The Virginius Affair Author:Richard H. Bradford "My father, Miss Hope, was a filibuster, and went out on the Virginius to help free Cuba, and was shot, against a stone wall." So a little-known diplomatic crisis of the 1870's was remembered in Richard Harding Davis's 1897 novel, Soldiers of Fortune. But the capture of the Virginius, an erstwhile confederate ship later s... more »old to a group of Cuban revolutionaries, and the execution of its crew of American mercenaries by the Spanish at Santiago, remains one of the forgotten episodes of American diplomatic history. As Richard Bradford explains in his lively account of the crisis, "The Affair received little attention from chroniclers of the nation's past because, happily, the country did not go to war over the incident. The triumph of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish in resolving the crisis slipped into that special limbo reserved for what may be the greatest achievement of statecraft, the prevention of trouble rather than the contrivance of some splendid conflict."
"The Virginius affair was an occasion when the tragic execution of the crew, an excited response by American 'yellow journals', revolution just off U.S. shores, economic disasters at home, corrupt officials in Washington, and an impetuous general in the White House should have combined to produce American military intervention. Bradford explains why that did not occur in a work that should become the standard account." from the book's forward« less