The Africanization of Cuba Scare, 1853-1855

Bibliographic Data

ID2824378
AuthorsC Stanley Urban (corresponding author), Christoph Urban (corresponding author)
Year1957
Volume37
Issue1
Pages29
Publication date1957-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2510177
OpenAlexW4245276563
LanguageEN
Citations received11

ONE OF THE most fascinating of the many attempts by the United States, or its citizens, to detach Cuba from Spain prior to the Civil War occurred in 1854-55. Many factors in the international situation at that time combined to give unquestioned importance to the political destiny of Cuba. England and France prodded Spain to abolish slavery and substitute a free labor system in the island with the result that unusual political and social tensions were generated there. Characteristically, the United States was particularly sensitive to the internal unrest in Cuba. This condition was reflected in the cabinet of the pro-expansionist Franklin Pierce administration which decided to press Spain to sell Cuba to the United States notwithstanding deteriorating relations with that European power. The administration was further embarrassed by the fact that exiled Cubans in the United States cooperated with the efforts of John A. Quitman, Governor of Mississippi in 1850-51, to organize a filibustering expedition with the intent of preventing the emancipation of slaves in the island. Spanish authorities were familiar with the development of the enterprise, and the information they conveyed to the Pierce administration made it impossible for the latter to ignore the filibusters. In the background was the ever-increasing sectional furor over the Kansas-Nebraska affair which was to intensify northern opposition to the expansion of slavery. The threat of Africanization gave the crisis its peculiar character and intensity, both in Cuba and on the mainland of North America. Conservative planters understood Africanization to mean the adoption of any system of labor which had for its ultimate aim the extinction of slavery, and they so interpreted the labor decrees in the island in 1854. Predictable consequences, they declared, would be a marked decline of lroductivit., bitter racial warfare. and the extermintionI

Administration (probate law) · Ancient history · Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Emancipation · Expansionism · Interregnum · Opposition (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Unrest · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access