Jesse Alemán
On July 8, 1864, Washington, D.C.’s Daily National Intelligencer ran a short ad announcing books received for sale. Included in William Ballantyne’s new stock were The Life of Lieutenant General U.S. Grant by Major Penniman for $1.25; The Maine Woods by H. D. Thoreau, also for five bits; Haunted Hearts by the author of The Lamplighter, Maria S. Cummins, and The Poor White, or the Rebel Conscript by Emily Clemens Pearson, which topped the list at $2.00 each; and for a buck-fifty, Libby Life by Lt. Col. F. F. Cavada.1 At first glance, the list seems indicative of the era’s literary history—a celebratory biography of a rising Civil War star; a meditative travel narrative by a declining transcendentalist; and two narratives by women which prove that even the Civil War couldn’t snuff out readers willing to shell out a full day’s pay for most skilled laborers for gothic romance and Union propaganda. And then somewhere in between history, transcendentalism, and popular, professional women writers there’s Libby Life, a prisoner-of-war memoir about Richmond, Virginia’s Libby Prison penned by a relatively unknown lieutenant colonel named Frederic Fernandez Cavada, a Cuban-born U.S. citizen whose record of service in the U.S. Civil War pales in comparison to the heroism he and his brother Adolfo garnered in Cuba’s Ten Years War against Spanish rule of the island.
Spanning 1868 to 1878, the Ten Years War, or La Guerra Grande, as Cubans call it, was a rupture of anti-imperialist movements bubbling on the island since at least the 1830s. Often linked to anti-slavery interests, sometimes fueled by arguments for annexation to the United States, and nearly always fostered by criollo desire for economic independence from Spain, Cuba’s anti-imperialism took many forms throughout the nineteenth century, culminating with its final bid for independence in 1895—the war José Martí made famous. But Cuba’s Ten Years War is an especially interesting event because the island’s historic problems over race, slavery, independence, and self-governance took on a different tone in the aftermath of the Confederacy’s secession and the subsequent civil war. As Ada Ferrer explains, Cuba’s Guerra Grande began when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a sugar planter, lawyer, and poet, freed his slaves and then “invited them to help ‘conquer liberty and independence’ for Cuba.”2 They did, along with thousands of others, and thus waged an anticolonial insurgency and independence movement three years after the end of the U.S. Civil War that constituted rebellion against Spain and its ruling peninsular class on the island.
The “ever-faithful isle” earned its sobriquet by staving off slave rebellions, revolutionary movements, and the gravitational pull of the United States, though the two engaged in lucrative trade and commerce throughout the nineteenth century. Cuba had long been the object of northern and southern annexationist designs in the United States, mainly because of the island’s sugar and coffee industries backed by plantation slave labor but also because of its strategic maritime location. Presidents James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce both offered to purchase the island from Spain for $100 million and $130 million, respectively, while the 1850s filibustering expeditions led by Narciso López and Mississippi Governor John Quitman were very much part of the clandestine movements to free Cuba for U.S. annexation. The politics of Cuban independence throughout the nineteenth century, though, were not always clear. “The Cuban filibustero,” Rodrigo Lazo tells us, “embodied the contradiction of protonationalist (Cuban) discourse and U.S. expansionism. . . . The antimonarchical position of exiles was intertwined with the position of U.S. expansionists who relished the thought of roping Cuba in[to] the Union.”3 This is what the Cuban historian Louis Pérez Jr. means when he describes nineteenth-century Cuba as “between empires,” as the tiny island had to navigate its desire to break from Spain with the internal push and external pull to become part of the United States.4 Complete independence was one option, as separatists often emphasized, but many criollos saw annexation as a strong political and economic lever that would wedge Spain off the island without upsetting the balance of Cuba’s slave economy and related racial system of citizenship. At the same time, Cuba was not entirely committed to breaking from Spain, as a sector of slaveholding Cubans, fearing the specter of a race war on the one hand and the loss of Cuban identity on the other, advocated for Spanish reform rather than U.S. annexation.5
Either way, Cuba and its accompanying slave system played such a prominent role for the Confederacy that it was included in the Union blockade of New Orleans. Many Cubans saw a common cause in the Confederacy—namely, they “believed in limited government, the right of self-determination, and in defending a staunch Constitutionalist peoples against invasion by a powerful majority,” according to Darrel Brock.6 The Cuban-born and Harvard-educated poet, lawyer, and newspaperman Jose Agustín Quintero was the Confederacy’s most important, influential, and successful diplomat to Mexico, brokering deals with the governor of Nuevo Leon and Coahuila for munitions, contraband supplies, and the possibility for the Mexican border state’s annexation to the Confederacy, while Ambrosio José Gonzales, who introduced Quintero to the influential Club de La Habana, volunteered his services to the Confederates and ended up as a colonel and chief of artillery under his old friend and schoolmate General P.G.T Beauregaurd (himself a Spanish-French creole). Finally, Loreta Janeta Velazquez’s cross-dressing as Lt. Harry T. Buford sartorially links Cuba and the Confederacy as two regions involved in related anticolonial conflicts. At the height of the Civil War, Velazquez even vows to fight for Cuban independence in the same way her Cuban nationalism led her to fight for the South: “I begrudged that this fair island should be the dependency of a foreign power; for I was, despite my Spanish ancestry, an American, heart and soul, and if there was anything that could have induced me to abandon the cause of the Southern Confederacy, it would have been an attempt on the part of the Cubans to liberate themselves from the Spanish yoke.”7
Cuba’s relation to the United States and the Confederacy during the war years is thus not anomalous but analogous insofar as the reverberations of the U.S. Civil War rippled across the Gulf of Mexico to shape the contours and the conflicts of Cuba’s Ten Years War. Velazquez’s comment also shores up the confusing national politics of the time. Her use of American either makes Cuban independence a national cause of the United States or it indicates Velazquez’s trans-American identity, suggesting that she understands Cuba’s independence as part of a greater “American” movement, a point further emphasized by her juxtaposition of her “Spanish ancestry” with her American “heart and soul.” This Cuban Cartesian split, so to speak, is what distinguishes her—and her fellow U.S. Hispanic writers—from Cuban and Mexican nationals residing in the United States during the war years. They are not quite natives, immigrants, or exiles, to recall Nicolás Kanellos’ taxonomy of early U.S. Hispanics, but transnational subjects born out of the rifts of internecine conflict.8 Nowhere is this trans-American experience better seen than in the lives and writings of Frederic and Adolfo Cavada, two Cuban-born brothers and Union officers who became Cuban rebels during the Ten Years War.
The brothers Cavada—there were three of them, actually—were born in Cienfuegos, Las Villas Province, Cuba, to Isidoro Fernandez Cavada y Diaz de la Campa of Santander, Spain, and Philadelphia-born Emily Howard Gatier. “Ironically,” Michael Dreese explains, “the three sons of Isidoro and Emily Cavada would be key figures in the independence movement that sought to overthrow the yoke of colonial power under which both branches of the family had prospered.”9 Fernandez Cavada, a loyal peninsular, served as the Spanish crown’s tax collector in Cienfuegos, where he met and married Emily Howard, the youngest daughter of a French émigré, Louis Howard, a landowner who fled the Saint-Domingue revolt and settled in Cienfuegos, where he traded in sugar and cattle. After Fernandez Cavada’s 1838 death (he was thirty-six at the time), Emily Howard taught school briefly before she returned with her sons to Philadelphia in 1841 and married Samuel Dutton, a banker and ship chandler who became stepfather to Emilio, Frederic, and Adolfo Cavada. Not much is known about their early years. The eldest, Emilio, became a New York and Philadelphia sugar merchant and served as a medic during Cuba’s 1895 war for independence, while Frederic started his U.S. education in a boarding school in Wilmington, Delaware, and finished it with graduation from Philadelphia’s Central High School in 1846. Afterward, he served as an engineer for the transcontinental railroad along the Isthmus of Panama, where he contracted malaria and returned to the City of Brotherly Love a little worse for wear. In July 1861, he and his younger brother Adolfo joined Company C of the Twenty-third Regiment of Volunteers of Pennsylvania, recruited in Philadelphia, and later they enlisted with the Zouves Company under Captain Collis in the 114th Pennsylvania Regiment.10 As Frederic’s recruiting officer, O. W. Davis, later recalled, “On the twentieth day of July, 1861, a delicate looking young man entered the business office . . . and asked for a position in the Twenty-third Pennsylvania Volunteers.”11 He proclaimed that he had no knowledge of “military matters”: “None whatever” but was willing to pay for the cost of raising his own company; he also affirmed that he did not have a job; was out of work because of his health; and when asked if he “could endure the exposure of a soldier’s life,” he responded, “I do not know, but have made up my mind to try it.”12
The brothers Cavada constitute a class a little different from that of the émigrés in New York, New Orleans, Key West, and Philadelphia who agitated for Cuba during the 1850s and 1860s. This émigré class, as Gerald Poyo has shown, was largely responsible for fostering a sense of Cuban nationalism that encompassed the United States and the island through print culture, political pressure, and labor politics. Separatists, annexationists, cultural and political nationalists, abolitionists, and radical anarchists all converged in the United States during the island’s heady mid–nineteenth century. Through various newspapers and influential political clubs, they seem to have applied as much pressure on U.S. politics and culture as they did on Cuban military and political change on the island.13 They were Cubans in the United States politicking for the future of their homeland.
But the Cavada brothers were different on this score. First, they were not émigrés in the sense that there is no indication their mother moved them from the island to Philadelphia out of separatist politics. Quite literally, her domestic arrangement changed, and because Frederic and Adolfo were relatively young, they followed their mother; eldest brother Emilio followed too, as his stepfather trained him in the business world. Second, Frederic and Adolfo grew up in the United States. They attended school in Delaware and Philadelphia, mastered English (Frederic often went by Federico, Frederick, or Fred), secured U.S. citizenship, and saw the U.S. military as a venue for upward social mobility. Third, they came to their revolutionary politics when they returned to Cuba as official U.S. consuls. Much of their writing in the United States makes nary a mention of Cuban independence, but just as reformist leaders were leaving Cuba for the United States en masse in January 1869, the brothers Cavada were resigning their official posts to throw in with the rebels in Trinidad and Cienfuegos.
It is tempting to see them as Americanized Cubans or, in contemporary terms, as Cuban Americans, who lack the sense of entitlement fueling the Cuban nationalism of their contemporaneous émigrés but also find their experience in the United States, especially as part of the U.S. military, wanting. But instead, the brothers Cavada should be seen more as trans-American subjects—hemispheric citizens whose sense of belonging traversed the Americas rather than being bound by its national borders. In this sense, the brothers Cavada provide a more viable paradigm for understanding nineteenth-century U.S. Latino/a identities because they offer a more vexed understanding of “Our America.” On the one hand, they were complicit with U.S. power at home, especially as it quelled the Confederacy’s rebellion, but on the other hand, they were radical agents of insurgency on their native island. Theirs was an identity forged out of two Americas, but unlike José Martí, who claimed only one America as his, the brothers Cavada imagined themselves within and across two, making their transformation from Union officers to Cuban insurgents all the more significant in the context of the island’s war of rebellion.
In themselves, the brothers are a study in contrast. While older brother Frederic suffered an embattled Union career, took ill often, and injured easily, younger brother Adolfo was almost an army over-achiever whose field diary charts his penchant for military details and his rapid rise in rank. Penned in English, Adolfo’s journal is significant as a document attesting to a U.S. Hispanic participant in the earliest battles of the U.S. Civil War: It spans more than two years, from August 1861, when he enlisted as a Philadelphia volunteer, to New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1863, when he closes his diary “ready to begin another year” and wondering what 1864 will bring.14 In between, the entries chart his transformation from a greenhorn to an experienced battle veteran as he weathers skirmishes and pickets at Warwick River and the subsequent battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, the last of which he figures as the culmination of his military experiences and personal development.
At Yorktown, Adolfo sits on picket along the banks of the Warwick and alternates between fear, adventure, awe, and humor during the month-long campaign. April 8, 1862—“Brisk musketry firing ahead—Began to feel a little green—The skirmishing very lively,” but only four days later, the green captain gets daring: “On picket still at Warwick River: Occasionally I go in search of adventure—crawling on hands and knees opposite to the rebel batteries; by Captain Hilderbrand, Fred, and myself was considered fine fun.”15 That same evening, shells, musket fire, and a thunderstorm all rouse Adolfo from sleep as “rapid volleys were fired—artillery began to push further, shells whizzed and burst—the lightening [sic] flashed, the thunder crashed, and the rain plashed.—Altogether about the grandest piece of music in nature’s repertoire.”16 The light action he sees is enough to inspire some literary pretention in his journal too. In the previous entry, for instance, “lightening [sic] flashed, the thunder crashed, and the rain plashed” in the heat of the skirmish—not splashed in the diary but plashed, a rhymed onomatopoeia that captures the sound and action of water as it puddles around him amidst rebel fire and a fierce thunderstorm. Finally, come May, Adolfo gives a more lighthearted entry, one that points to either the folly of warfare or its absurdity: “May 1862—“Bang! Whiz, whiz! Look out for your heads! Men rushing ahead eager for the fray; men rushing back eager to get out of it.”17
By June 2, 1862, Adolfo has grown accustomed to picket duty—“Getting shelled every day but don’t mind that now,” he says, but six months later at the first Battle of Fredericksburg, he encounters real action on the front, and his journal entry betrays his excitement, trepidation, and his relief for surviving one of the most lopsided Confederate victories of the war: “Fix bayonets—Charge! . . . Hurrah! The Rebel artillery and musketry all concentrated on us. Terrible fire—our men fall by hundreds . . . The air is full of flying bullets . . . men falling in groups. List of wounded: Lt. Humpherys—slightly wounded; Genl Humpherys—two horses killed. Capt. Cavada—allright.”18 His May 7, 1863, entry, one day after Union forces suffer more heavy loses at the Battle of Chancellorville, is more grim: “In camp—Reflections—Another ground movement, another terrible, bloody battle fought by the Army of the Potomac resulting in so many killed, so many wounded, so many prisoners.”19
It is significant for U.S. Hispanic history that Aldofo Cavada, a Cuban-born U.S. citizen, was a participant in the Civil War’s early battles and kept a diary about it to boot, putting to rest both the popular misconception that the war was an Anglo American conflict as well as Walt Whitman’s idea that it would remain unwritten: “Such was the War. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written, its practicality, minutia of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual Soldier of 1862-’65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his appetite rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp—I say, will never be written—perhaps must not and should not be.”20
With Cavada’s diary we have both the written war and the interiority of an “actual” soldier, and here is where the journal takes significance for understanding Cavada’s trans-American identity, for his interiority—his excitement, anxiety, fear, and joy—corresponds with the Union cause at the start of the war. It is not coincidental that the diary opens with Cavada at Yorktown, which is more memorable as the last battle of the American Revolution rather than one of the first Civil War skirmishes. Meanwhile, the excitement and gloom he feels at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, respectively, mirror the ebb and flow of the Federal army’s momentum, as it weathered Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s lopsided victory at Fredericksburg only to face a worse fate at Chancellorsville. In short, Cavada figures himself in his military diary as a synecdoche for the Union at the start of the war, but he also fashions himself as a quintessential U.S. citizen who begins as a greenhorn picket at the site of the American Revolution’s siege of Yorktown and comes of age at the Civil War’s most significant battle.
Just as the Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg marked a turning point in the war, it also signals a change in Cavada’s diary. His July 2, 1863, entry seems self-consciously aware of the impending battle’s importance, and, as if to respond in kind, he takes more care to narrate it poetically: “The rain fell. No sound broke the stillness of the air except the pattering rain drops in the grass. . . . It was a grand sight—one to make one[’s] blood warm and tingle through its channels—all sense of danger—the past abolished in that great present—that surrounds us.” It is at Gettysburg that Adolfo comes of age as a Union officer. He proclaims a day after the battle: “July 4, 1863—The Fourth of July! A day made doubly dear by the victory of liberty over slavery on the fields of Gettysburg. . . . A short distance from here I could see the hill where I encamped with the 23rd Regiment during the 1st and 2nd of November 1862. Things have changed in my favor since then.”21 That Gettysburg takes place around the Fourth of July is perhaps a historical irony but symbolic nonetheless as Adolfo narrates his transformation through a national imaginary that begins with the American Revolution and culminates with U.S. independence. It is also the first and only time that Adolfo mentions slavery as a casus belli, as if his trans-American transformation as a U.S. Cuban citizen corresponds to his awareness about slavery and independence, a point that will return with a difference after the Civil War.
If Gettysburg is the culmination of Adolfo’s Union career, however, it marks his big brother’s misfortune on the field. July 3, 1863: “No positive information had been received of Fred’s fate.—Some thought he had escaped, others had seen him wounded and [taken] prisoner, others still had seen him struck down by a cannon ball—amid so many contradictory statements I still hoped for the best.”22 Aldofo’s concern is not new. Throughout his diary, he is called to attend to Frederic, who is often ill, absent, or broke. Adolfo recounts taking leave to go retrieve his AWOL big brother; other times he mentions letters received from his mother, reminding him to watch after Fred; and always, when they share the same field, his diary entries express concern for his brother. Throughout most of time Adolfo is coming of military age, Fred’s health wanes. On December 16, 1862, Adolfo hears that his brother has been wounded and goes to visit him at camp; a month later, Frederic comes to stay with Adolfo at camp, and he’s “very sick”; a day later, Adolfo secures leave papers for his brother and sends him home to recuperate, under the escort of Lt. Col. O.H.P. Carey of the 77th Pennsylvania Infantry. Four months later, on April 4, 1863, Adolfo must go find Fred and bring him back to camp.
Frederic at first proved to be a precious war participant. In May 1863, he was found guilty of and cashiered for three related charges of “behav[ing] himself in a cowardly manner in the presence of the enemy” at the Battle of Fredericksburg by absenting himself from the battlefield, taking shelter at the rear of the battlefield, and deserting his men under fire for shelter in the rear.23 By official accounts, he did not comport himself much better at Gettysburg. He was in the melee long enough to get captured, and once again, charges of cowardice were leveled against him. In his July 12, 1863, report, Captain Edward R. Bowen of the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry notes that he “saw Lieutenant-Colonel Cavada, who was then commanding the regiment, stopping by a log house in an orchard on our right. I inquired if he was wounded; he replied that he was not, but utterly exhausted. I begged him to make an effort to come on, as the enemy was only a few yards from him and advancing rapidly. He replied that he could not, and I left him there, and not having heard from him since, I have no doubt he was taken prisoner there.”24 He was, and his commanding officer, Colonel Collis, who himself was accused of cowardice a few months later, filed formal charges against Cavada and waged a nasty letter-writing campaign to the president of the United States, accusing Cavada of cowardice at the battles of Chancellorville and Gettysburg. As Collis explained in a letter to Assistant Secretary of State Seward: “At Chancellorville, on the 3d May, 1863, when the first shot was fired at my regiment, Colonel Cavada disappeared, and when, after two hours’ incessant fighting, with but ninety men and four officers left, . . . we marched to the rear, [and] we found Colonel Cavada sitting in the woods more than two miles distant from the line of battle”; he claimed he was “suddenly attacked with a very severe headache.”25 Cavada’s capture at Gettysburg, Collis argued, was indicative of the cowardice he displayed at Fredericksburg and Chancellorville, but the fact that the lieutenant colonel was captured alongside General C. K. Graham was probably the only reason Collis’s and Bowen’s reports fell on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, to pass his time as a prisoner of war, Cavada penned sketches, anecdotes, and stories about prison life on contraband scratches of paper, and a few months after his 1864 release, King and Baird, the same company that printed Collis’s incendiary pamphlet against Cavada, published Libby Life: Experiences of a Prisoner of War, which Philadelphia’s J. B. Lippincott re-published in 1865. As the Daily National Intelligencer announced on June 18, 1864, “The narrative abounds with scenes and incidents, the correctness of which is vouched for by his fellow prisoners, and will interest every reader.”26 Dedicated to the Union League of Philadelphia, a prominent organization of uppercrust, Republican Party businessmen who supported Lincoln’s war effort to which the brothers Cavada and their stepfather, Mr. Dutton, belonged, Libby Life recounts daily life as a prisoner—the boredom, hunger, and small celebrations the Union captives enjoy—with “freedom” as an underlying theme. “My chief aim in these humble pages,” Frederic explains, “has been to perpetuate for my companions in captivity, a compliance with their request, a truthful record of our prison experiences,—a record which, while it cannot fail to bring back upon our hearts some of the gloomy shadows which once darkened them in the prison-house, may also renew upon our lips the irrepressible smiles which were wont to wreathe them at times, in spite of hunger, suffering and despair.”27 Cavada’s sentiment gives truth to the power of language, especially during wartime, to be subversive and transformative. “In prison camps and torture blocks,” James Dawes postulates, “the achievement of communication and recognition through an undetected note or an answered whisper is the first step in rebuilding the world.”28
All Civil War prison camps were notorious, and Libby Prison was no exception. Part of Richmond, Virginia’s prison complex, which included Castle Thunder and the nearby Belle Isle Prison, Libby was a warehouse-turned-jail for Union officers between 1861 and 1864, when it was then used for Confederate military criminals. By all accounts, sanitary conditions due to overcrowding were deadly, so much so that in February 1864, Libby Prison was the site of a sensational and subsequently sensationalized escape attempt by way of a fifty-seven-foot tunnel. “By February 9, 1864,” William Hesseltine explains, “the tunnel was opened and a hundred and nine prisoners made their escape during the night. Forty-eight of the hundred and nine officers . . . were captured before they reached the Union lines.” Of the ones who did make it, Hesseltine continues, several offered exaggerated official reports, newspaper accounts, and personal narratives about their escape.29 Cavada was not one of the escapees, but he recounts the escape in his narrative immediately after it occurred, and in his preface he situates his book contra the exaggerated accounts. He states that his “sketches . . . were drawn, not with the object of presenting a sensational picture of the military prisons of the Confederacy, but simply to while away the idle hours of a tedious and protracted captivity.”30
But when we recall that Libby Prison is in the heart of the Confederacy, then Cavada’s longing for freedom in the face of captivity must be read against the presence of black slavery (despite Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation) and, as the aforementioned book The Poor White reminds us, within the North’s sensationalized accounts of white slavery. Unlike Adolfo, who finds the triumph of “liberty over slavery” on the Gettysburg battlefield, Frederic discovers the opposite as he becomes a Confederate captive and describes his conditions as akin to those associated with the tortures of slavery. He recounts laundry day, for instance, or “whitewashing” day, as he calls it, as a “torture and terror” “invented by the fiendish ingenuity of some monster in human shape” as the prisoners are hosed down from above by the prison guards, while “a dozen negroes from below” scrub out the prison quarters with filthy water.31 It is a brief but telling scene as Cavada and his Union compatriots literally and symbolically find themselves stuck between black slavery below, white overseers above, and no escape from either. Cavada draws a similar, if not more bizarre, sketch during the 1864 New Year’s Day “Grand Ball” in the prison’s kitchen. With a small band, accompanied by a man “well blacked up” as a “negro woman” and another dressed as “a comical representation of [her] colored beau,” the prisoners engage in a “heathenish” dance that leaves the “Sioux and Camanches [sic] . . . utterly outdone.”32 On a lower floor, two men engage in a chess game that rivals Thoreau’s symbolic “ant war” in Walden:
On the floor below, two sane men are near the termination of a highly interesting game of chess; . . . Black’s hand is outstretched, tremulous with ill-controlled excitement: White turns pale, for those nervous outstretched fingers clutch a portentous black rook, and in another instant the white king will be mated. . . . When lo! From the ceiling overhead, where it was hung, down comes a huge ham, and drops like a bomb-shell into the very midst of the contending hosts! The pieces are scattered right and left; the board, and the rickety table on which it stood, are overset; and the black and the white general both spring to their feet with a cry of horror. . . . The war-dance was still going on overhead, and a gigantic Indian warrior having leaped into the air, and come down directly above the suspended ham, had jarred it from the nail on which it hung, and had thus ruined the most brilliant game of chess ever played in the prison.33
The New Year’s celebration gives way to a carnival scene of racial disruption and destruction, with the U.S. Civil War figured as a chess game, not between northern and southern whites but between blacks and whites in a metaphysical struggle for dominance over a binary racial system troubled by the presence of Native America. Cavada’s seemingly simple sketches, then, represent in miniature allegories of race war that situate his imprisonment as enslavement to the United States’ prevailing racial order, making his final acquisition of freedom even more ironic because he is “bought out” during a prisoner exchange in 1864 and becomes “once more substantially and positively—FREE!”34
Immediately after his return to Philadelphia, Frederic challenged Colonel Collis to a duel for officially and publicly accusing Cavada of cowardice. The duel never occurred, and Cavada briefly re-enlisted in the Union Army under his friend General David Birney, but near the war’s end, Secretary of State Seward named Frederic U.S. consul to Trinidad de Cuba, and he promptly tendered his resignation from the Union Army to take up his new post and return to his native island in 1866. It was a homecoming for him and also an awakening as his dispatches to the U.S. State Department urge the State officials to aid Cuba’s independence movement.35 The freshly appointed consul and former Union officer was becoming rebellious, and after the outbreak of Cuba’s Ten Years War on October 10, 1868, Frederic resigned his post and joined Cuba’s insurgency, alongside Adolfo, who also returned to the island after the Civil War as the American vice consul in Cienfuegos. As the New York Herald reported on February 12, 1869, “It is reported that the leaders of the [Cuban] revolution in the sugar districts of Cienfuegos, Villa Clara and Trinidad are Adolfo Cavada and his brother, Frederick [sic] Cavada. The former was recently American Vice Consul at Cienfuegos. He was a Colonel of a Philadelphia regiment of zouaves during the civil war in America. The latter was until last week the American consul at Trinidad de Cuba, and has just resigned.”36 Big brother Emilio joined the cause by using his New York and Philadelphia sugar businesses to supply funds, munitions, and other contraband to his brothers, while Adolfo commanded a small force of rebels in the province of Las Villas. However, it was middle brother Frederic—the poet, POW, and would-be “coward”—who emerged as the commander-in-chief of Cuba’s rebel army; he became known as “General Candela,” or the “Fire King,” for the scorched-earth, guerrilla tactics he practiced against the island’s economic staple, the sugar cane fields. The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer reported in a piece titled “War to the Knife and the Knife to the Hilt”: “The insurgent General Cavada has issued the following order to the forces under his command: ‘It is probable that the owners of plantations will begin to grind sugar cane at an early date and the General expects his subordinates to burn the cane fields as soon as the cane is dry.’”37
A burn policy and other forms of property destruction were neither politic nor popular during the Ten Years War. Rebel President Carlos Manuel de Céspedes worked to muster support from fellow landowners and slave owners by assuring them that the rebellion would respect property, including food, farms, land, and, of course, people. The insurgent leadership was forced to balance two different impulses of their rebellion—namely, to protect the interests of the landed criollo class and keep at bay the idea that the rebellion opened the opportunity for immediate emancipation of black slaves.38 This was especially true of mid-island locales such as Cienfuegos and Trinidad, which were in between eastern Cuba, the hotbed of the insurrection, and the more prosperous western Cuba, which became the Spanish stronghold. “Insurgent leaders were hopeful of obtaining material and financial support from their wealthy counterparts, and hence were reluctant to enact measures capable of antagonizing sugar planters in the west. Any prospect of obtaining the support of western planters required respect for their estates and their slaves. In 1869,” Pérez concludes, “Carlos Manuel de Céspedes proclaimed the death penalty for any attack against sugar estates and slave property.”39
Threats to people and property were not only bad politics in Cuba, but they also made the Cuban rebellion unpopular in the United States at a time when rebel leaders were soliciting U.S. recognition of belligerency and intervention on behalf of the insurgency. An October 29, 1869, New York Tribune article, for instance, reports that
We have singular news from Cuba that the negroes near Cienfuegos have driven off a body of insurgents, which, we imagine, answers in some way to the general order of the patriot Cavada for burning the cane-crop. These things, however, are not the worst of our friends of Spanish descent as seen through the transparent ingenuity of those from whose stock and kind they are supposed to have descended. . . . The Cubans may make them worse still if they quarrel overmuch among themselves; and if there is any danger of this for want of a strong executive arm in the Junta, by all means, let the arm be found and put in its right place.40
Bad politics and worse press do no good for mustering support of the rebellion on the island or in the United States, yet Frederic manages to practice both as General Candela, as if the rebellion he wages is against the United States and Cuba’s elite criollo class.
The Fire King did not exactly put down the pen for the knife, as the aforementioned Cincinnati Daily Enquirer headlined. Instead, in 1870, somewhere between organizing a rebel army and leading it, Frederic found the time to write a travel narrative for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine praising the national wonders of Cuba’s Bellamar Caves and inviting U.S. visitors to see the cave for themselves. “Easy of access from Havana by railway,” Cavada explains, “and commodiously and safely prepared for the reception of visitors, [the Bellamar cave] fully repays one from a day’s absence from the busy scenes of the capital.”41 The article makes no mention that Cuba is embroiled in civil war, led in part by Cavada himself, and for this reason it might be better understood less as a travel puff piece and more as a complex autobiographical allegory of hemispheric history and trans-American rebellion. As the article continues, it recounts Cavada’s descent into the cave. At first, Cavada frames the tourist’s gaze, noting the cave’s natural wonders, its passageways, columns, and the unique formations of its stalactites and stalagmites, but the farther Cavada descends, the more gothic the experience becomes, most notably when he crosses a formation known as the “Gothic Temple.” Soon, formations begin to take shape, and he encounters the “‘Mantle of Columbus,’” a solid formation that has crystallized into a mass “as white as snow.”42 Beyond it is the “Devil’s Gorge,” a symbolic point of no return as he descends farther to discover at his journey’s end the “Avenue of Hatuey,” a passageway that leads him to “a tall, keen stalagmite called the ‘Lance of Hatuey.’”43 In the deepest part of Cuba’s Cave of Bellamar, Frederic finds the most celebrated figure of indigenous rebellion in Cuba.
A Taíno chief from Hispaniola, Hatuey became Cuba’s national hero for raising a guerrilla war of rebellion against the Spanish in 1511, until his capture and execution on February 2, 1512. He emerged as a protean symbol of Cuban nationalism throughout the nineteenth century as a way of recalling the horrors of the Spanish black legend; re-imagining Cuban criollos as indigenous insurgents; and spinning a romantic, heroic history to the island’s legacy of insurgency. Pedro Santacilia’s 1859 Lecciones orales sobre la historia de Cuba, which was published in New Orleans, emphasizes Hatuey’s rejection of Catholic conversion, and Juan Cristóbal Nápoles Fajardo’s poem “Hatuey and Guarina,” also published around 1856, imagines Hatuey’s putting his love of patriotism before his love for Guarina.44 Francisco Sellén, a revolutionary Cuban poet exiled to the United States in 1868, penned and published in New York Hatuey, a drama in verse that represents the indigenous insurgent as a martyr for independence, patriotism, and the treachery of betrayal within his rebellion.45 Cavada’s Harper’s article might be seen in the same vein but with a difference in the sense that it narrates Cavada’s coming to revolutionary consciousness. His is a symbolic journey beneath Cuba and, by extension, within his own interiority as he takes the path for U.S. visitors to the cave, schluffs off Columbus’s mantle, and in the end finds Hatuey’s lance for warfare. In much the same way that Adolfo’s diary charts his coming of age as a Union officer, “The Cave of Bellamar” narrates Frederic’s transformation from U.S. citizen to Cuban rebel ready to take up Hatuey’s war of guerrilla tactics.
Thus, at the same time as the Harper’s article, General Candela also penned and published in Spanish an insurgent manual to guerrilla warfare and a field guide for officers.46 The pamphlet gives military definitions of terms such as hilera and fila, line and ranks; frente and flanco, front and flank; and vanguardia and retaguardia, vanguard and rear guard—the usual military terms, with the glaring omission of retreat and surrender, that indicate Cavada was attempting to introduce military protocol to his insurgent troops. His field guide for officers emphasizes this point, as he recommends that officers follow a clear chain of command, establish military tribunals, and, probably the most telling of his experiences in the Union Army, that officers keep written copies of their orders to collect as a record of their rebellion—all of this while advocating the use of guerrilla warfare whenever possible.
It is not difficult to comprehend how both pieces can come from the same pen at the same time if we understand Cavada’s life and imagination within the context of a trans-American formation. He is not torn between “Nuestra America and the America that is not ours,” as Martí would later put it. Rather, both Americas are his in ways that produce two different bodies of writing: one in English, published in one of the leading upper-middle-class magazines of the time in the United States; the other in Spanish, written to make Cuba’s insurgent war against Spain more efficient in terms of military policy and guerrilla tactics. One announces allegorically his coming to revolutionary consciousness on the island; the other employs strategies he learned in the Union to wage rebellion. His is a trans-American identity with a voice in both worlds (U.S. and Latino), as Cavada is not so much torn by his double-ness as he is formed by it in the same way that the outbreak and outcome of the U.S. Civil War inflected the issues of race, anti-imperialism, slavery, and self-governance fueling Cuba’s own war of rebellion.
In this regard, Frederic underscores a profound understanding of the relation between the U.S. Civil War and Cuba’s Ten Years War—both are American civil wars that share a genealogy much as the Cavada brothers themselves do, for if the U.S. Civil War is the arena for Adolfo’s coming of age, it is the Cuban war that turns Frederic into a general and later commander-in-chief whose scorched-earth practices rivaled Sherman’s march to Savannah. It also made him a trans-American hero, claimed by Cuban nationals as a prodigal son; by Philadelphians as a freedom-fighting brother; and by Unionists as a comrade in arms. It is thus not surprising that his capture by Spanish forces in late June 1871 garnered national headlines across the United States and a petition for his release became a cause célèbre for high-ranking Union brass, including Generals Graham (his former Libby Prison compatriot), Sheridan, and Sherman, all of whom petitioned President Ulysses S. Grant to seek Cavada’s release. But to no avail. A week before his fortieth birthday, Frederic was executed without trial on July 1, 1871 (almost eight years to the day he was captured at Gettysburg). In his last letter to his wife, dated June 30, he writes, “I am here as a prisoner of war due to circumstances that without a doubt are familiar to you.”47 They are no doubt uncanny to him too, a sickly, inexperienced lieutenant colonel of the Philadelphia Volunteers who passed his time in a rebel prison writing anecdotes finds himself a prisoner of war again—this time as a rebel commander-in-chief who never quite realized the irony of quelling one rebellion in the States but leading another on the island. His last words were reportedly, “Adios mi Cuba, hasta siempre.”48 One story even says he tossed his cigar and hat into the air before the bullets flew. His obituary ran in the New York Herald, the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, the Leavenworth Times, the Boston Daily Journal, Philadelphia’s Public Ledger, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, which closed its paean to him with the following: “He lived and wrought and died for the cause of Cuban independence. He was a brave soldier, a true patriot, and an estimable gentleman.”49
Ten months later, the New Orleans Picayune made brief mention that Adolfo Cavada was also killed in action,50 and even though the Ten Years War ended in 1878 without securing Cuban independence or the immediate abolition of slavery, the revolutionary spirit of the brothers Cavada in action and in writing laid the foundation for the anti-imperial movement of Martí’s generation. But at the risk of making too much of Frederic’s transformation, from would-be coward to the fire-king, it is worth noting that his return to Cuba and subsequent insurgent leadership fulfilled a nostalgic fate he expressed in his first published poem, “The Cuban’s Adieu to His Native Land,” which appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in 1847:51
Adieu to thee! Queen of the sea,
Adieu to the thoughts of the past,
Though for e’er thy remembrance shall last,
Whenever on earth I may be.
Adieu to thee! Isle I hold dear,
’Till thy people at Liberty’s call,
By causing Iberia to fall
’Neath the flag of the free shall appear.
And now thou’rt gone, perhaps for ever,
But await with a patient heart,
Till Columbia by valour and heart
The chains of the tyrant shall sever!
At first glance, the poem reads like the scores of other Cuban exile poems published in Spanish-language organs throughout urban centers like New York and New Orleans. It imagines Cuba’s someday gaining its independence from Spain, perhaps with the United States’ assistance, and combines the political rhetoric of revolution with the romantic, if not overly sentimental, view of the island. But there are two differences here. The first is that it is penned by a fifteen-year-old boy rather than an adult poet, lawyer, property owner, politician, or military man, as the majority of Cuban exile writers were in the 1840s and 1850s. The second is that it is penned and published in English. In other words, Cavada’s poem, like the brothers Cavada, marks a transitional generation of U.S. Cubans in the nineteenth century—not quite at home but not quite in exile either. They are “deterritorialized,” as Lazo puts it, meaning that the Cavada brothers and their writing move “in and out of one nation and then another.”52 But such motion is not seamless, for to traverse one nation to another means to betray them both, to rebel against their borders in the name of a larger, hemispheric sense of citizenship. We see such a movement in Cavada’s poem, for in it is a glimpse at how the fire of rebellion fueled the poet to travel from Cuba, to Philadelphia, and back to the island again, with independence in mind the entire time.
1 Daily National Intelligencer, July 8, 1864.
2 Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 15.
3 Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 7.
4 Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba between Empires, 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), 29–31. See also Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, Third edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 83, and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 27–32.
5 Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 31.
6 Darryl E. Brock, “José Agustín Quintero: Cuban Patriot in Confederate Diplomatic Service,” in Cubans in the Confederacy, ed. Phillip Thomas Tucker (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2002), 44.
7 Loreta Janeta Velazquez, The Woman in Battle: The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Cuban Woman and Confederate Soldier (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 248.
8 Nicolás Kanellos, “An Overview of Hispanic Literature of the United States,” in Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 16.
9 Michael A. Dreese, Torn Families: Death and Kinship at the Battle of Gettysburg (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2007), 137.
10 See Joseph John Jova, “Foreword,” Libby Life, by F. F. Cavada, (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985); Louis Alfredo Martinez, “Federico Fernández Cavada: Loyal to Two Flags,” in Hispanic Presence in the United States, ed. Frank de Varona (Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Company, 1993); O. W. Davis, Sketch of Frederic Fernandez Cavada, A Native of Cuba (Philadelphia: James B. Chandler, 1871). The Historical Society of Pennsylvania holds a small collection of Cavada-related material, and the University of Miami houses the Fernando Fernández-Cavada collection.
11 Davis, Sketch of Frederic Fernandez Cavada, 10.
12 Ibid., 11.
13 Gerald E. Poyo, “With All, and for the Good of All”: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 4.
14 Adolfo F. Cavada, Diary, unpublished, Fernando Fernández-Cavada Collection, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the Civil War, ed. Peter Coviello (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7.
21 Adolfo Cavada, diary, unpublished.
22 Ibid.
23 Thos. M. O’Brien and Oliver Diefendorf, General Orders of the War Department, Volume 2 (New York: Derby and Miller, 1864), 160.
24 The War of Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, 1889), Series I, Vol. XXVII, Ch. XXXIX, 503.
25 Charles Henry Collis, The Case of F. F. Cavada (Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1865), 12.
26 Daily National Intelligencer, June 18, 1864.
27 Cavada, Libby Life, 10.
28 James Dawes, The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War Through World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2.
29 William Best Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1964), 131. The escape was fictionalized in Peter Burchard’s juvenile novel Rat Hell (New York: Putnam, 1971), with Cavada perhaps making an appearance as the character Sears, an artist. See Burchard 36.
30 Cavada, Libby Life, 9.
31 Ibid., 33.
32 Ibid., 126–27.
33 Ibid., 127–28. Italics in original.
34 Ibid., 200.
35 Joseph John Jova, “Foreword,” Libby Life, n.p.
36 New York Herald, February 2, 1869.
37 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, October 29, 1869.
38 See Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 24.
39 Pérez, Cuba between Reform and Revolution, 90.
40 New York Herald Tribune, October 29, 1869.
41 General Fredrico F. Cavada, “The Cave of Bellamar,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (November 1870), 826.
42 Ibid., 828.
43 Ibid., 833.
44 Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 76.
45 Francisco Sellén, Hatuey, poema dramatíco (New York: A da Costa Gómez, 1891).
46 F. F. Cavada, Ejercito Libertador de Cuba: Breve instruccion de guerrilla y guia de los jefes y oficiales de campaña (Guaimaro, Cuba: Imprenta del Cubano Libre, 1870).
47 Frederic Cavada Letter to Wife, June 30, 1871. Fernando Fernández-Cavada Collection, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida. Translation provided by the Cuban Heritage Collection.
48 Times Picayune, July 26, 1871.
49 Philadelphia Inquirer, July 12, 1871.
50 The Daily Picayune, April 4, 1874.
51 Joseph John Jova, “Foreword,” Libby Life, n.p.
52 Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba, 55.