Thus did the Cubans look forward with hope to, and at the same time fear, the future. And meanwhile the tragedy of Lopez was having a wide-spread effect on the feeling of the people, and on political conditions in other countries.
In the United States a profound impression was produced of a triple character. There was, in the first place, the international point of view. It was realized that the United States was being brought uncomfortably near the possibility of a serious controversy, if not of actual war with Spain. The neutrality laws had been evaded, and there was every prospect that such evasions would thereafter be repeated. The whole question of American relations with Cuba was acutely reopened, and both those who favored and those who opposed the acquisition of that island by the United States were made to realize that a momentous decision might be called for at any moment.
There was, in the second place, the point of view of the pro-slavery states of the South, and their leaders, who were generally in control of the national government at Washington. The South strongly favored Cuban annexation, either voluntary or forcible. The island was wanted as Texas and other Mexican territories had been wanted, to provide for the extension of slave territory and for the addition of new slave states to the union to counter-balance the new free states which were about to seek admission at the north. There was also a passionate desire to avoid the calamity of having Cuba made, as the other Spanish-American countries had been made, free soil, thus encircling the slave states with an unbroken ring of anti-slavery territory. Moreover, at this time the spirit of conquest and of expansion was very much abroad in the land. The lust for territory which had prevailed in the Mexican War was by no means satisfied. Men still regarded it as the manifest destiny of the United States to "lick all creation." In the geography of the popular mind, the United States was, or was destined to be, "bounded on the north by the aurora borealis, on the south by the precession of the equinoxes, on the east by primeval chaos, and on the west by the day of judgment." Under such circumstances, the attitude of the people of the United States south of Mason and Dixon's line was unmistakable.