IT TOOK THE ST. PAUL a week to reach England, and Porter, who had turned sixty just a month earlier, spent a lot of the crossing thinking about his upcoming role as the US ambassador to France. Thinking, in fact, about what the proper role of an ambassador should be.1 It was a fairly new job in the American diplomatic corps. In the years after the Civil War, being an American emissary was little more than a patronage scheme, a place for the well connected and the adventurous to enrich themselves in the name of the US government.
In 1893, the State Department was reorganized as the United States began paying more attention to foreign relations and to its place in the world. Until then, the highest possible rank available to an American emissary was minister, which in the world of international protocol was a rung down the ladder from an ambassador, who traditionally represented royal courts. By now declaring their top diplomats ambassadors, the US government put its representatives on equal footing in foreign capitals with emissaries from the great nations of Europe and around the globe. It was as though the upstarts from the New World were inviting themselves to the adult table.
President Cleveland opened the first American embassies in England, Germany, Italy, and France, where the United States had stationed a representative ever since Benjamin Franklin arrived to persuade Louis XVI to side with the colonial rebels against France’s recurring enemy, Britain. The first representative to hold the new rank of ambassador was Thomas F. Bayard, whom President Cleveland sent to London just a few weeks before he appointed James B. Eustis—the man Porter was replacing—to France. Porter understood the significance of the job he was undertaking. He would be the connection between the US government and that of France, the nation’s oldest ally, as well as a link between old Europe and new America. He also saw his role as representing American industry and pursuing policies and lobbying efforts that would improve trade between US businesses and France, as well as the rest of Europe. And he had to act and live accordingly.2
The St. Paul arrived in Southampton, England, on the afternoon of May 12, 1897. Porter’s wife, Sophie, and daughter, Elsie, went on to London, where they planned to spend a month touring and visiting friends while Porter settled into his office in Paris. The ambassador spent the evening at the port, then boarded a midnight steamship from Southampton to Havre, where he transferred to a train and arrived in Paris late in the morning on May 13. It’s unclear whether John Gowdy, who also sailed on the St. Paul to assume his post as consul general, was on the same train, but he arrived in Paris around the same day.
Porter was met on the platform by a small party of fellow Americans led by Eustis, the departing ambassador, who was a Confederate war veteran and former US senator from Louisiana.3 The welcoming party also included two other Confederate veterans: the embassy’s first secretary, Henry Vignaud, another Louisianan who first went to Paris in 1862 as an aide to the Confederate minister to France, and Arthur Bailly-Blanchard, a New Orleans native who did occasional work for the embassy. A smattering of other embassy officials and Americans living or working in Paris at the time were there too, including former Union army general Edward Winslow, an old friend of Porter’s who had agreed to host the new ambassador while he searched for a home of his own. And that would prove to be no easy task.
The American embassy occupied part of a five-story building at 59 Rue Galilée, a narrow cross street a few blocks southeast of where the Arc de Triomphe anchored the western end of the Champs-Élysées. The embassy was all offices, with no living quarters for the ambassador, a function of the US government’s policy to not provide housing for its emissaries. And it was much too small for the staff. Weeks before Porter stepped aboard the St. Paul to sail to Europe, Vignaud, the embassy’s first secretary, had written him about the need for more space. Porter agreed. “When I last saw the office rooms they did not appear to be in keeping with the dignity of the Embassy,” Porter had replied. “I appreciate the importance of moving promptly in the matter, and I have no doubt with your intimate knowledge of all the requirements you will be able to select eligible new quarters. I should think that they ought not to be a great distance from the present location, as Americans have been accustomed to finding the Embassy in that part of the city.”4
Vignaud eventually found larger space in a five-story building at 18 Avenue Kleber, some five hundred yards west of the existing embassy and still near the Arc de Triomphe. Porter quickly approved Vignaud’s selection and made the pitch to the secretary of state, John Sherman, in Washington. “The new quarters will consist of a suite of rooms on the ground floor and a very large apartment on the second floor in a house,” which he described as being on “one of the finest streets in this part of Paris.” In addition, he declared that it was “by far the best quarters to be found for anything like the price of 8,000 francs per year. The present quarters were not fit for a legation and are totally inadequate for an Embassy. There is not even space for the archives and the rooms do not rise to the dignity of the ‘shabby genteel.’ The new location will be a matter of congratulation to all who have had to visit the present offices.” Sherman wired back that he approved, though he told Porter that regulations barred leases longer than two years.5
Porter also decided that the US ambassador’s residence needed to be grand, an emblem of wealth and success, and large enough to host receptions and other diplomatic social obligations. So his first efforts after arriving in Paris were focused less on representing the United States than on meeting with brokers, inspecting buildings, and trying to fight off the inflated prices he was quoted once it was learned the potential renter was the new American ambassador.
It took more than a month, but Porter eventually found the right spot, a mansion at 33 Rue de Villejust, a short street linking Avenue Victor Hugo and Avenue Bois de Boulogne just three blocks southwest of the Arc de Triomphe. Porter thought the space was perfect for what he wanted: big and roomy, it exuded a sense of contemporary wealth, with enough trappings of old Europe to give visitors a sense that this was the home of a serious man. Porter was leery of European prejudices against Americans, who were seen as brash, uncouth, money-hungry upstarts. Porter sought to project an image of modernity and business competence, but also of long-term stability. And he paid for it out of his own pocket, an annual rate about equal to his ambassadorial salary of $17,500—which meant the wealthy one-time railroad executive and former presidential aide was essentially working for free.
The mansion was in the heart of the upper-class sixteenth arrondissement, which was the anchor of the expatriate American colony and home to a few notable French as well. Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot and her husband, Eugène Manet, younger brother to painter Édouard Manet, had lived up the street until their deaths a few years earlier. The place “suits me to a T,” Porter wrote. “The reception floor is as large as the entire second floor of Union League Club and with the garden etc. it enables me to receive any number of people.”6 The building and grounds had been owned and renovated by art dealer Frederic Spitzer, who died in 1890 after amassing one of France’s premier private collections of art and medieval relics (and restoring many objects—with subsequent controversy over whether some of the items he sold were forgeries). A portion of the collection was still in the mansion and included in the rental agreement. “I raked this city with a fine-toothed comb to find a house into which I would not be ashamed to take the folks when they come to see me…. It is in the best quarter of the city, has no end of rooms for receptions, is filled with old tapestries, interesting old art objects, etc., so that I am very fortunate in a matter really so important in this Capital.”7
The Porters moved into the Spitzer mansion in time to host a formal reception on the eve of the American Fourth of July celebration, relatively meaningless to the French but significant for the expatriate community in Paris. In a sense, it was a coming-out party for the new ambassador. Following the directions of the French protocol office, Porter invited top French officials as well as all the ambassadors in residence in Paris and their families. Porter, to send a message of independence, also broke with protocol and invited another two hundred expatriate American families, bringing the top businessmen into close contact not only with French officials but also with the top delegates from other countries represented in France. Some 1,500 people ultimately were invited, and they streamed into the mansion, the most notable couples pausing to be announced by “a tall, pompous man in black, with knee-breeches, a silver chain around his neck, a rod in his hand and a voice like a megaphone.”8 Porter and his wife waited on a landing of the sweeping staircase to greet each arriving guest as they passed through the large salle d’armes and then on up to the main ballroom on the second floor. Porter wore a deep-black suit; Sophie was in a white satin dress with silver accents, wearing “diamonds around her neck and in her hair.” They made for an impressive-looking couple.
Two days later, the Porters hosted a second, less formal reception celebrating American independence, to which, via newspaper ads, they invited every American living in Paris at the time. “His house is splendid—the finest any of our representatives have ever had here, and the American colony is tickled to death,” William S. Sims, the embassy’s naval attaché, wrote to his mother. “General Porter saws wood [note: Sims used the expression to mean “works hard”] and doesn’t bother anybody. Mrs. Porter is very nice. The daughter is a ‘kid’ of 17 and a right good-looking girl. None of them speak French well, unfortunately, but you needn’t say I said so.”9 More than two thousand people streamed through the Porters’ new residence and small grounds that day. “They all had something to eat and drink and wound up with a dance and were set ahead about ten years in their patriotism,” the ambassador later bragged to Hanna.10 The Porters had indeed arrived.
And Paris was teeming with Americans, drawn by an endless fascination with the city. The Paris Commune was of particular interest, even though it didn’t last very long and the socialistic underpinning of the occupation was diametrically opposed to the predominant American procapitalism ethos. The Commune arose in the aftermath of a losing war with Prussia, when socialists and workers seized political control of Paris in the spring of 1871 and self-organized into the Paris Commune. They elected workers, professionals, radicals, and small businessmen to an eighty-one-member Commune council and began pushing a worker-centric set of reforms, including free education and the right of workers to take over closed businesses.
It was a short-lived workers’ paradise. In May, the national army attacked the city. It was a rout, with more than twenty thousand Communards killed, compared with about one thousand army fatalities. The fighting was marked by atrocities on both sides, including the killing of hostages and the torching of key government buildings by the Communards. The army was by far the worst of the transgressors, however, conducting summary executions. They chased the last few remaining Communards into the Père Lachaise cemetery, where they captured 147 of the rebels, lined them up against the southeast wall, and shot them. The bodies were tossed into mass grave pits that quickly filled with other Communard bodies dragged in from all quarters of the city. A week after the battle for Paris began, the Commune was lost.11
By the 1890s, popular books revisiting the Commune, from children’s adventure tales to historical romances, adult novels, and memoirs, had become a genre of their own, leading one unidentified literary critic to write, “We have had the Commune from the point of view of the novelist ad nauseam.”12 Paris held a romantic fascination across the classes; wealthy tourists used Paris as a hub for visits to other parts of Europe, while bohemian artists sought inspiration among the living French painters and in the museums.
George Dyer, the US naval attaché to Madrid, spent several weeks in Paris with his family, including daughter Susan, renting rooms on Rue de Clichy, a few blocks northeast of the Gare Saint-Lazare train station. “It is a great house built around a court with the front doors inside, and is more like a hotel than a boarding house,” the daughter wrote in her diary, an evocative view by a teenage girl of those days in Paris.13 As her father tended to business, Susan and her mother joined the throngs of American tourists visiting museums and shops, which she found more interesting than those in New York City, but just as expensive. She spent each late afternoon, weather permitting, strolling through the city streets, picking a different area to visit with each walk. In early December, the Christmas displays filled shop windows along Rue de la Paix, just north of the Tuileries and the Louvre, where “the street is lined with jewelers’ stores, as it was dark and everything was lighted up it made a brilliant display. We stopped and chose things out of every window and were just as contented as if we had them in reality.” Evenings out centered on the opera and ballet performances, but also the Folies Bergère, where the young Miss Dyer “saw the best variety show of my life,” though “I could have dispensed with … the ‘ballet’ (so-called). It was too suggestive and Frenchy—I looked at the ceiling most of the time. A woman all but undressed on the stage. Such a thing would not be allowed at Keith’s or Proctor’s in New York.”14
Ambassador Porter took in some of the sights, but his focus was primarily on promoting American business and trade through social connections, in effect recreating his life in New York. His approach differed from the embassy’s standard practice, and Porter fought something like a cultural intransigence. “He wants to work the society racket, so they say, but he is in hard luck with his staff,” Sims wrote. “His first secretary and the military attaché are men who don’t ‘go out’ at all, and you know how much use the naval attaché is in that line.”15 Porter had to go it alone. He issued and accepted an endless stream of dinner invitations and quickly got to know the French leaders, particularly President Félix Faure, with whom he struck up a fast friendship. Faure regularly invited Porter and his wife to his private box at the opera, as well as garden parties and days at the racetrack, a favorite of the diminutive president.
Porter used that friendship to impress visiting Americans, such as Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central Railroad and future US senator from New York, who “went away the most tickled man you ever saw. I made a special request of the president to invite D[epew] to a little theatrical entertainment he was to give at the palace in honor of the Prince and Princess of Bulgaria. This was granted and I took Chauncey with me, presented him to the President, Mrs. Faure and their daughter, and a number of ministers and he ‘underwent’ no end of delight. I did not hear any sore-head talk from him while here.”16
Porter regarded Faure as “a man of distinguished presence, extremely courteous in manner, possessed of real tact, unpretentious but not lacking in dignity, and understands the French people thoroughly.” In reality, Faure was something of an accidental leader, having won the presidency during a fractured convention. He was elected primarily because he offended no specific interests in French political society. Porter might well have seen a bit of himself in the French president. They shared military backgrounds—Faure had been minister of the French navy—and they both had become wealthy through industry, Faure as a leather merchant and Porter in railroads. But there they split. Where Porter embraced a sense of personal conservatism—he’d wear an overcoat until it all but fell apart—Faure “was passionate and expansive” with great appetites for good food, fine clothing, and compliant women. Yet he was a moderate when it came to political affairs, which at the time in France were decidedly unsettled.17
The late 1890s coincided with the third decade of what would be a seven-decade run for the French Third Republic. (It would collapse under the onslaught from Nazi Germany.) Porter’s arrival came as the nation was struggling with searing and divisive issues, from the role of the Roman Catholic Church in an increasingly secularized society and government to simmering class divisions that had led to the insurrection and then brutal suppression of the Paris Commune uprising just twenty-five years earlier. Violent anarchists continued to agitate for reforms and revolution, which made for a murderous time. French president Marie François Sadi Carnot was assassinated in Lyon in June 1894 by Italian anarchist Santo Caserio, part of a spree of killings and assaults by the radicals that swept through Europe. Faure himself was the target of botched assassination attempts on July 14, 1896, when a gunman opened fire but missed as Faure’s carriage rolled through Bois de Boulogne, and on June 13, 1897, when a pipe bomb was detonated as his carriage rolled past a thicket, again in Bois de Boulogne en route to the Longchamp racecourse for the Grand Prix horse race. Both would-be assassins were captured and deemed insane, rather than anarchists, though the latter is what they seemed to have been.
Internationally, the European powers—including France—were near the end of the race to colonize the African continent even as they struggled to maintain a military balance in Europe itself. France had declared war on Prussia in 1870 in hopes of maintaining its dominance over Europe. Instead, it suffered a humiliating defeat and saw its power and influence fall as the German states united. By 1897 France was still struggling for power and position, and tensions among the major powers ebbed and flowed as they sought the upper hand in backwaters and byways in the heart of Africa. King Leopold of Belgium was setting a high bar for inhumane acts through his brutal exploitation of the Congo.18
Porter, though, focused on little of that. He was a man of business more than diplomacy; updates on French tariff legislation and a looming meeting in Paris on bimetallism dominated his communications with Sherman, his boss back in Washington. McKinley had appointed a three-member bimetallism commission to represent the United States’ view that the nation would pin the value of its currency to both gold and silver if the European powers did the same. The commission arrived in Paris around the same time as Porter and waited for his credentials to be presented formally to the French before beginning its work. Porter also regularly met with Americans touring Europe. “I cannot feel lonesome as I spend half of every day receiving Americans at the Embassy; still I miss the folks at home, and wait with eagerness for American news.”19
For all the whirl of social Paris that Porter encountered, high society was in a state of deep depression in the late spring and early summer of 1897. Each spring since 1885, wives of the city’s most prominent men had come together for the annual Bazar de la Charité, in which they staffed booths selling a range of fashionable products to raise money for dozens of Catholic charitable organizations working in Paris. Over time, the event had evolved into a sprawling temporary enclave of stitched-together booths and stalls under a massive roof. It was also an affirmation of the social and political power of the Catholic aristocracy, a vibrant symbol of old France even as the new France, in the form of the occasionally anticlerical Third Republic, looked ahead to the next millennium.20
The 1897 incarnation of the Bazar was modeled after a medieval Parisian street and built on an open lot, measuring 300 feet by 150 feet, just off Rue Jean-Goujon on the Right Bank near the Grand Palais. While open at the street, the lot was surrounded on the other three sides by adjoining walls, rising as high as fifteen feet, and multistory buildings. Into that was nestled the temporary superstructure, measuring some 240 feet along the road and about 40 feet deep. The walls were wooden tongue-and-groove panels pieced together beneath a glassed skylight that ran along the ridge of the slightly angled roof, the rest of which was covered with tar paper. A ceiling of suspended canvas hid the trusses from view within the rooms. There were two side-by-side doors in the middle of the structure at the sidewalk, and four other doors at the back, though they were hidden from the view of people inside the building. Wooden planks laid across wooden beams flat on the ground formed the floor. Each charity booth was elaborately decorated with paper and other highly flammable objects—all in all, a recipe for disaster.
And the disaster came. On the afternoon of May 4, some 1,200 members of mostly Catholic Parisian society—given the time of day, nearly all were women and children—milled through the Bazar. It was a place to be seen, so the women dressed in their finest, long frilly gowns of multiple layers, and bonnets or hats. It was spring, so many wore cloaks which they checked at a booth near the door where they entered, setting something of a mental marker for where to find an exit in a hurry. One of the displays featured a cinematograph, an early movie projector, in a closed room near the main entrance. The lamp was placed too close to a container of oil, and the heat ignited the flammable liquid. Panic broke out in the full theater as the fire, fueled by a strong breeze coursing through the loose construction, quickly consumed wood and paper and frilly decorations and chased moviegoers into the main hallway. Flames sprinted along the underside of the roof and blew out some of the skylights, creating a chimney for the conflagration—and fueling its terrifying growth. Flaming joists and tar paper rained down on the crowd of screaming women and children in their loose and flammable finery, a mass of humanity unable to find the exits.
“There is no doubt that many of the visitors practically died where they stood at the time of the outbreak, being enveloped almost immediately in the burning canvas which fell from above,” British fire inspector Edwin O. Sachs wrote after reviewing the fire. “Of the others who succumbed, many were entrapped either by being cut off from the exit; by finding these blocked when they reached them, or by not knowing their exact position. Of those who escaped by the principal exits, a large number were injured by the crush at the doors.”21
Some 130 people, the vast majority of them women and children, were killed; a high percentage of them burned to death. More than 450 others suffered injuries ranging from slight to critical, with scores deeply scarred both physically and emotionally. Many of the dead were charred beyond recognition and had to be identified by partially melted jewelry as their blackened and shrunken bodies were laid out side by side in the nearby Palais de l’Industrie, pressed into service as a makeshift morgue.
The fire broke out the day before the Porters boarded their ship for Paris. By the time they arrived, the first shock of the catastrophe had given way to angry finger-pointing—three organizers eventually would be tried for negligence in the design and operation of the bazaar—but the city was dominated primarily by deep, profound sadness. Given the intermarriage of the city’s elite, few families were untouched by the tragedy, and the social fabric of the aristocracy was shredded as families were suddenly motherless and a number of new widowers also found themselves without one or more of their children.
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.”22
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.23
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.24
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.