Cuban Ten Years War
After the American Civil War, the island country of Cuba under Spanish rule was one of only a few Western Hemisphere countries where the institution of slavery remained legal and was widely practiced. On October 10, 1868 a revolution broke out, known as the Ten Years War, by Cuban landowners led by Carlos Manual Céspedes. The Spanish, led initially by Francisco Lersundi, used the military to suppress the rebellion. In 1870, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish persuaded President Grant not to recognize Cuban belligerency and the United States maintained an unstable peace with Spain. As the Cuban war continued, international patriotic insurgency began to arise in support of the Cuban rebellion and war bonds were sold in the U.S. to support the Cuban resistance. One of the U.S. Cuban patriots was John F. Patterson who bought a former Confederate steamer Virgin at the Washington Navy Yard, renaming her Virginius. The legality of Patterson's purchase of the Virginius would later come to national and international attention. The Cuban rebellion finally ended in an 1878 armistice after Spanish general Arsenio Martinez Campos pardoned all Cuban rebels.
Read more about this topic: Virginius Affair
Famous quotes containing the words cuban, ten, years and/or war:
“Because a person is born the subject of a given state, you deny the sovereignty of the people? How about the child of Cuban slaves who is born a slave, is that an argument for slavery? The one is a fact as well as the other. Why then, if you use legal arguments in the one case, you don’t in the other?”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the Sphinx wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before we began to live consciously on our own accounts?”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Peace can endure only so long as humanity really insists upon it, and is willing to work for it and sacrifice for it. Twenty- five years ago American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered; we failed them, we failed them then, we cannot fail them again and expect the world to survive again.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make use and get advantage of her as I can, as is usual in such cases.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)