realize was that before the invasion even began, watchmen on the city's dock saw the Creole approach and immediately notified the Lieutenant Governor. This gave him time to relay orders to the neighboring city to alert the Spanish officials. So by 10 a.m. on May 19th, Spanish officials in Matanzas were already fully informed of the invasion of Cardenas. So while Lopez and his men were drinking and sleeping in a city they thought was secured, Spanish forces were assembling to retaliate. Lopez learned that the Spaniards were getting ready to attack, so at 2 p.m. he ordered his men to start boarding their ship, hoping they could get out of the city before the counter attack and sail instead to the village of Mantua. Lopez, keep in mind, was very familiar with the area from his years living in Cuba. He believed that Mantua was full of people who would join his revolt while the Spanish reinforcements were wasting their time in the abandoned Cardenas. But even before this happened, about 200 Spanish infantrymen and 100 Lancers arrived at Cardenas and were simply camped right outside the city, which the filibusters were completely unaware of. While most of the filibusters were loading into the ship, about 175 filibusters remained in the city when the 100 Spanish Lancers attacked, riding into the city on their horses. Now this was a transition period in military tactics which would later come into play in the American Civil War as well, because rifles were very effective against cavalry because of their superior range. So as the Lancers rode in their horses were shot out from under them and they were driven back. All in all, another 8 or 10 filibusters were killed and maybe 20 or so were wounded. According to Richardson Hardy's description of the skirmish, quote, 70 or 80 of the Spanish lay killed and wounded, their maddened horses dragging and trampling them to death, end quote. At 9 p.m. this regiment became the last to board the Creole and they loaded up while being fired on by more Spanish troops stationed on the pier. The filibusters kept their prisoners with them so the ship was cramped while the exhausted men tried to rest. But with extra weight on the ship they ran aground in the shallow waters outside of Cardenas. Now the filibusters were sitting ducks on a crowded ship that wouldn't move. So they started throwing everything they could off the ship, hoping to set it loose. Eventually this meant tossing their weapons and ammunition as well, but the ship remained stuck. Finally about a hundred of the men evacuated in small boats and paddled to a small island a quarter mile away and with the rising tide the Creole was finally free. Out of the shallow waters the men who evacuated were picked up and the prisoners were released on the island instead. Lopez gave the prisoners a few silver dollars each as he let them go basically demonstrating to them that he was supposed to be their liberator not their conqueror. Lopez still wanted to go to Mantua which was quite a bit west of Cardenas. But mob rule had taken over on the ship and the men argued over where the second landing should be. Finally it was decided that they didn't have enough coal to get them very far and they decided to sell for Key West. About 30 miles off the coast of Florida though Lopez spotted through his spyglass a Spanish man of war named the Pizarro. This ship had been searching for the filibusters in the Gulf of Mexico for weeks and the ship appeared to be moving in the wrong direction so they didn't seem to be aware of the Creole's presence. This changed when the two ships were within four or five miles of each other and the Pizarro quickly turned around and started chasing the Creole. The filibusters began shoveling what coal they had left into the furnace to try to outrun the Spanish ship. When the Creole was eight or ten miles off the coast of Florida the Pizarro had caught up to within about two miles of them. The filibusters could see Key West's lighthouse in the distance and they continued shoveling coal into the furnace to reach Florida before the Spaniards caught them. They ran out of coal and started throwing in any substitutes they could think of like clothing and raw bacon trying to keep moving and at 1 p.m. on May 21st islanders on a small archipelago just off the coast of Florida spotted the Creole racing toward them. The ship ran into the port and the islanders welcomed them and cheering their arrival. Firmly on U.S. soil the captain of the Pizarro was unwilling to fire his ship's cannons even though by the time the Creole docked the Spanish ship was only a quarter mile behind them. Lopez's men disembarked, they were exhausted, they were sunburnt, but they trudged along the island's coast to the U.S. Army barracks a half mile away as they walked the Pizarro sat threateningly off shore. The filibusters disbanded and the army took possession of the Creole. The Pizarro hovered off the coast of the island for two more days before finally taking off. Lopez and many other filibusters were suspicious that the Spanish ship was only feigning their departure hoping to capture the filibusters when they were back in international waters. Even though Lopez believed this was the case he couldn't stay on the island forever so he boarded a U.S. mail ship called the Isabel that was headed for Charleston South Carolina. Several others including Gonzales stayed in Key West to recover but they eventually made their way out of Florida narrowly escaping capture. Their relief was even more profound after they got hold of newspapers reporting of the execution by firing squad of five of their men they had mistakenly left behind in Cuba. Lopez's initial attempt at liberating Cuba had been a failure but after narrowly escaping capture he was determined to try again. The final attempt at liberating Cuba from Spanish rule will be the topic of the next episode. For more content like this visit mesis.org