, some years later, a filibustering expedition. His
three vessels were manned chiefly by Americans. There are always those
whose love of excitement and adventure, sometimes mixed with an active
sympathy for an under dog, leads them to engage in such an enterprise. This
one was productive of no important results. There were plenty of American
pirates and privateers in earlier days, but I have found no record of any
earlier actual expedition whose purpose was the creation of a new republic.
But during the next hundred years, including the considerable number
of Americans who have engaged in the present disorder in Mexico, such
enterprises have been numerous. Among the most notable are the several
Lopez expeditions to Cuba, about 1850, and the Walker expeditions to
Lower California, Nicaragua, and Honduras, a few years later. The steamer
_Virginius_, to which reference is made in another chapter, was engaged
in filibustering when she was captured, in 1873, and many of her crew and
passengers unlawfully executed, by Spanish authority, in Santiago. But that
was only one of many similar enterprises during the Ten Years' War in Cuba.
It is very doubtful if the war could have continued as it did without them.
During our own Civil War, we called such industries "blockade-running," but
it was all quite the same sort of thing. The Confederate army needed arms,
ammunition, medicine, and supplies of many kinds. On April 19, 1861,
President Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of the ports of the seceded States,
with a supplementary proclamation on the 27th that completed the line, and
thus tied the South hand and foot. In his _History of the United States_,
Elson notes that raw cotton could be bought in Southern ports for four
cents a pound while it was worth $2.50 a pound in Liverpool, and that a ton
of salt worth seven or eight dollars in Nassau, a few miles off the coast,
was worth $1700 in gold in Richmond before the close of the war, all
because of the blockade.

There is, naturally, a lack of detail regarding the many expeditions, large
and small, of the Ten Years' War, but they began soon after the opening of
hostilities. In his _Diary_, Gideon Welles notes, under date of April 7,
1869, the prevalence of "rumors of illegal expeditions fitting out in our
country to aid the Cuban insurgents," and states that "our countrymen are
in sympathy with them." In December, of that year, President Grant reported
that a number of illegal expeditio