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ADDITIONAL VIEWS PRESENTED BY MR. MORGAN AND MR. MILLS IN SUPPORT OF THE REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.

The report of the committee has the unqualified approval of the undersigned members of that body, but they conceive that it is well to present therewith the former action of the Committee on Foreign Relations, in 1859, on the same subject and on some of the same points that are discussed in the present report.

On January 24, 1859, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations had under consideration a Senate bill "making appropriations to facilitate the acquisition of the island of Cuba by negotiation," and made a report, which is hereto appended and designated as Appendix No. 1.

That report covers a period of fifty-nine years, and sets forth the political conditions then existing in Cuba, and the disastrous effects of Spanish rule in Cuba, during that time. They were the same, in their leading characteristics, that existed at the beginning of the insurrection that was set on foot by the native population in 1868, in the outbreak at Yara, which was followed by ten years of internecine warfare attended with horrible butcheries.

The causes that provoked tuat uprising of the native Cubans were the same that are stated in the report of the committee, made ten years previously, in 1859. They are summed up in the following general statement of that committee:

There can be no doubt that an immense majority of the people of Cuba are not only in favor but ardently desirous of annexation to the United States.

It would be strange, indeed, if they were not so. Deprived of all influence even in the local affairs of the island; unrepresented in the Cortes; governed by successive hordes of hungry officials sent from the mother country to acquire fortunes to be enjoyed at home, having no sympathy with the people among whom they are mere sojourners and upon whom they look as inferiors; liable to be arrested at any moment on the most trifling charges; tried by military courts or submissive judges, removable at pleasure, punished at the discretion of the captain-general, they would be less than men if they were contented with their yoke.

The "mother country," as it is styled by the committee, is thus described in their report:

Spain is a country of coups d'état and pronunciomentos. The all-powerful minister of to-day may be a fugitive to-morrow. With the forms of a representative government, it is in fact a despotism sustained by the bayonet-a despotism tempered only by frequent, violent, and bloody revolutions. Her financial condition is one of extreme embarrassment.

Spain is not the "mother country of Cuba" even in the sense of having supplied that island with a large part of the ancestors of her present population. She is a cruel stepmother, whose introduction. into the Cuban family has been the immediate cause of the robbery of the stepchildren of their inheritance and their cruel persecution to keep down revolt.

The committee were engaged, in 1859, in providing for the purchase of Cuba by negotiations with Spain, and were as gentle in their description of Spanish rule in Cuba as a decent respect for the world's knowledge of the truth of the actual situation of the people there would S. Doc. 231, pt 7-5

permit. It is dark enough without the illumination of the fires of devastation these succeeding years have witnessed in Cuba.

Among the great debates in Congress upon that report of the Committee on Foreign Relations, the part of a speech that relates to Cuba and the report of the committee above referred to, made by Hon. Judah P. Benjamin, in the Senate, on February 11, 1859, is appended hereto, marked appendix No. 2. Mr. Benjamin gives an accurate and much more complete statement of the condition of the people of Cuba and the methods of Spanish government in that island than is stated in the report of the committee.

The relations of Spain and the United States were not then strained by the disturbances of actual insurrection in Cuba, as they were afterwards, from 1868 to 1878, and have been almost ever since, and are now, by the excessive and inhuman abuses of power in Cuba, to which no limit can be now anticipated, either as to the time when they will end or the increased cruelty that is now a settled feature of the present Spanish war of extermination.

The President recognizes the fact that the present war is for independence on the part of the Cubans and not for the gratification of personal ambition, or alone for the redress of personal or political grievances with which the painful history of their sufferings is crowded. For the sake of liberty and the independence of their country they are willing to forget the recompense that is due them for their individual sufferings.

Hon. T. Estrada Palma was duly accredited as diplomatic delegate plenipotentiary to the United States, under an appointment by the Constituent Assembly of the Republic of Cuba. He appears to have been received informally for the purpose of presenting the case of Cuba to our Government. On the 7th December, 1895, he addressed a note to the Secretary of State, accompanied by a statement of facts, in which the case of Cuba is set forth officially. That document has been printed by the order of the Senate, and is appended hereto and numbered 3.

In the papers that accompanied this note the delegate stated the causes of the revolution in Cuba; that it had reached that stage in which the issue between the contending parties "is independence or extermination."

The recent message of the President is clear on the point that he has been forced to the same conclusion.

The delegate then stated the facts, showing the preliminary organization of the revolt; the uprising; the growth of the revolution; the battles and campaigns that had already been fought, including the great and victorious campaign of Gomez against Capt. Gen. Martinez Campos, which caused him to be recalled to Spain and supplanted by Captain-General Weyler; the military organization of the Cubans; their civil government; their treatment of prisoners; that the government he represented is not a negro government; the character of the war; the protests of resident citizens of the United States in Cuba against their cruel treatment by the Spanish forces; that their lives and property are placed under the special protection of the Cuban government, and that they are exempt from taxes and contributions by the constitution of the Republic of Cuba, when that government is recognized by their respective governments.

The letter of the Cuban delegate thus addressed to our Secretary of State has appended to it several papers which set forth fully the grievances complained of by the Cuban people. In its nature it is a declaration of the independence of Cuba, stating the grounds of their

united action. That declaration is in keeping with the historical narrative given by Mr. Benjamine in his speech, herewith presented, and with the report of the Committee of Foreign Relations in 1859, and with the messages of President Grant and President Hayes, and the letters of Mr. Sickles and Dr. Cushing, as ministers to Spain, and of Mr. Fish and Mr. Evarts, as Secretaries of State.

All these papers are uniform in their statements of the wrongs and grievances of the Cuban people, and of the wrongful and tyrannical course of Spain toward them. In none of them is any fact or reason stated to excuse or paliate the cruelties that Spain has inflicted upon her subjects in Cuba. In none of them is any bad purpose imputed to the Cuban people.

No one has contradicted those statements, or any material part of them, on the authority of the Spanish Government or before any official or other credible authority.

The tenor of the message of the President to this session of Congress is a reaffirmation of all this history, stated in all these papers. In the part of his message relating to Cuba he has laid them before Congress without any special recommendation, and has left to Congress the duty of making provision for the security of the rights, the property, and the lives of our citizens residing in Cuba, and of enforcing the right of indemnity on behalf of the legal successors of those who have been killed there. He has intimated that delay is the wisest policy, but he has refrained from saying that delay is required by our national honor, by the safety of our people in Cuba or by the interests of humanity.

A comparison of this message, which is appended hereto and marked Appendix 4, will show that it agrees with the statements of every President who has attended to the subject, and it further shows that the same spirit of tyrannical domination now prevails in Cuba that has kept the people of that island in despairing servitude during this entire century.

The message of Mr. Cleveland, who has no aversion to Spanish rule in Cuba, confirms, in all important statements, the truth of the charges made by Mr. Estrada Palma against Spain in the exposition of the case of Cuba which he presented to our Secretary of State.

The only difference in the situation in Cuba, as it is described in the report of the Senate Committee on Foregn Relations in 1859 and as it is described in the President's message in 1896, thirty-seven years later, is that as time has progressed the wrongs of Cuba have been aggravated and the means of repression employed by Spain have grown into a war against humanity—a war of annihilation of property and the extermination of the native population.

If the firm purpose of our predecessors to put an end to this condition of affairs in Cuba in the comparatively mild form of tyranny that existed fifty years ago has degenerated into doubts and misgivings as to our duty to our own people and the demands of Christian civilization, let the responsibility for this lapse from the true spirit of American liberty and our love of home rule and independence rest where it justly belongs, and not upon the people through the indifference to their will on the part of their Representatives in Congress.

Concurring in all that is said in the general report of the committee, the additional facts herein stated are presented as additional reasons for agreeing to that report, and for the passage of the resolution of the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Cameron), which the committee recommends.

JOHN T. MORGAN.
B. Q. MILLS.

APPENDIX No. I.

Senate Report No. 351, Thirty-fifth Congress, second session.
JANUARY 24, 1859.

Mr. Slidell made the following report, to accompany bill S. 497: The Committee on Foreign Relations, to whom was referred the bill (S. 497) making appropriations to facilitate the acquisition of the Island of Cuba by negotiation, have had the same under consideration, and now respectfully report:

It is not considered necessary by your committee to enlarge upon the vast importance of the acquisition of the Island of Cuba by the United States. To do so would be as much a work of supererogation as to demonstrate an elementary problem in mathematics, or one of those axioms of ethics or philosophy which have been universally received for ages. The ultimate acquisition of Cuba may be considered a fixed purpose of the United States, a purpose resulting from political and geographical necessities which have been recognized by all parties and all Administrations, and in regard to which the popular voice has been expressed with a unanimity unsurpassed on any question of national policy that has heretofore engaged the public mind.

The purchase and annexation of Louisiana led, as a necessary corollary, to that of Florida, and both point with unerring certainty to the acquisition of Cuba. The sparse and feeble population of what is now the great West called in 1800 for the free navigation of the Mississippi and the enforcement of the right of deposit at New Orleans. In three years not only were these privileges secured, but the whole of the magnificent domain of Louisiana was ours. Who now doubts the wisdom of a measure which at the time was denounced with a violence until then unparalleled in our political history?

From the day we acquired Louisiana the attention of our ablest statesmen was fixed on Cuba. What the possession of the mouth of the Mississippi had been to the people of the West that of Cuba became to the nation. To cast the eye upon the map was sufficient to predict its destiny. A brief reference will show the importance attached to the question by our leading statesmen and the steadiness and perseverance with which they have endeavored to hasten the consummation of so vital a measure.

Mr. Jefferson, in a letter to President Madison, of the 27th of April, 1809, speaking of the policy that Napoleon would probably pursue toward us, says:

He ought to be satisfied with having forced her (Great Britain) to revoke the orders on which he pretended to retaliate, and to be particularly satisfied with us, by whose unyielding adherence to principle she has been forced into the revocation. He ought the more to conciliate our good will, as we can be such an obstacle to the new career opening on him in the Spanish colonies. That he would give us the Floridas to withhold intercourse with the residue of those colonies can not be doubted. But that is no price, because they are ours in the first moment of the first war, and until a war they are of no particular necessity to us. But, although with difficulty, he will consent to our receiving Cuba into our Union to prevent our aid to Mexico and the other provinces. That would be a price, and I would immediately erect a column on the

southernmost limit of Cuba and inscribe on it a ne plus ultra as to us in that direction. We should then have only to include the north in our confederacy, which would be, of course, in the first war, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation; and I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.

*

It will be objected to our receiving Cuba that no limit can then be drawn to our future acquisitions. Cuba can be defended by us without a navy, and this develops the principle which ought to limit our views. Nothing should ever be accepted which would require a navy to defend it.

Again, in writing to President Monroe on the 23d June, 1823, he says: For certainly her addition to our confederacy is exactly what is wanting to advance our power as a nation to the point of its utmost interest.

And in another letter to the same, on the 24th October, 1823, he says:

I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida Point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico and the countries and isthmus bordering on it would fill up the measure of our political well-being.

John Quincy Adams, while Secretary of State under Mr. Monroe, in his dispatch to Mr. Nelson, our minister to Madrid, of the 28th April, 1823, says:

In the war between France and Spain, now commencing, other interests, peculiarly ours, will in all probability be deeply involved. Whatever may be the issue of this war as between those two European powers, it may be taken for granted that the dominion of Spain upon the American continents, north and south, is irrecoverably gone. But the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico still remain nominally and so far really dependent upon her that she yet possesses the power of transferring her own dominion over them, together with the possession of them, to others. These islands, from their local position and natural appendages to the North American continent, and one of them, Cuba, almost in sight of our shores, from a multitude of considerations, has become an object of transcendent importance to the commercial and political interests of our Union. Its commanding position, with reference to the Gulf of Mexico and the West India seas, the character of its population, its situation midway between our Southern coast and the Island of Santo Domingo, its safe and capacious harbor of the Habana, fronting a long line of our shores destitute of the same advantages, the nature of its productions and of its wants, furnishing the supplies and needing the returns of a commerce immensely profitable and mutually beneficial, give it an importance in the sum of our national interests with which that of no other foreign territory can be compared and little inferior to that which binds the different members of this Union together.

Such, indeed, are, between the interests of that island and of this country, the geographical, commercial, moral, and political relations formed by nature, gathering in the process of time, and even now verging to maturity, that, in looking forward to the probable course of events for the short period of half a century, it is scarcely possible to resist the conviction that the annexation of Cuba to our Federal Republic will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself. It is obvious, however, that for this event we are not yet prepared. Numerous and formidable objections to the extension of our territorial dominions beyond sea present themselves to the first contemplation of the subject; obstacles to the system of policy by which alone that result can be compassed and maintained are to be foreseen and surmounted both from at home and abroad; but there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, can not choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only toward the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature, can not cast her off from its bosom.

The transfer of Cuba to Great Britain would be an event unpropitious to the interests of this Union. This opinion is so generally entertained that even the groundless rumors that it was about to be accomplished, which have spread abroad, and are still teeming, may be traced to the deep and almost universal feeling of aversion to it, and to the alarm which the mere probability of its occurrence has stimulated. The question both of our right and of our power to prevent it, if necessary by force, already obtrudes itself upon our councils, and the Administration is called upon, in the performance of its duties to the nation, at least to use all the means within its competency to guard against and forefend it.

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