Narciso López, the Venezuelan-born son of a slaveholding rancher, a decorated officer in the Spanish army, and an avowed Cuban patriot, organized on U.S. soil three filibustering expeditions to Cuba. The last, about a decade before southern secession, ended in his garroting by Spanish authorities. López had called for help to liberate Cuban whites from Spanish tyranny and the specter of a Haitilike slave revolution induced by British abolitionism.
As Tom Chaffin’s sprightly narrative stresses, López attracted a national following to his lone-star banner. Fire-eating southern secessionists never drove the movement and, as a group, actually proved rather cautious toward López. He elicited greater support from urban merchants and lawyers than from established southern planters. The penny press also contributed to the cause, as sympathetic publishers of big-city dailies sought to expand their mass circulation by inflaming popular passions for Cuba’s annexation. In attracting northern as well as southern recruits, Chaffin contends, López tapped into an older, dying “U.S. nationalism steeped in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian republicanism that tolerated both slavery and expansionism” (p. 3). Conversely, López’s sharpest critics in the United States represented a rising, competing nationalism based on antislavery, free-soil principles.
Southern nationalists did have a deep and abiding interest in annexing Cuba; but some feared that López’s paramilitary ventures would precipitate precisely what they were desperately trying to avoid: the Africanization of the island. John C. Calhoun and William Gilmore Simms, among others, clearly understood that nationalist expansionism could serve southern interests by increasing the pressure on the federal government to purchase Cuba from Spain and thereby obviate the insular and international risks associated with filibustering. The Union would thereby acquire peacefully a valuable slaveholding possession that, in the event of secession, would accrue to the South. Thus Southern nationalism—by 1850, an uneven work in progress—cannot easily be disentangled from the rhetoric of Young America.
Chaffin probably overrates the nationalist allure of López, especially because southern influences clearly predominated in the expeditions and because even he concedes the existence, by 1861, of a southern nationalism that “ripened” (p. 8) in the heat of the dispute over slavery out of the older republican, proslavery nationalism. Nor is Chaffin clear as to why free-soilism, by 1850, qualifies as a competing nationalism rather than, as southerners charged, a sectional deviation.
Chaffin shows little interest in the Cuban dimension of the López expeditions and reduces López himself, a complex and heroic figure, to a misleading miniature. López, as Chaffin should have known, began plotting Cuban separatism years before “the late 1840s” (p. 39); that is, years before he lost his Cuban offices to a new Spanish regime and suffered business reversals. A searching reassessment of López and his movement will require dogged pursuit of the insights in Herminio Portell Vilá’s great work on López; the bundles of relevant archival material in London, Madrid, and Havana; and the many references to López in the scattered papers of southern notables. Until then, the best biography in English remains the sympathetic article prepared in 1850, with the help of Cirilo Villaverde, for John O’Sullivan’s expansionist journal The United States Magazine and Democratic Review.
