Cuban Ten Years War
After the American Civil War, the island country of Cuba under Spanish rule was one of only a few Western Hemisphere countries where the institution of slavery remained legal and was widely practiced. On October 10, 1868 a revolution broke out, known as the Ten Years War, by Cuban landowners led by Carlos Manual Céspedes. The Spanish, led initially by Francisco Lersundi, used the military to suppress the rebellion. In 1870, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish persuaded President Grant not to recognize Cuban belligerency and the United States maintained an unstable peace with Spain. As the Cuban war continued, international patriotic insurgency began to arise in support of the Cuban rebellion and war bonds were sold in the U.S. to support the Cuban resistance. One of the U.S. Cuban patriots was John F. Patterson who bought a former Confederate steamer Virgin at the Washington Navy Yard, renaming her Virginius. The legality of Patterson's purchase of the Virginius would later come to national and international attention. The Cuban rebellion finally ended in an 1878 armistice after Spanish general Arsenio Martinez Campos pardoned all Cuban rebels.
Read more about this topic: Virginius Affair
Famous quotes containing the words cuban, ten, years and/or war:
“Because a person is born the subject of a given state, you deny the sovereignty of the people? How about the child of Cuban slaves who is born a slave, is that an argument for slavery? The one is a fact as well as the other. Why then, if you use legal arguments in the one case, you dont in the other?”
—Franz Grillparzer (17911872)
“Loves heralds should be thoughts,
Which ten times faster glides than the suns beams,
Driving back shadows over lowring hills.”
—William Shakespeare (15641616)
“Well, children, enjoy this all you can, for in four years you may begin to walk over again.”
—William Howard Taft (18571930)
“Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.”
—Wallace Stevens (18791955)