An autocrat’s a ruler that does what th’ people wants
an’ takes th’ blame f’r it.
THE PRESIDENT’S FIRST visitor when he returned to his desk on 29 September 1903 was Secretary of the Navy William Henry Moody. With the expected retirement of Elihu Root, the forty-nine-year-old Moody was seen as the new “strong man” of the Administration, remarkable for ambition, breeding, and intelligence. As a young Massachusetts lawyer, Moody had caught the favorable attention of Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Later, as a member of the House of Representatives, he had also impressed—and sometimes infuriated—Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Although Moody had not been willing, in those days, to “whoop to war” with Spain, he now felt as grandly as the President about America’s future as a world power. Her principal engine of advancement must be an ever-expanding navy, in whose wake freedom would spread like foam.
Since joining the Cabinet sixteen months before, Moody had been much at Roosevelt’s elbow—on his ill-fated tour of New England, as an adviser during the coal strike and the Venezuelan crisis, a fellow passenger on the presidential train to California. The two men looked like brothers: stocky, hard-chested, ruddy, with big strong heads and ragged mustaches. They shared Harvard manners, blunt speech, and a constant heartiness. But whereas Roosevelt’s warmth was genuine, there was a core of coldness in Moody, a Puritanism none could thaw. He was the only bachelor member of the Cabinet, walking home alone every night with a slight, rheumatic limp.
Emerging from the White House, he made an official statement of policy on the canal situation. He said that Roosevelt would refrain from action “as long as there was the least possible hope” of a change of mind by the Colombian Congress. The President, Moody stressed, “takes the ground that this is a most important question, and the final decision is a decision for centuries.”
HAVING THUS TRIED to dispel rumors that he wished to use force against Colombia, Roosevelt braced himself for a showdown with Samuel Gompers and other executives of the American Federation of Labor. He scheduled their visit for an unusually late hour—after dinner—and made a thorough study of the Government Printing Office case, which was sure to be an item on the agenda. His instinct was to give Gompers “a good jolt.” Labor must be made to understand that it was subject to the same Square Deal as capital, in the Rooseveltian scheme of things.
In this particular matter I would be as incapable of considering my own personal future as if I were facing foreign or civil war, or any other tremendous crisis. It is a sheer waste of time for these people … to threaten me with defeat for the Presidency next year. Nothing would hire me even to accept the Presidency if I had to take it on terms which would mean a forfeiting of self-respect. Just as I should refuse to accept it at the cost of abandoning the Northern Securities suit, or of repealing the trust regulation of last [sic] year, or of undoing what I did in the anthracite coal strike, so I should refuse to take it at the cost of undoing what I did in this matter of Miller and the labor unions.
William A. Miller was the GPO foreman whose dismissal he had overridden as an unjust reprisal for increasing the productivity of the bindery division. Now the bookbinders were trying to get Miller out on morals charges, saying that he kept three wives. Roosevelt, embarrassed, could argue only that the foreman’s morals, or lack thereof, constituted “a new case,” subject to routine review.
This apparent sanction of both the open shop and open marriage was bringing in some of the most hostile mail he had ever received. Unions in more than a dozen states had pledged opposition to his candidacy in 1904. Plainly, he risked losing his most hard-won constituency if he failed to satisfy the AFL delegates. He drafted a “reply” to what he guessed they were going to say, asked Moody, Garfield, and Cortelyou to check it, then had it typed pending release. This document was in his dinner-jacket pocket when Gompers came to the White House at 9:15, accompanied by four aides.
One of them was John Mitchell, shockingly changed from the handsome union executive of one year before. Mitchell’s eyes were hollow from drink, his body had thickened, and a hernia stiffened his gait. For all the fame he had won in the great strike, his miners were still unrecognized and overworked, their 10 percent raise already eroded by inflation.
Roosevelt sized Gompers up as “a sleek article,” and found that he could handle him with ease. The AFL leader was plainly anxious to avoid a confrontation in threatening economic times. Not until toward the end of a general review of labor matters did Gompers drop the name Miller, enabling Roosevelt to produce his statement.
“I thank you and your committee for your courtesy,” the President read aloud, “and I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you.” They had to hear him out.
I ask you to remember that I am dealing purely with the relation of the government to its employees. I must govern my action by the laws of the land, which I am sworn to administer, and which differentiate any case in which the government of the United States is a party from all other cases whatsoever. These laws are enacted for the benefit of the whole people.… I can no more recognize the fact that a man does or does not belong to a union as being for or against him, than I can recognize the fact that he is a Protestant or a Catholic, a Jew or a Gentile, as being for or against him.
Miller’s habits at home were irrelevant to his freedom, as a federal employee, to take an antiunion stance on principle. Reinstating him was a matter of executive privilege. “And as to this my decision is final.”
The delegation trooped out, looking grim under the lights of the porte cochere. Secretary Loeb distributed copies of Roosevelt’s statement to reporters. Gompers, aware that he had been scooped by a master of press relations, refused any comment. “It would not be respectful,” he said, and strode down the dark driveway.
Editorial opinion the next morning almost unanimously supported the President. Radical unions remained resentful, but Gompers bowed to the popular mood, and saw to it that anti-Roosevelt resolutions were defeated at the AFL convention. The open shop became official government policy. “It seems to me that this was the greatest act of your administration,” gushed Ray Stannard Baker. Baker did not realize that the President was already working on something that better deserved that superlative.
“YOU MAY HAVE noticed that I have not said a word in public about the canal,” Roosevelt wrote Mark Hanna on 5 October. “I shall have to allude to it in my Message.” He had decided to call a special session of Congress in November, ostensibly to secure bicameral approval of the Cuban-reciprocity treaty, but also to have legislative support at hand, in case emergency action was needed in Panama.
There was no doubt now that the province would soon—must—secede from the Colombian federation. Bogotá’s rejection of the canal treaty, and Washington’s apparent acceptance of that rejection, amounted to dual deathblows to the Istmusenos. Not only had they lost their long-dreamed waterway, spilling wealth on both sides forever, but their railroad, too, would become redundant, once the Nicaragua Canal opened for business. With no paved highways, no bridges, little industry, and less commerce, they might just as well revert to jungle living.
The President could not help feeling sympathetic. Here was a little ridge of country, about as wide as southern Vermont, a half-drowned hogback of mostly impenetrable rain forest, walled off from the rest of Colombia by mountains. Geographically, it belonged to Central America. Its only surface communications with the southern continent were by sea or mule train. Letters took fifteen days to get to Bogotá, if they got there at all; about the only reliable deliveries were those carrying tax money out of the Isthmus.
Panama’s political status as a provincia of Colombia was equally tenuous. It had spontaneously joined the New Granadian Federation in 1821, and seceded with its disintegration in 1830. Bogotá had reasserted control twelve years later, and from then on Panama had alternated stormily between semi-autonomy and subjugation. Roosevelt counted no fewer than fifty-three isthmian insurrections, riots, civil disturbances, and revolts since 1846. None had been perpetrated with any American help. On at least ten occasions (six times at Bogotá’s request, twice during his own presidency), Washington had blocked rebel movements and shipments along the Panama Railroad.
In doing so, it had argued that it sought only to protect the railroad’s neutral right-of-way, which civil war might compromise. Now an infinitely greater right—that of all trading nations to enjoy the benefits of a Panama Canal—had been denied by the “corruptionists” of just one government. “This does not mean that we must necessarily go to Nicaragua,” Roosevelt wrote. “I feel we are certainly justified in morals, and therefore justified in law, under the treaty of 1846, in interfering summarily and saying that the canal is to be built and that they must not stop it.”
The therefore was characteristic, an example of the Rooseveltian rationality that so often amused Root and Knox. It did not amuse Hanna. The Senator’s only suggestion was that the Compagnie Nouvelle should be paid to continue its halfhearted excavations in Panama, while Congress thought up some new way of settling with Colombia.
This advice contrasted with the roarings of Albert Shaw in Review of Reviews, the nation’s most influential journal of opinion. Bogotá’s “blackmailing adventurers” had insulted the United States by demanding a ten-million-dollar “bribe,” Shaw wrote. Washington should “look with favor” upon separatists in Panama, with a view toward supporting their revolution.
Roosevelt tried to calm the editor down, informing him that “as yet, the people of the United States are not willing to take the ground of building the canal by force.” But the theme of blackmail, like King Charles’s head, could not be kept out of his draft Message to Congress:
It is out of the question to submit to extortion on the part of a beneficiary.…
The interest of international commerce generally and the interest of this country generally demands that the canal should be begun with no needless delay. The refusal of Colombia properly to respond to our sincere and earnest efforts to come to an agreement, or to pay heed to the many concessions we have made, renders it in my judgment necessary that the United States should take immediate action on one or two lines: either we should drop the Panama Canal project and immediately begin work on the Nicaraguan canal, or else we should purchase all the rights of the French Company, and, without any further parley with Colombia, enter upon the completion of the canal.… I feel that the latter course is the one demanded by the interests of this Nation and I therefore bring the matter to your attention for such action in the premises as you may deem wise.
He was careful not to predict any “misconduct” that might be to America’s advantage on the Isthmus. William Nelson Cromwell bustled in to see him on 7 October, and bustled out none the wiser—“a typical revolutionist,” in Roosevelt’s opinion, “mysterious, and in it for the fun of the game.” Three days later, however, the President received someone much harder to deflect.
Philippe Bunau-Varilla was escorted by Assistant Secretary of State Loomis. Tiny as the Frenchman was—he barely reached his companion’s sternum—Roosevelt saw at once that he was a shrewd and aggressive personality. The globular head bulged with intelligence, and the eyes—“duellist’s eyes”—were as chill as glass. Most people were overawed when they entered the Executive Office for the first time, but Bunau-Varilla was calm. Roosevelt felt himself being sized up.
He knew that there was “an underlying motive” for the visit, which would not be stated directly. Loomis introduced Bunau-Varilla as the new co-owner of Le Matin in Paris. For a while they all made polite conversation about French journalism, avoiding any reference to Panama. Then Loomis mentioned the Dreyfus affair. Bunau-Varilla took the cue:
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BUNAU-VARILLA |
Mr. President, Captain Dreyfus has not been the only victim of detestable political passions. Panama is another. |
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ROOSEVELT |
Oh yes, you have devoted much time and effort to Panama, Mr. Bunau-Varilla. Well, what do you think is going to be the outcome of the present situation? |
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BUNAU-VARILLA |
Mr. President, a revolution. |
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ROOSEVELT |
A revolution … Would it be possible? (To Loomis) But if it became a reality, what would become of the plan we had thought of? |
Loomis remained rigidly mute. The President, for all his air of fake surprise, was referring to John Bassett Moore’s proposal to “require” Colombia to sign the canal treaty. Roosevelt asked what made Bunau-Varilla think that a revolution was coming.
“General and special considerations, Mr. President.” Bunau-Varilla spoke with careful vagueness, not wanting to embarrass Roosevelt with details. But he could not resist asking if the United States would be supportive of an armed uprising in Panama.
Roosevelt ignored the question.
“I don’t suppose you can say.”
“I cannot.”
“Will you protect Colombian interests?”
“I cannot say that.”
All that the President would say was that Colombia, in rejecting a treaty she herself had proposed, had forfeited any further consideration by the United States. “I have no use for a government that would do what that government has done.”
Both men were anxious for the interview to end. They perfectly understood each other. Roosevelt saw that if anyone was capable of bringing about the revolution, it was this tremendous little foreigner. Bunau-Varilla, in turn, was convinced that the United States would find a way to support him.
THE PRESIDENT’S FAUX PAS about a “plan” may not have been involuntary. When receiving officers and gentlemen—Bunau-Varilla was, like himself, a colonel—he was sure that his confidence would not be abused. (It might, however, be discreetly used.) With advisers, Roosevelt was even franker, telling Professor Moore that he would recognize Panama if it revolted and set up an independent government “under proper circumstances.”
In the same spirit, he now informed Albert Shaw that he would be “delighted” to hear of an uprising on the Isthmus. “But for me to say so publicly would amount to an instigation of a revolt, and therefore I cannot say it.” With his current unpopularity among unionists, white Southerners, and Wall Street bankers, he dared not risk any word or deed that might revive old images of him as a rash, rough-riding imperialist.
John D. Long could not have chosen a worse time to publish an article in Outlook jocularly recalling the days when the President, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had wanted “to send a squadron across the ocean to sink … the Spanish fleet while we were still at peace with Spain.” Roosevelt angrily denied the allegation, but critics of his Administration thought that Colombia should take it as a forewarning. “He is the most risky man the United States has had in the Presidency,” declared the Philadelphia Record.
Another article, by Henry Watterson in the Louisville Courier-Journal, alleged that half of the forty million dollars that American taxpayers were paying to the Compagnie Nouvelle for canal rights would be kicked back to various American senators, lobbyists, engineers, and columnists—the “thieves” behind the original switch to Panama. While nobody believed that Roosevelt had any “share of the stealage,” he was being importuned by too many unscrupulous parties. There was only one honest alternative: to opt for Nicaragua, and quickly. “Time’s up, Mr. President!” Watterson taunted. “Will you act … or will you continue to play politics?”
Philippe Bunau-Varilla demolished Watterson’s claims in a letter to the New York Sun. He noted that “not one cent” of the canal-rights money could be disbursed illegally, since the Compagnie Nouvelle was in receivership, and thus managed by the courts of France. As for the Nicaragua route, “it has all the advantages over Panama except the technical ones.”
Watterson was reduced to weak taunts aimed at “Mr. Vanilla Bean.” The nickname stuck, to Bunau-Varilla’s fury, but the charges of corruption did not.
MANUEL AMADOR GUERRERO, an elderly physician accredited by the Panamanian revolutionary junta, met with Bunau-Varilla in New York. An American intermediary, known only as “W,” had led him to believe that the Roosevelt Administration would contribute at least six million dollars of unspecified secret funds to his cause. The money was needed to buy gunboats that would prevent Colombia from landing reinforcements on the Isthmus when revolution broke out. Bunau-Varilla told him to forget about any such subsidy.
A more realistic hope, based on Roosevelt’s hints in the Executive Office, was that the United States Navy would provide such protection, under Roosevelt’s treaty obligations to keep traffic across Panama clear. Amador said that in that case the junta had no worries about the five hundred Colombian troops garrisoned in Panama City. They had been so long neglected and underpaid by Bogotá that they could certainly be bribed to join the revolution.
Bunau-Varilla grandly promised to raise one hundred thousand dollars for this purpose. If he could not borrow it from a New York bank, “I can provide it, myself, from my own personal fortune.”
Downtown, as the conspirators shook hands, William Nelson Cromwell prepared to decamp for Paris. “The fun of the game” was rapidly becoming too fraught for him. He was terrified that President Marroquín would find out that he, too, had been plotting with Panamanians, and cancel the Compagnie Nouvelle’s remaining rights.
And there was still the dread prospect that Roosevelt might yet decide to dig in Nicaragua. Obsequiously, Cromwell sent him a final appeal before sailing:
YOUR VIRILE AND MASTERFUL POLICY WILL PROVE THE SOLUTION OF THIS GREAT PROBLEM.
BUNAU-VARILLA, having invested so heavily in Panama’s future, returned to Washington on 15 October to see if John Hay would tell him anything more than Roosevelt had. The Secretary of State received him at home, and put on a dazzling display of diplomatic obtuseness. He waited for Bunau-Varilla to raise the subject of Panamanian unrest, then agreed that a revolution was likely. “But,” he added in his silky voice, “we shall not be caught napping.”
He mentioned that a squadron of Navy ships was coaling up in San Francisco, and would next “sail towards the Isthmus.” There was some talk about the propensity of Latin American nations for political violence. Then Hay changed, or seemed to change, the subject. “I have just finished reading a charming novel, Captain Macklin.”
He picked up Richard Harding Davis’s latest adventure story and said that it was about an American soldier of fortune who visits Central America and enlists in a revolutionary army, under the command of an idealistic Frenchman. “Take it with you,” Hay urged. “It will interest you.”
That evening, on the train back to New York, a wildly excited Bunau-Varilla pored over Captain Macklin. Every page furthered his idealistic identity with the French general, fighting in the jungle for “justice and progress.” But the book also made him worry about mañana. When he next saw Dr. Amador, he behaved with Napoleonic briskness, handing over a plan of military action, a declaration of independence, a draft republican constitution, and “a code with which to correspond with me.” The United States, he guaranteed, would move to protect Panama within forty-eight hours of the revolution.
Amador accepted both the documents and the promise. But he was much less willing to accede to Bunau-Varilla’s airy follow-up, “Nobody knows better than I the final aim, which is the completion of the canal and the best way to attain it. It will, therefore, be necessary to entrust me with the diplomatic representation of the new Republic at Washington.”
All Amador could say was that he would discuss the matter with his colleagues. Bunau-Varilla, elated, began to design a national flag.
THAT NIGHT, two young Army officers, Captain Chauncey B. Humphrey and Lieutenant Grayson Murphy, visited the White House to report secretly on a tour they had just made of Panama. Roosevelt listened with interest, having sent them south himself, to survey strategic approaches to the canal zone.
They confirmed Bunau-Varilla’s predictions of a revolution, saying it would probably occur late that month, or in early November. While crossing by train from Colón to Panama City, disguised as English tourists, they had found themselves in the same car as José de Obaldía. The Governor and his aides, assuming that the foreigners spoke no Spanish, had openly—but unenthusiastically—talked about a break from Bogotá. Captain Humphrey got a feeling of general gloom, based on the failure of Panamanian revolutions in the past.
He and Murphy also heard that a German lobbyist had influenced the Colombian Senate’s rejection of the canal treaty, that votes had been sold—either way—at seven to ten thousand gold dollars apiece, and that an American railroad man with “a remarkably attractive wife” had bought a number of nays.
Casting aside his disguise, Captain Humphrey had later met with leaders of the junta. They proved to be so desperate for military aid that they actually offered him command of their forces. If successful in winning Panama’s freedom, he and Lieutenant Murphy would get a quarter of the ten million dollars that Washington would then (surely) pay for canal rights.
Humphrey had declined appointment, explaining that he was an American Army officer and served only one flag. But he had not scrupled to give free tactical advice (including how to seize a Colombian gunboat lying off Panama City), and a list of Texan arms suppliers. In exchange, he had gotten an indication of the junta’s current assets: five hundred troops, 2,500 arms, and $365,000 in cash and pledges.
The President was not a passive auditor of Humphrey and Murphy’s tale. He impressed them with his topographical and political knowledge of the Isthmus. They half hoped he would say that the United States must avoid any military role there, so that they could resign their commissions and become real-life Captain Macklins. But he made no such disclaimer, and they were shown out into the night. “There goes our revolution,” Murphy muttered sadly.
ROOSEVELT SPENT THE weekend brooding over the Humphrey-Murphy report, identifying to an almost comical degree with President Andrew Jackson. “There was an executive who realized not only the responsibilities, but the opportunities of the office,” he told a lunch group including George Haven Putnam. Old “King Andrew” was no saint, but he had never hesitated “to cut any red tape that stood in the way of executive action.… Now, Haven, I hear you chuckling. I know what you are thinking about.”
On Monday, crisp cables began to issue from the White House and the Navy Department. The Dixie was loaded with a battalion of Marines and ordered to Guantánamo, Cuba, arrival date 29 October. Moody ordered the Boston to steam secretly, “with all possible dispatch” to San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, within striking distance of Panama City, while the Marblehead, Concord, and Wyoming proceeded (as per Hay’s alert to Bunau-Varilla) to Acapulco. The only maverick movement in this slow concentration of forces was that of the gunship Nashville, which had only just left Colón. To wheel her round would excite Colombian suspicions, so she was allowed to continue to Caimanera, Cuba.
In coincidental, yet related movement, the steamer Yucatán sailed for Colón from New York. Dr. Amador was on board, looking rather portly, because he wore under his vest the silk flag of Panamanian independence, stitched by Madame Bunau-Varilla. He was probably unaware that five years before, “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” had headed south on this same dilapidated vessel, with equal dreams of glory.
On 23 October, in further irony, Roosevelt had a recurrence of the malarial fever that had stayed in his system since the Santiago campaign. He spent the afternoon lying on a sofa by a bright fire, with Edith knitting and rocking beside him.
On 26 October, the New York Herald’s Panama correspondent, whose brother was a junta member, reported that seventy anti-Colombian insurgents had “invaded” the Isthmus. Governor Obaldía dispatched one hundred men to meet this imaginary force, conveniently weakening the garrison in Panama City.
On 27 October, Roosevelt turned forty-five, and Dr. Amador was welcomed home. While the President, well again, celebrated with an eighteen-course dinner, Amador had to confess that the only aid he had won in el Norte was pledged by a Frenchman five feet four inches tall.
BUNAU-VARILLA, HOWEVER, was as good as his word. He had already transferred one hundred thousand dollars in personal funds from Paris to New York. But, as a hard man, he set hard conditions on Amador. The money would not be sent on until he received a cable confirming the success of the revolution and appointing him Panama’s Minister Plenipotentiary in Washington. He would then press the Roosevelt Administration to protect and quickly recognize the new republic. “The only dangerous period for you will be from the moment the revolution begins to forty-eight hours after the telegram is handed to me.”
Judging from his “trigonometrical” projections of the various movements involved—of United States warships, of Colombian reinforcements (already deploying), of junta agents throughout the Isthmus—the earliest likely date for such news was 29 October. When a cable from Amador arrived on that date, Bunau-Varilla congratulated himself. But the coded message was not what he expected:
FATE NEWS BAD POWERFUL TIGER. URGE VAPOR COLON.
SMITH
Some of it, at least, he could decipher. Fate: Bunau-Varilla. News: Colombian troops arriving. Bad: Atlantic side. Powerful: in five days. Tiger: more than two hundred men. Smith: Amador. But urge vapor Colón seemed more language than code. Urge must be English, vapor either American English or Spanish. Vapor: steam. Steamer!
He was being asked to arrange the dispatch of an American warship to Colón before the Colombian troops got there on 2 November. Bunau-Varilla grabbed a valise and rushed for a Washington train.
Francis B. Loomis received him at home, coldly and noncommittally. The next morning, Bunau-Varilla hung around Lafayette Square, wondering whether to knock on John Hay’s door, when Loomis chanced, or contrived, to bump into him. Now the Assistant Secretary was confidential, if cryptic: “It would be terrible if the catastrophe of 1885 were to be renewed today.”
Riding back to New York on the Congressional Limited, Bunau-Varilla deduced that Loomis had told him that the United States did not intend to permit the burning of Colón by government troops, as she had the last time Panama seriously rebelled. Which must mean that naval force of some sort was on its way. Newspapers aboard the train reported that the Nashville, last seen off Cuba, had arrived in Kingston, Jamaica—en route, surely, to the Isthmus. Five hundred nautical miles at ten knots an hour worked out to two days’ steam. About twelve extra hours would be necessary for preparations. Bunau-Varilla jumped out of the train at Baltimore.
It was ten minutes past noon, 30 October 1903. He sent a wire to “Smith” in Panama City.
ALL RIGHT. WILL REACH TON AND A HALF.
Ton and a half: two and a half days. Calculating from now, that meant the Nashville should arrive off Colón in the small hours of 2 November. The revolution might be slightly delayed, but not compromised. Bunau-Varilla waited for another train, knowing there was little more he could do for the moment. He had “urged a vapor” to Colón. Now everything depended on “Smith.”
ROOSEVELT SWATTED AWAY the late-October light on the White House tennis court. Despite twinges of gout and a thickening waistline, he triumphantly took a set from James Garfield. Then he put his racket away and prepared for humiliation in the November polls.
It was his habit to be gloomy about elections, even in a year as “off” as this. Some thirteen states were due to choose governors, mayors, and local legislatures. Of these, only three gave him real cause to worry, because of Republican infighting. In New York, the party was badly split, boding ill for the state’s all-important electoral-college vote. In Delaware, he was accused—with some justice—of being equivocal between two GOP factions, one of which was corrupt. And in Ohio, Tom L. Johnson’s run for Governor was threatening the legislative majority that Mark Hanna would need for re-election. Roosevelt hoped that Johnson would be beaten, because a Hanna happily back in the Senate would be a Hanna less likely to think of running for the presidency in 1904.
At least there was good news from London, where ElihuRoot, Henry Cabot Lodge, and George Turner won a near-total victory at the Alaska Boundary Tribunal. Canada was left with a few token islands. Lodge, overjoyed (insofar as a Brahmin could feel joyful about anything), wrote to say that Roosevelt should not worry about temporary setbacks to his domestic policy. Such things only “looked” bad, in contrast to his general popularity and success. “I think you are fundamentally just as strong as you ever were.”
If so—and Tuesday’s vote would tell—that political strength was secondary to the strength of will Roosevelt felt surging in himself with regard to coming events on the Isthmus. Now was the time to fulfill “not only the responsibilities, but the opportunities of the office.” Indeed, “Opportunity” was the title of his favorite Washington poem, by the late Senator John J. Ingalls, framed on the wall opposite his desk:
Master of human destinies am I!
Fame, love, and fortune on my footsteps wait;
Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate
Deserts and seas remote, and passing by
Hovel and mart and palace, soon or late
I knock unbidden once at every gate!
If sleeping, wake; if feasting, rise before
I turn away. It is the hour of fate,
And they who follow me reach every state
Mortals desire, and conquer every foe
Save death; but those who doubt or hesitate,
Condemned to failure, penury and woe,
Seek me in vain and uselessly implore.
I answer not, and I return no more!
Whatever happened in Colón or Panama City over the next few weeks—or days, or hours—he must, if necessary, occupy the canal zone and start the digging by main force.
ALL DAY LONG on Monday, 2 November, junta scouts scanned the sea northeast of Colón for signs of Bunau-Varilla’s promised gunboat. But they sighted nothing—not even the Colombian troop transport reportedly on its way. If the latter arrived first, their revolution would be much less sure of success.
The Nashville was, nevertheless, approaching at full speed, and Secretary Moody knew all about the troopship. In a series of orders approved by Roosevelt, the Dixie had been dispatched to follow in the Nashville’s wake, while the Boston, Marblehead, Concord, and Wyoming were cleared for Panama City.
The coordinated grace of these trajectories on Moody’s map board was deceptive. Straight lines could not render the communications errors, coaling delays, and bureaucratic blocks that slow any naval mobilization. The Dixie, now in Kingston, was unable to sail immediately, while the Pacific squadron, laboring down the Mexican coast, had yet to bypass Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the Isthmus remained quiet. Neither Bunau-Varilla (anxiously awaiting Amador’s confirmation cable in New York) nor Loomis were aware that the junta had postponed the revolution by forty-eight hours.
Now the plot was to wait until dawn on 4 November, giving the United States time to establish a strong naval presence off both coasts, before the pro forma arrest of Governor Obaldía in bed. All other government officials of any consequence would be jailed at the same time, with the exception of General Esteban Huertas, commander of the Panama City garrison and a willing, if expensive, recruit. Huertas’s battalion, plus two thousand veterans of earlier revolutions, three hundred railroad workers, and a like number of firemen, should establish order without much difficulty. A rocket would signal their success, and summon the liberated people of Panama City to the Plaza de Santa Ana. Then a declaration of independence (not Bunau-Varilla’s) would be read, and a new flag (not Bunau-Varilla’s) raised above the palm trees. Meanwhile, in Colón, the chief of police, Porfilio Meléndez, would proclaim the revolution there. By nightfall, all or most of Colombia’s three hundred thousand Istmusenos should be celebrating their new identities as Panamanians.
Two uncertainties, however, complicated this zarzuela scenario: Would the American gunboat arrive before the Colombian troopship? And could it be relied on to control events in Colón?
ROOSEVELT’S LAST TACTICAL move of the day was to approve a “secret and confidential” cable that addressed both questions. It ordered Commander John Hubbard of the Nashville to “maintain free and uninterrupted transit” across the Isthmus. If the transit seemed threatened by “any armed force with hostile intent,” he was to “occupy” the railroad line. Then, with repetitive emphasis:
PREVENT LANDING OF ANY ARMED FORCE WITH HOSTILE INTENT, EITHER GOVERNMENT OR INSURGENT.… GOVERNMENT FORCE REPORTED APPROACHING COLóN IN VESSELS. PREVENT THEIR LANDING IF IN YOUR JUDGMENT THIS WOULD PRECIPITATE A CONFLICT.
A similar order went out to Hubbard’s fellow commanders on the Pacific side.
Darkness settled over Washington. Two thousand miles south, in a warmer twilight, the Nashville dropped anchor off Colón.
INSTEAD OF RETIRING with Edith after dinner, Roosevelt boarded a special sleeper to New York. It was his habit every election eve to head homeward to vote. He enjoyed the ritual. If Panama chose to revolt now, it would have to do it without him.
He was awakened at 6:00 to prepare for transfer across Manhattan. At the same hour in Colón, first light disclosed another overnight arrival in the harbor: the Colombian troopship Cartagena. While the President bathed and breakfasted, Commander Hubbard sent an inspector aboard the Cartagena and found her to be swarming with tiradores, select sharpshooters of the Colombian Army. None of them seemed to have a clear idea of why they had been sent to the Isthmus—only that they had been ordered by General Juan Tovar to debark quickly.
On shore, Chief Meléndez and other junta agents braced for trouble. Colonel James Shaler, the sympathetic superintendent of the Panama Railroad, agreed that at all costs the tiradores must be kept from crossing over to Panama City. Yet Commander Hubbard, inexplicably, raised no objection to the debarkation.
Hubbard’s problem was that he had not yet received his secret orders from Washington. He had no more clue than the captain of the Cartagena as to why he had been ordered back to Colón. At 8:20 A.M., therefore, the troopship nosed up to the Panama Railroad dock, and five hundred tiradores came ashore, bristling with weaponry.
Simultaneously, Roosevelt crossed the East River in bright fall sunshine. Behind him, the towers of Manhattan scintillated. Electoral bunting flapped in the streets, and huge crowds—too huge for Republican comfort—lined up to vote. At 8:30 he reached the Long Island Rail Road pier, settled into a waiting “special,” and its whistle blew for Oyster Bay.
Another, very short private train prepared to depart Colón for Panama City. Colonel Shaler had rigged it to accommodate the Colombian battalion’s sixteen senior officers. As he seated them, he explained that Governor Obaldía was anxious to see General Tovar as soon as possible. The tiradores would follow later in the day, as soon as more rolling stock could be procured. Shaler’s courtly urgency overcame Tovar’s doubts, and the train pulled out of the depot, leaving behind five hundred puzzled soldiers. The wooden houses of Colón slipped by at increasing speed. Jungle crowded in, and vegetation slapped at the sides of the car. Tovar and his aides rode over the saddle of hills Roosevelt wanted to divide, swaying in chlorophyllous gloom, suspended between two oceans.
THE PRESIDENT VOTED above Yee Lee’s Laundry in Oyster Bay at five minutes before ten. Then he drove out along Cove Neck for a quick look at Sagamore Hill. The big house was shuttered and dark, ghostly with sheeted furniture. A heavy fume of camphor balls discouraged entry. He walked around the estate, and noticed that the old barn, where he had romped with so many of his children, was beginning to give way. Two dogs greeted him; a third stared indifferently. Japanese maples trembled in full, scarlet leaf, but most other trees were bare, exposing a wider panorama of Long Island Sound than he had seen all summer.
“THE BIG HOUSE WAS SHUTTERED AND DARK.”
Sagamore Hill in winter
After about a half hour fighting desolate emotions, he returned to his carriage and was driven back to Oyster Bay station.
AS ROOSEVELT DID SO, Commander Hubbard agonized over yesterday’s orders, which had at last come through to the Nashville. He did not quite understand them, still having no knowledge of the prerevolutionary situation in Panama. The tiradores did not look like a “force with hostile intent,” now that they had lost their leaders. They squatted under the arcades of Colón, chatting with women. Nor was there any sign, as far as Hubbard could see, of the “insurgent” threat Washington seemed to anticipate. He went ashore to interrogate Colonel Shaler about it, and quickly lost his innocence. Returning to the Nashville, he sent a cable to Washington:
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT MOVEMENT MAY BE MADE TONIGHT AT PANAMA TO DECLARE INDEPENDENCE, IN WHICH CASE I WILL PROTEST AGAINST TRANSIT OF TROOPS NOW HERE.
A certain lack of urgency at the railroad yard in collecting the cars necessary for such transit suggested that Hubbard would not have to do much protesting. Around 11:30, Shaler received a call confirming that General Tovar’s party had arrived in Panama City. It had been welcomed by an impressive delegation of civic leaders, headed by Governor Obaldía, and by General Huertas and the garrison guard, glittering in full dress uniform. The first order of business, of course, was to have the Governor’s office arrange for delivery of the tiradores—but while this was being done, Tovar and his staff were invited to join Obaldía for lunch and a siesta.
AT 2:34 P.M., ROOSEVELT’S special train pulled out of Jersey City for Washington. Facing six hours of travel, he remembered that Nicholas Murray Butler had asked him for a list of recommended books. It seemed like a strange request, coming from the President of Columbia University, yet deserving of a full answer. He cast his mind back over what he had read since taking the oath of office, and began to scribble.
Parts of Herodotus; the first and seventh books of Thucydides; all of Polybius; a little of Plutarch; Aeschylus’ Orestean Trilogy; Sophocles’ Seven Against Thebes; Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae; and Aristophanes’ Frogs. Parts of The Politics of Aristotle.
All these had been in translation. However, he had read, in French, the biographies of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, Henri Turenne, and John Sobieski. He had also browsed, if not deeply studied, Froissart on French history, Maspero on the early Syrian, Chaldean, and Egyptian civilizations, “and some six volumes of Mahaffey’s Studies of the Greek World.” What else?
The Memoirs of Marbot; Bain’s Life of Charles the Twelfth; Mahan’s Types of Naval Officers; some of Macaulay’s Essays; three or four volumes of Gibbon and three or four chapters of Motley. The battles in Carlyle’s Frederick the Great; Hay and Nicolay’s Lincoln, and the two volumes of Lincoln’s Speeches and Writings—these I have not only read through, but have read parts of them again and again; Bacon’s Essays … Macbeth; Twelfth Night; Henry the Fourth; Henry the Fifth; Richard the Second; the first two cantos of Milton’s Paradise Lost; some of Michael Drayton’s Poems—there are only three or four I care for; portions of the Nibelungenlied.…
ROOSEVELT HAD BARELY settled in his seat before the first hint of trouble in Panama reached the State Department. Hubbard’s early-morning dispatch from Colón had gone astray; this one came from Oscar Malmros, the United States Consul in Colón.
REVOLUTION IMMINENT … GOVERNMENT VESSEL CARTAGENA, WITH ABOUT 400 MEN, ARRIVED EARLY TODAY, WITH NEW COMMANDER IN CHIEF, TOVAR … NOT PROBABLE TO STOP REVOLUTION.
Washington was ill prepared to deal with such sudden news, since most of its top officials, including Root, Moody, and the President himself, were out of town on election trips. Assistant Secretary Loomis cabled Felix Ehrman, the United States Vice Consul in Panama City, ordering him to keep the State Department apprised of the situation in Panama City. Ehrman could reply only that it was “critical,” but not yet violent. Some sort of uprising was expected “in the night.”
Had the Vice Consul been better informed, he might have noticed the curious frequency with which deadlines of “five o’clock” recurred in local communications. Governor Obaldía had promised the increasingly desperate Tovar that his battalion would be delivered at that hour. The fire brigade was on notice to be ready for action then, and a freelance scribe assigned to write an important public proclamation had his contract amended accordingly. Word spread that there would be “a great mass meeting” in Plaza de Santa Ana at 5:00 P.M., and certain key citizens were told to bring guns.
… Church’s Beowulf; Morris’ translation of the Heimskringla, and Dasent’s translation of the sagas of Gisli and Burnt Njal; Lady Gregory’s and Miss Hull’s Cuchulain Saga together with The Children of Lir, The Children of Turin, The Tale of Deirdre, etc.; Les Précieuses Ridicules, Le Barbier de Séville; most of Jusserand’s books, of which I was most interested in his studies of the Kingis Quhair; Holmes’ Over the Teacups; Lounsbury’s Shakespeare and Voltaire; various numbers of the Edinburgh Review from 1803 to 1850; Tolstoi’s Sebastopol and The Cossacks; Sienkiewicz’s Fire and Sword, and parts of his other volumes; Guy Mannering; The Antiquary; Rob Roy; Waverley; Quentin Durward; parts of Marmion and the Lay of the Last Minstrel; Cooper’s Pilot; some of the earlier stories and poems of Bret Harte; Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer; Pickwick Papers; Nicholas Nickelby; Vanity Fair; Pendennis; The Newcomes; Adventures of Philip; Conan Doyle’s White Company.…
WHEN ELISEO TORRES, the young colonel whom General Tovar had left in command of the tiradores, asked Colonel Shaler when his men might expect to cross the Isthmus, he received a variety of answers. At first Shaler repeated Obaldía’s promise of delivery by five, but when that hour drew near, the railroad suddenly demanded advance payment of all fares. Torres, who had no money, was quick-thinking enough to insist on the government of Colombia’s right to transport troops on credit. Consul Malmros, overhearing, confirmed that such a right was written into the railroad’s concession. Shaler did not contest this, but noted that the concession also called for the Governor of Panama’s signature on all military travel requisitions. Also there was still the question of a shortage of available cars, most of the railroad’s rolling stock unfortunately being on the other side of the Isthmus.
Torres waxed more and more angry. Shaler had to admit, quietly to Chief Meléndez, that the railroad could not stall much longer without jeopardizing its treaty privileges. Torres could probably be held off until sunset, when trains stopped running anyway. But some cars were going to have to be laid on in the morning, unless Shaler received “written orders of the United States Government to refuse the transportation.”
ROOSEVELT RECALLED PLOWING through Charles Lever’s Charles O’Malley and some Brockden Brown novels with little real enjoyment, during the period when he was confined by his leg injury. Keats, Browning, Poe, Tennyson, Longfellow, Kipling, Bliss Carmen, Lowell, Stevenson, Allingham, and Leopold Wagner were more to his taste, and he had spent many enjoyable hours in their literary company. He had read aloud to his children (“and often finished afterwards to myself”) the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Howard Pyle. As for Joel Chandler Harris, “I would be willing to rest all I have done in the South as regards the negro in his story ‘Free Joe.’ ”
FIVE O’CLOCK CAME and went in Colón without any word of a disturbance in Panama City. The cable and railroad offices prepared to shut down for the night. Commander Hubbard came ashore again from the Nashville, and heard with concern that Shaler was resigned to transporting the government battalion in the morning. But before he could object, at 5:49 P.M., a call came through from Herbert G. Prescott, Shaler’s deputy at the Pacific terminus. Strangely, Prescott wanted to speak to Chief Meléndez. His message was a coded one—indicating that Prescott, too, was an agent of the junta, and saying that the revolution was “about to begin.”
Subsequent calls made clear that General Tovar and his senior staff had already been arrested at the order of General Huertas. Governor Obaldía was next (surrendering with the utmost equanimity), and by 6:00 P.M. the junta had started reorganizing itself as a “Provisional Government.” Its official documents and proclamations showed that the elderly Dr. Amador held little real power. The executive signatures were always those of José Augustin Arango, Federico Boyd, and Tomas Arias.
One of their first official acts was to send Shaler a telegram warning him, in the strongest terms, “not to accede” to any request for transportation of the tiradores. “This act would be of grave consequences for the company you represent.”
KENNETH GRAHAME. Somerville and Ross. Conrad. Artemus Ward. Octave Thanet. Viljoen. Stevens. Peer. Burroughs. Swettenham. Gray. Janvier. London. Fox. Garland. Tarkington. Churchill. Remington. Wister. White. Trevelyan …
By the time Roosevelt tired of jotting, he had listed 114 author names. “Of course I have forgotten a great many.” His catalog did not strike him as impressive. “About as interesting,” he concluded, “as Homer’s Catalogue of the Ships.”
He dozed off several times as the train raced south. Night fell. The weather was still mild and clear. Democratic weather. Faceless stations whizzed by in the dark. Sooner than expected, Washington loomed ahead. At 8:14 he alighted at Sixth Street Station. A reporter pushed an election dispatch into his hand. He stopped and read it under the bright platform lights. The Republican Party had suffered a landslide defeat in New York.
Refusing comment, Roosevelt shook hands with the locomotive crew, then climbed into a waiting White House carriage. It rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue past the Evening Star and Post buildings, only half noticed by crowds peering up at giant, illuminated stereopticon screens. Preliminary polling figures alternated with celebrity portraits and comic “moving pictures.” By 9:00, Roosevelt had arrived in the West Wing telegraph room to check on further results. But Loomis was there with a cable that drove all thoughts of the election from his mind. It was Vice Consul Ehrman’s nervous message of five hours before. Now, Ehrman cabled again:
UPRISING OCCURRED TONIGHT, SIX. NO BLOODSHED. ARMY AND NAVY OFFICIALS TAKEN PRISONERS. GOVERNMENT WILL BE ORGANIZED TONIGHT, CONSISTING OF THREE CONSULS, ALSO CABINET. SUPPOSED SAME MOVEMENT WILL BE EFFECTED IN COLóN. ORDER PREVAILS SO FAR. SITUATION SERIOUS. FOUR HUNDRED SOLDIERS LANDED TODAY. BARRANQUILLA.
Roosevelt sent at once for his top State and Navy Department aides. Hay arrived within minutes, accompanied by Loomis. Moody was still out of town, so his second in command, Charles H. Darling, came instead, followed by Admiral Taylor, Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, and two assistant officers. A crisis conference began in the President’s office.
Ehrman’s “no bloodshed” was good news, and Arango, Boyd, and Arias seemed to be going about their business efficiently so far. But the presence of those soldiers in Colón was indeed “serious” (and would look even more so when Roosevelt found out there were five hundred, not four). The Nashville was so far the only American presence on either side of the Isthmus. Hubbard’s guns and Marines might, or might not, be enough to stop the government battalion from crossing over and quashing the revolution.
All the more reason, therefore, to keep Tovar’s troops on the Caribbean side. But “reason” of a legal nature must be found in the treaty of 1846. Roosevelt was aware that early in his own presidency, the State Department had blocked a shipment of rebel arms along the railroad, on the ground that they might be used to prevent further transport of anything. Could the same scruple now justify blocking a shipment of government soldiers, whose only mission was to maintain the integrity of the Colombian federation?
Apparently, it could. Roosevelt authorized a draft set of instructions for the Navy Department to set in cipher, and cable immediately:
For NASHVILLE. In the interests of peace do everything possible to prevent government troops from proceeding to Panama [City]. The transit must be kept open and order maintained.
Direct the ATLANTA to proceed with all speed to Colón.
Also the BOSTON [to Panama City].
Repeat all of yesterday’s orders.
Remarkable in this document was its lack of any reference to the “strict neutrality” imposed upon American commanders in earlier Isthmian crises.
By 10:30 P.M., the specific order to Commander Hubbard was ready for transmission and signed by Hay. Further cables went to the other ships involved, although their urgency was largely symbolic. The Atlanta had to finish stoking up in Kingston before it could join the Nashville; the Boston had not yet cleared Honduras; the rest of the Pacific Squadron would need three more days to get to Panama City. At least the Dixie was nearing Colón, where Hubbard could doubtless use it.
Up Pennsylvania Avenue, the stereopticon watchers were roaring, as result after result flickered onto the screens. Mayor Seth Low of New York City had conceded defeat. A Democratic rout was announced in Maryland. Especially loud cheers, around eleven o’clock, signaled a triumph for “Hanna Republicans” in Ohio.
The White House conference broke up fifteen minutes later, after another cable from Panama City announced that a government gunboat had tossed five or six shells into the city, “killing a Chinaman in Salsipuedes street and mortally wounding an ass.” If that was the extent of Colombia’s rage so far, a tired President could get some sleep.
THE BIG WORD REVOLUTION crowded election results on the right-hand side of the front page of The Washington Post the next morning. Most other newspapers, however, treated the story from Panama City as if it were the final, entirely predictable installment of a serial that had begun well but lost its power of suspense. In any case, the New York World had given away the ending nearly four months before—even forecasting yesterday’s date. This temporary lack of interest (the story being by no means over) enabled Roosevelt, Hay, Loomis, and Darling to concentrate on the worsening crisis in Colón.
Commander Hubbard, by triple authority of the White House and the State and Navy Departments, had issued a denial of rail transport to the tiradores. (They were free to march across the Isthmus, if they liked, on a mud trail two feet wide, through one of the wettest jungles in the world.) Hubbard informed Colonel Shaler in writing that any redistribution of troops, loyal or revolutionary, “must bring about a conflict and threaten that free and uninterrupted transit of the Isthmus which the Government of the United States is pledged to maintain.” He had sent an early copy of this order to Colonel Torres, emphasizing that it applied to both sides, and trusting in his “cordial” cooperation.
Torres reacted with cordial fury. He was still unaware of what had happened in Panama City, but he had grown increasingly nervous since the departure of his commanding officers. Their silence was suspicious, as was Hubbard’s cryptic reference to a possible “conflict.” Did the commander mean a clash with insurrectos inland, or an international battle right here on the Colón waterfront? Torres knew only that an American naval officer was denying him the right to cross his own country.
The mid-morning train from Panama City arrived, bringing the first unofficial news of yesterday’s uprising. Porfirio Meléndez offered to buy Torres a drink. Under soothing fans at the Astor Hotel, he confirmed that Panama had seceded from Colombia. The new republic’s security had been guaranteed by the United States, which was sending more warships. General Tovar was in jail, along with his fellow officers, and so was Governor Obaldía. All Panamanians supported the revolution, so resistance was “entirely useless.” If Colonel Torres would be so good as to order his men to surrender their arms, the junta would provide rations and passage back to Barranquilla.
Torres went in a frenzy to the prefect of Colón and told him to deliver an ultimatum to Consul Malmros. Unless Tovar and Amaya were freed by 2:00 P.M., he would open fire on the town “and kill every U.S. citizen in the place.”
When Commander Hubbard heard of this threat, shortly after one o’clock, he took it as tantamount to “war against the United States.” All male Americans in Colón were ordered to take cover in Shaler’s stone depot, while their women and children were rushed aboard steamers in the harbor. Forty-two heavily armed Marines simultaneously came ashore to defend the railroad, while the Nashville patrolled the waterfront. Its guns covered the town at boardwalk level.
Undeterred, Torres’s five hundred men surrounded the railroad yard.
IN WASHINGTON, the President lunched with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—“one of the most interesting men I have ever met”—and Sir Frederick Pollock, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University. Roosevelt enjoyed their company, yet remained temperamentally unable to understand the workings of minds more concerned with reason than power.
In New York, Philippe Bunau-Varilla decoded a cable from his friend “Smith” in Panama City. It was not, as he expected, his appointment as the new republic’s Minister Plenipotentiary, but a pressing demand for one hundred thousand pesos. He decided to send half that amount. Fifty thousand pesos equaled about twenty-five thousand dollars, or one quarter of his total pledge. If junta members wanted the rest, they would have to make good on the ministership—and certify that they held both coasts. The United States was not likely to dig a canal on only one side of the continental divide.
“With all the insistence possible,” he cabled back, “I recommend you to seize Colón.”
COLONEL TORRES, closeted with Chief Meléndez, let his 2:00 P.M. deadline pass. For another hour and a quarter, Colombians and Americans continued to draw beads on each other across the railroad yard. The tension increased as the Cartagena, which had raised anchor after the Nashville lowered its guns, steamed toward the horizon at a speed suggesting she sought safety beyond it. Now that they had lost their troopship, the tiradores were more than ever compelled to stand and fight.
Then Torres approached the depot, smiling. Evidently there had been some pecuniary progress in his negotiations with Chief Meléndez. He told Colonel Hubbard that he now felt “most friendly” toward the United States. But he needed an authorization from his captive leader before he called off his men. Colonel Shaler undertook to transport a pair of Colombian envoys to Panama City for that purpose, and Commander Hubbard promised them safe conduct. After their special train had puffed off, Torres and Hubbard agreed to a mutual, modified fallback. The Marines would retire to the Nashville, and the battalion would camp on a hill outside town, while Colón would be left under the control of Chief Meléndez.
A state of unnatural calm settled over the shabby little port, even as Panama City, where the first revolutionary bonuses had just been paid out in silver, abandoned itself to wild celebrations. In Bogotá, mobs raged through the streets and stoned President Marroquín’s house. And in Washington, Roosevelt and Hay worried over a cable from Malmros: PANAMA IN POSSESSION OF COMMITTEE WITH CONSENT OF ENTIRE POPULATION…. COLON IN THE POSSESSION OF THE GOVERNMENT.
And in New York, a naval emissary boarded a steamer of the Panama Railroad Company with a secret package addressed to the commander-in-chief of the North Atlantic Fleet. It contained war plans for an emergency occupation of the Isthmus.
COLONEL HUBBARD WENT ashore early on Thursday, 5 November, to find the tiradores (rendered irritable by mosquito bites) about to re-enter town. Torres said he had to be ready for the orders of General Tovar, due when his envoys arrived on the mid-morning train. Hubbard, infuriated, once more landed Marines, mounted cannons around the depot, and sent American women and children to safety. The Nashville resumed its sweep of the waterfront.
To popular relief, the envoys brought no orders, written or oral, from General Tovar. He declined to command from the depths of a jail cell; he merely expressed confidence that Colonel Torres “would always do his duty.” Chief Meléndez, scenting capitulation, reappeared at Torres’s elbow. The colonel blustered bravely all day; then, shortly before sunset, he agreed to accept an “indemnity” of eight thousand dollars advanced by Colonel Shaler. The money was counted out in cash. For another thousand dollars’ credit (guaranteed by Colonel Hubbard), the captain of the Royal Mail Company steamship Orinoco agreed to transport the tiradores home. Torres plodded aboard with his sacks of American gold. Four hundred and sixty men and thirteen women followed him up the gangplank. Shaler sent a farewell gift of two cases of champagne.
Just then, at 7:05 P.M., the Dixie arrived in Colón harbor. It docked rapidly, undeterred by a violent rainstorm, and disgorged four hundred Marines. But their services were not needed. The Orinoco was already under way, and the Panamanian flag rose above Casa Meléndez.
ROOSEVELT’S CABINET MEETING on the morning of Friday, 6 November, was devoted exclusively to Panama. Hay and Moody presented their latest consular dispatches, inaccurately reporting peace, stability, and rejoicing all over the Isthmus. A cable from Arango, Boyd, and Arias confirmed that “Señor Philippe Bunau-Varilla” had been appointed their “envoy extraordinary” in Washington, “with full powers to conduct diplomatic and financial negotiations.” (For Bunau-Varilla, sitting on his money in New York, that title was not yet good enough.)
There was no doubt what the junta wanted: diplomatic recognition of the Republic of Panama. Roosevelt and Hay were willing to extend such courtesy, now that the entire width of the Isthmus had been secured. The delicate question was when. A prompt announcement might forestall any attempt by Colombia to reclaim the Isthmus with a much larger military force. Panama, organized and recognized, could legitimately ask for American aid in repelling “foreign” invaders—and seven American warships were on hand to comply. All the same, there was such a thing as indecent haste. Questions were being asked in British newspapers about Commander Hubbard’s denial of transit rights to the tiradores.
Roosevelt did not feel the world as a whole would long deplore their repatriation to Barranquilla. All his readings in history and geography, all his thrusting Americanism, “every consideration of international morality and expediency,” told him that after four hundred years of dreams and twenty years of planning, the Panama Canal’s time had come. Colombia was clearly guilty of fatal insolence. Panama deserved the thanks—and support—of other self-determinant nations for her “most just and proper revolution.”
Shortly before lunch, the Cabinet meeting broke up. Hay returned to the State Department and cabled a message to Consul Ehrman in Panama City.
THE PEOPLE OF PANAMA HAVE, BY AN APPARENTLY UNANIMOUS MOVEMENT, DISSOLVED THEIR POLITICAL CONNECTION WITH THE REPUBLIC OF COLOMBIA AND RESUMED THEIR INDEPENDENCE. WHEN YOU ARE SATISFIED THAT A DE FACTO GOVERNMENT, REPUBLICAN IN FORM, AND WITHOUT SUBSTANTIAL OPPOSITION FROM ITS OWN PEOPLE, HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE STATE OF PANAMA, YOU WILL ENTER INTO RELATIONS WITH IT.
The time was 12:51 P.M.; the infant republic had been in existence not quite sixty-seven hours.
ROOSEVELT ADJOURNED TO LUNCH. One of his guests was Oscar Straus, whose understanding of international law, commerce, and diplomacy increasingly impressed him. Musing aloud, Roosevelt wondered about the validity of the 1846 treaty, in that it had been contracted with New Granada. Did American obligations to an extinct federation still apply in 1903?
Straus suggested that the treaty was contracted only with the legitimate “holders” of the Isthmus. American rights related to the territory, which was unchangeable. “Our claim must be based upon what is known in law as ‘a covenant running with the land.’ ”
Roosevelt seized upon the words with delight. That evening, an announcement of provisional recognition of Panama, issued by the Secretary of State, quoted Straus’s dictum. Hay was careful to add the phrase as lawyers say, and equally careful to eschew any reference to himself. His first words were, “The action of the President in the Panama matter,” and he identified Theodore Roosevelt no fewer than sixteen times in the next twenty paragraphs. “The imperative demands of the interests of civilization required him to put a stop … to the incessant civil contests and bickerings which have been for so many years the curse of Panama.”
Professor John Bassett Moore was pleased to see some of his own language in the announcement, and sent Straus a note of mutual congratulation. “Perhaps, however, it is only a question … of the ‘covenant running away with the land’!!”