The Admiral and the Ambassador (14 page)

It was into this muted Parisian high society that the Porters sought to insert themselves, focusing their social attentions at first on fellow expatriate Americans at embassy-hosted dinners. Their daughter, Elsie, was deemed too young at age seventeen to play a role, and was sent off to the Convent of the Assumption on Rue de Lübeck—just a few blocks from the Porters' rented home at the Spitzer mansion—where she hoped to improve her French language skills.

Elsie stayed at the convent in a private room separate from the dormitories that housed the other young women. She returned home at noon on Saturdays and arrived back at school by 9:30 AM on Mondays. In her diaries, Elsie said she had asked to attend the school, though once she was enrolled, she referred to the convent as “this blessed hole.” Dinners were taken from benches at common tables and eaten in silence; afterward the young women passed by the mother superior in pairs for a visual inspection.

Raised a Protestant, Elsie was uncomfortable with the Catholic icons. “Christ is too holy, it seems to me, to be carved for ten cents on a cross all
dripping with gore and in the most awful agonies.” Yet she was equally harsh in her view of the social responsibilities of an ambassador's daughter, which meant spending Sunday with her mother visiting society ladies. “It is very nice, I suppose, being in society, especially when you have a great name and position, but as far as I can see, it consists of standing for hours at the dressmaker and invariably having your clothes tight … or cackling to a lot of freaks you don't care anything about.”
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Yet Elsie would be spending more time than she anticipated fulfilling social obligations as her mother's health began to flag. The issue, never detailed publicly, was a weakened heart, and Sophie Porter found the mountain air in Switzerland better for her health than the pollution—and stress—of Paris. Over the next few years, she would be absent from her husband's side for months at a time, and her daughter would stand in.

Porter had only been at work a few weeks when a special dispatch from the secretary of state, John Sherman, landed on his desk. Sent to both Porter and John Hay, the US ambassador to England, Sherman's message advised that Stewart Woodford, the newly appointed ambassador to Spain, would be arriving in late July. Weeks earlier, President McKinley had settled on Woodford for the delicate post after several other men turned down the appointment. Woodford's marching orders were to negotiate an end to the Cuban crisis; McKinley was becoming increasingly worried that the United States would be drawn inexorably into a military intervention.

Woodford's first step would be to stop in Paris to meet with Porter, as well as the American ambassadors to England and Germany, to discuss the growing tensions with Spain and the mood of America's European allies. There was a lot to discuss. The Spanish colonial empire had been dwindling since its peak in the 1600s, when it dominated the Americas, and it now consisted of Spanish Sahara and a few other small outposts in Africa; the Philippines and other islands in the East Indies; and Cuba. Insurrectionists had been active in both the Philippines and Cuba, but it was the latter, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, that had seized the attention of the American public, many of whom saw parallels to the American
colonies' fight for independence from Great Britain—the fight that made John Paul Jones an American icon.
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The trouble in Cuba had surged and ebbed numerous times during the 1800s, with native-born Cubans chafing under Spanish rule. A violent insurrection broke out in 1868, and lasted a decade before it burned itself out. In 1895 rebellion began anew when José Martí's Cuban Revolutionary Party organized military landings and uprisings in three places in Cuba. (The plans were crippled by the US government, which seized two ships planning to move weapons and revolutionaries from Fernandina Beach, Florida, to Cuba.) Martí was killed in one of the early skirmishes, but the rebels battled on with a scorched-earth policy seeking to destroy the sugar industry, believing that the resulting economic crisis would so destabilize Spanish interests that they would grant independence rather than spend the money to quell the rebellion. It was effective, at least in disrupting the sugar cash crops. Cuba produced about $65 million in sugar exports in 1895, the year the rebellion began in earnest. In 1896 the value of the sugar crop dropped to $13 million. At the same time, two insurrectionist fronts were opened up in western Cuba, which led to media accounts that overstated the strength of the revolutionary forces. That helped increase the sense of instability in Cuba and raised questions about Spain's ability to maintain control.
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American media accounts over the years, often embellished and romanticized, pushed political pressure for US intervention, though neither President Cleveland nor President McKinley wanted to lead the nation to war. Since its founding, the United States had largely pursued a policy of isolation. In June 1895 Cleveland had issued a statement of neutrality on Cuba that was read as a de facto recognition of the insurrection. The American public was split between those who favored American support for the revolutionaries and those who wanted to aid Spain in putting down the rebellion. But the revolutionaries found support in Congress, leading to a vote on April 6, 1896, urging Cleveland to recognize the rebellion and offer support.

Cleveland was unmoved, and he privately informed Spain that the United States would be willing to mediate negotiations with the rebels. Spain took two months to consider the offer then rejected it. McKinley,
both during the campaign and once in office, wanted neither military intervention nor a pledge of US support for either side. He seemed to be wishing the problem would just go away so he could concentrate on reviving the still-moribund US economy.

In April 1896 Spanish prime minister Antonio Cánovas replaced the general in Cuba, Arsenio Martínez de Campos, with the more aggressive General Valeriano Weyler. Weyler immediately ordered all rural Cubans in areas where the insurgents were most successful to move to villages and towns, in the belief that this would undercut the rebels' access to supplies and support. Many of the forcibly displaced were collected in unsanitary camps, and the focus on civilians in what was ostensibly a military conflict drew sharp international condemnation, particularly among Americans backing Cuban independence.

President Cleveland, in his final address to Congress in December 1896, implied that the US government saw little difference between the insurgents and the government. Where Spain had once sought to preserve private property during the course of quelling the rebellion, it

has now apparently abandoned it and is acting upon the same theory as the insurgents, namely, that the exigencies of the contest require the wholesale annihilation of property that it may not prove of use and advantage to the enemy. It is to the same end that, in pursuance of general orders, Spanish garrisons are now being withdrawn from plantations and the rural population required to concentrate itself in the towns. The sure result would seem to be that the industrial value of the island is fast diminishing and that unless there is a speedy and radical change in existing conditions it will soon disappear altogether. The spectacle of the utter ruin of an adjoining country, by nature one of the most fertile and charming on the globe, would engage the serious attention of the Government and people of the United States in any circumstances.

Cleveland seemed to be laying the ground for eventual US intervention. Americans had invested upward of $50 million in Cuban enterprises, and trade between the two countries had hovered around $100 million a year before the insurrection broke out.

Complicating the issue was the fact that many of the insurrectionists had both raised money and plotted strategy in the United States—some assuming American citizenship—before returning to the island. Stretches of the US coast were being monitored to intercept those going to join or arm the fight. Cleveland dismissed calls for the United States to side with the rebels as counter to American interests and instead suggested that granting autonomy to Cuba would both take the steam out of the rebellion and allow Spain to retain its financial and historical interests. But he also warned that American patience was not limitless:

A time may arrive when a correct policy and care for our interests, as well as a regard for the interests of other nations and their citizens, joined by considerations of humanity and a desire to see a rich and fertile country intimately related to us saved from complete devastation, will constrain our Government to such action as will subserve the interests thus involved and at the same time promise to Cuba and its inhabitants an opportunity to enjoy the blessings of peace.

That time was coming sooner than Cleveland anticipated. And it would lead, surprisingly, to a resurgence of American interest in a long-forgotten sea warrior, John Paul Jones.

I
T TOOK
A
MBASSADOR
P
ORTER
nearly a week to respond to the letter from his boss, Secretary Sherman, but on July 13 he wrote back that he would welcome meeting with Woodford and his fellow ambassadors to England and Germany. He also reported that he had “already been taking measures to acquaint myself as to the views of influential persons in France, statesmen, financiers, etc., in reference to the Cuban question, and can soon ascertain pretty clearly the drift of opinion.”
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French leaders were sympathetic to Spain for several reasons, including neighborliness—with a shared border, it made sense to pick disputes judiciously—and a recognition that with its own colonial possessions France had little moral authority to tell another country how it should deal with uprisings. More significant was that French investors held some $400 million in Spanish bonds and railroad investments, a significant portion of Spain's $2 billion national debt. Without the trade revenue from colonial plantations, the financiers feared those bonds could become worthless.

“I think it will be found that these considerations would not induce [France] to take any hostile steps towards us as a nation in case we should be obliged to resort to vigorous action in reference to the deplorable condition of things in Cuba,” Porter advised Sherman. Many of the financiers, he said, recognized that if the rebellion in Cuba continued its course, the bonds would lose their value anyway. There also was a counteranalysis that “if Spain lets Cuba go, stops the enormous expenditure of men and money … and devotes her energies to developing her resources at home and her possessions in Africa, there will be a prospect for the creditors to get a better price for the securities which they hold.”

Woodford arrived in Paris in late July and spent a couple of weeks consulting with Porter and others. Porter, whose military experience had been forged in the direct confrontations of the Civil War, saw in the persistence of the Cuban rebels signs that they ultimately would succeed. “If we ever get this infernal Cuban question settled we will have some peace and quiet,” he wrote to his old friend and neighbor Cornelius Bliss, McKinley's secretary of the interior. “It is perfectly absurd that Spain with 200,000 regular troops cannot handle 30,000 insurgents and it is the best proof that Cuba will some day be free in spite of everything. The administration has shown great patience, which is wise.”
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Despite his own military history, or perhaps because of it, Porter was among those who would welcome war with Spain—and maybe even with Great Britain, if it came to it. While Woodford was in Paris, Porter arranged a series of private dinners for American diplomatic figures, as well as military attachés. The Cuban crisis was never far from their minds during those gatherings, but the conversations roamed far. Woodford's naval attaché, George Leland Dyer, was bouncing around European ports to assess both military strength and happenings in those cities. Yet he was at the ambassador's elbow during most of those Paris meetings and discussions, as well as at the less formal dinners. Dyer found Porter an odd figure. Over a meal of sweetbreads, duck, and champagne on the evening of August 17, Dyer listened to Porter in all his patriotic fervor. Woodford was the focal point of the dinner, and in addition to Dyer, he was accompanied by his army attaché, Tasker H. Bliss, and the new first secretary to the embassy in Madrid, John R. MacArthur. Andrew D. White, the ambassador to England, was also at the table.
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