348 Chapter 13 The Coming of the Civil War
of transmitting the dynamic, demo-
cratic U.S. spirit to other countries
by aiding local revolutionaries,
opening new markets, or perhaps
even annexing foreign lands. This
became known as the Young
America movement, whose adher-
ents were confident that democracy
would triumph everywhere, even if
by conquest.
One of those who dreamt of con-
quest was an adventurer named
William Walker. In 1855 Walker,
backed by an American company
engaged in transporting migrants to
California across Central America,
seized control of Nicaragua and
elected himself president. He was
ousted two years later but made
repeated attempts to regain control
until, in 1860, when he died before a Honduran firing
squad. There were reasons unrelated to slavery why
Central America suddenly seemed important. The
rapid development of California created a need for
improved communication with the West Coast. A canal
across Central America would cut weeks from the sail-
ing time between New York and San Francisco. In
1850 Secretary of State John M. Clayton and the
British minister to the United States, Henry Lytton
Bulwer, negotiated a treaty providing for the demilita-
rization and joint Anglo-American control of any canal
across the isthmus.
As this area assumed strategic importance to the
United States, the desire to obtain Cuba grew
stronger. In 1854 President Franklin Pierce instructed
his minister to Spain to offer $130 million for the
island. The State Department prepared a confidential
dispatch suggesting that if Spain refused to sell Cuba,
“the great law of self-preservation” might justify
“wresting” it from Spain by force.
News of the dispatch—known as the Ostend
Manifesto—leaked out, and it had to be published.
Northern opinion was outraged by this “slavehold-
ers’ plot” to add another slave state to the Union.
Europeans claimed to be shocked by such “dishonor-
able” and “clandestine” diplomacy. The government
had to disavow the manifesto, and any hope of
obtaining Cuba or any other territory in the
Caribbean vanished.
The expansionist mood of the moment also
explains President Fillmore’s dispatching an expedi-
tion under Commodore Matthew C. Perry to try for
commercial concessions in the isolated kingdom of
Japan in 1854. Perry’s expedition was a great success.
The Japanese, impressed by American naval power,frozen Ohio River to freedom, the death of Little Eva,
Eva and Tom ascending to Heaven—these scenes left
audiences in tears.
Southern critics pointed out, correctly enough,
that Stowe’s picture of plantation life was distorted, her
slaves atypical. They called her a “coarse, ugly, long-
tongued woman” and accused her of trying to “awaken
rancorous hatred and malignant jealousies” that would
undermine national unity. Most Northerners, having
little basis on which to judge the accuracy of the book,
tended to discount southern criticism as biased. In any
case, Uncle Tom’s Cabinraised questions that tran-
scended the issue of accuracy. Did it matter if every
slave was not as kindly as Uncle Tom, as determined as
George Harris? What if only one white master was as
evil as Simon Legree? No earlier white American writer
had looked at slaves as people.
Uncle Tom’s Cabintouched the hearts of mil-
lions. Some became abolitionists; others, still hesitat-
ing to step forward, asked themselves as they put the
book down, “Is slavery just?”
Stowe,Uncle Tom’s Cabinat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
Harriet Beecher Stowe & The Making of Uncle
Tom’s Cabinatwww.myhistorylab.com
Diversions Abroad: The “Young
America” Movement
Clearly a distraction was needed to help keep the lid
on sectional troubles. Some people hoped to find
one in foreign affairs. The spirit of manifest destiny
explains this in large part; once the United States
had reached the Pacific, expansionists began to think
WatchtheVideoReadtheDocumentHarriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became a staple of the mid-nineteenth-
century theater. This poster shows Simon Legree whipping a blameless Uncle Tom.